Ezāfe

Ezāfe (Persian: اضافه‎), also written as izafet, izafe, izafat, izāfa, and izofa (Tajik: изофа izofa), is a grammatical particle found in some Iranian languages and Urdu that links two words together; in the Persian language it consists of the unstressed vowel -e or -i (-ye or -yi after vowels)[1] between the words it connects and often approximately corresponds in usage to the English preposition of. It is generally not indicated in writing in the Persian script,[2] which is normally written without short vowels, but it is indicated in Tajiki, which is written in the Cyrillic script.

Common uses of the Persian ezafe are:[3]

  • Possessive: برادرِ مریم barādar-e Maryam "Maryam's brother" (it can also apply to pronominal possession, برادرِ من barādar-e man "my brother", but in speech it is much more common to use possessive suffixes: برادرم barādar-am).
  • Adjective-noun: برادرِ بزرگ barādar-e bozorg "the big brother"
  • Given name/title-family name: Mohammad-e Mosaddeq Mohammad Mosaddeq, آقای مصدق āghā-ye Mosaddeq "Mr. Mosaddeq"

The Persian grammatical term ezāfe is borrowed from the Arabic concept of iḍāfa ("addition"), where it denotes a genitive construction between two or more nouns, expressed using case endings. However, whereas the Iranian ezafe denotes a grammatical particle (or even a pronoun), in Arabic, the word iḍāfa actually denotes the relationship between the two words. In Arabic, two words in an iḍāfa construction are said in English to be in possessed-possessor construction (where the possessed is in the construct state and any case, and the possessor is in the genitive case and any state).

Besides Persian, ezafe is found in other Iranian languages as well as in Turkic languages, which have historically borrowed many phrases from Persian. Ottoman Turkish made extensive use of ezafe, borrowing it from Persian (the official name of the Ottoman Empire was دولتِ عَليۀ عُثمانيه Devlet-i Âliye-i Osmaniyye), but it is transcribed as -i or -ı rather than -e. Ezafe is also used extensively in Urdu although its use is mostly restricted to poetic settings or to phrases imported wholesale from Persian since Urdu usually expresses the genitive with the Hindustani declined possessive postposition kā.

The Armenian language has a genitive case that superficially resembles ezafe, and whose usage may have been influenced by it, leading to constructions such as Hayastani Hanrapetut'yun, "Republic of Armenia", or Sardarapati č̣akatamart, "Battle of Sardarabad". Note that if it was true ezafe, the word order would be the other way: *Hanrapetut'yuni Hayastan. The Albanian language also has an ezafe-like construction, as for example in Partia e Punës e Shqipërisë, Party of Labour of Albania (the Albanian communist party). This linking particle declines in accordance to the gender, definiteness, and number of the noun which precedes it. It is used in adjectival declension and forming the genitive. E.g.:

Zyra e Shefit "The Boss' office" (The office of the boss)

Në një zyrë të afërt "In an adjacent office"

Jashtë zyrës së tij "Outside his office" (The office of his)

Etymology

Originally, in Old Persian, nouns had case endings, just like every other early Indo-European language (such as Latin, Greek, and Proto-Germanic). A genitive construction would have looked much like an Arabic iḍāfa construct, with the first noun being in any case, and the second being in the genitive case, as in Arabic or Latin.

  • vašnā Auramazdāha 'by the will of Auramazda'
    vašnā 'will' (Instrumental case)
    Auramazdāha 'Aura Mazda (God)' (genitive case)[4]

However, over time, a relative pronoun such as tya or hya (meaning "which") began to be interposed between the first element and its genitive attribute.

  • by the will which (is) of Auramazdah

Tisdall states that the modern Persian ezafe stems from this relative pronoun which, which in Eastern Iranian languages (Avestan) was yo or yat. Pahlavi (Middle Persian) shortened it to ī (spelled with the letter Y in Pahlavi scripts), and after noun case endings passed out of usage, this relative pronoun which (pronounced /e/ in New Persian), became a genitive "construct" marker. Thus the phrase

  • mard-e xub مردِ خوب

historically means "man which (is) good" rather than "good man."[5]

In other modern Iranian languages, such as Northern Kurdish, the ezafe particle is still a relative pronoun, which declines for gender and number.[6] However, rather than translating it as "which," as its etymological origin suggests, a more accurate translation for the New Persian use of ezafe would be a linking genitive/attributive "of", or no translation in the case of adjectives.

See also

Notes and references

  1. ↑ The short vowel "-ِ" (known as Kasra or kasré) is pronounced as e or i depending on the accent.
  2. ↑ Simin Abrahams, Modern Persian (Routledge, 2005: ISBN 0-7007-1327-1), p. 25.
  3. ↑ Leila Moshiri, Colloquial Persian (Routledge, 1988: ISBN 0-415-00886-7), pp. 21–23.
  4. ↑ http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/aveol-7-X.html
  5. ↑ W. St. Clair Tisdall, Modern Persian Conversation Grammar (London: Nutt, 1902), §40, §208.
  6. ↑ Geoffrey Haig, Linker, relativizer, nominalizer, tense-particle: On the Ezafe in West Iranian available at:http://www.engl.polyu.edu.hk/research/nomz/files/HAI.Iranian.final.pdf, p.2. Accessed 11/22/2013
  • Karimi, Yadgar. 2007. "Kurdish Ezafe construction: implications for DP structure". Lingua 117(12):2159-2177.
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