Persian grammar


Persian grammar is the grammar of the Persian language, whose dialectal variants are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. It is similar to that of many other Indo-European languages. The language became a more analytical language around the time of Middle Persian, with fewer cases and discarding grammatical gender. The innovations remain in Modern Persian, which is one of the few Indo-European languages to lack grammatical gender.

Word order

While Persian has a standard subject-object-verb word order, it is not strongly left-branching. However, because Persian is a pro-drop language, the subject of a sentence is often not apparent until the end of the verb, at the end of a sentence.
The main clause precedes a subordinate clause, often using the familiar Indo-European subordinator ke.
The interrogative particle āyā, that asks a yes-no question, in written Persian, appears at the beginning of a sentence. Grammatical modifiers, such as adjectives, normally follow the nouns they modify by using the ezāfe, but they occasionally precede nouns. Persian is one of the few SOV languages to use prepositions. The only case marker in the written language, rā , follows a definite direct object noun phrase.
Normal sentences are subject-prepositional phrase-object-verb. If the object is specific, the order is ' V'. However, Persian can have a relatively free word order, often called scrambling, because the parts of speech are generally unambiguous, and prepositions and the accusative marker help to disambiguate the case of a given noun phrase. The scrambling characteristic has allowed Persian a high degree of flexibility for versification and rhyming.

Articles

In the literary language, no definite article is used; rather, it is implied by the absence of the indefinite article. However, in the spoken language, the stressed suffix -e or -a is often used as a definite article. -e is mostly used in urban areas and -a is mostly used in rural areas. The first one is in newer dialect and the second one is in older dialect. The consonants and vowels changed in the years throughout history.
For plural nouns, the definite plural marker ها hā functions as both the plural marker and the definite article.
The indefinite article in both spoken and literary Persian is the number one, یک yek, often shortened to ye.

Gender

Persian nouns and pronouns have no grammatical gender. Arabic loanwords with the feminine ending ة- reduce to a genderless Persian ـه/-ه which is pronounced -e in Persian and -a Arabic.

Many borrowed Arabic feminine words retain their Arabic feminine plural form -āt, but Persian descriptive adjectives modifying them have no gender. Arabic adjectives also lose their gender in Persian.

Plural

All nouns can be made plural by the suffix ها-‹hā›, which follows a noun and does not change its form. Plural forms are used less often than in English and are not used after numbers or زیاد ziād 'many' or besyār. -hā is used only when the noun has no numbers before it and is definite.
In the spoken language, when nouns or pronouns end with a consonant, -hā is reduced to -ā.
In the literary language, animate nouns generally use the suffix -ān for plurals, but -hā is more common in the spoken language.
Nouns adopted from Arabic usually have special plurals, formed with the ending -āt or by changing the vowels. Arabic nouns can generally take Persian plural endings, but the original form is sometimes more common. The most common plural form depends on the individual word.

Cases

There are two cases in Persian: nominative case and accusative case. The nominative is the unmarked form of a noun, but when the noun is followed by a را or suffix -o, it is in the accusative. The other oblique cases are marked by prepositions.
Inanimate subjects do not require plural verb forms, especially in the spoken language: ketābhā unjāst.

Subject pronouns

Persian is a null-subject or pro-drop language, so personal pronouns are optional. Pronouns add rā when they are used as the object but otherwise stay the same. The first-person singular accusative form من را man rā 'me' can be shortened to marā or, in the spoken language, mano. Pronominal genitive enclitics are different from normal pronouns, however.
PersonSingularPlural
1stman مَنmā ما
2ndto توšomā شُما
3rdu او
ān آن,
vey وِى* 		ānhā آنـها ,
išān ایـشان

* rarely used
PersonSingularPlural
1stman مَنmā ما
2ndto توšomā شُما
3rdu او
išun ایـشان* 		ounhā/ounā آنـها ,
išun ایـشان

* uses 3rd person plural verb form
Persian resembles French in that the second person plural pronoun 'šomā' is used as a polite form of address. Persian 'to' is used among intimate friends. However, Persian also resembles North Indian languages like Hindustani in that the third person plural form, with the pronoun išun, is used for politeness to refer to one person, especially in the presence of that person:
Possession is often expressed by adding suffixes to nouns; the same suffixes can also be used as object pronouns. For the third person these are ambiguous ; for example, کتابش could mean 'his book' or 'her book'.
PersonSingularPlural
1st-am ـَم-emān ـِمان
2nd-at ـَت-etān ـِتان
3rd-aš ـَش-ešān ـِشان

PersonSingularPlural
1st-am ـَم-emun ـِمون
2nd-et ـِت-etun ـِتون
3rd-eš ـِش-ešun ـِشون

Examples:
When the stem to which they are added ends in a vowel, a y is inserted for ease of pronunciation. However, with the plural marker ها, it is also common in Iranian dialects to drop the -a/-e stem from the possessive marker. For example, 'my cars' could be translated as either ماشین هایم with the y-stem or ماشین هام. It can be simplified even more to the colloquial spoken form by dropping h, for ease of pronunciation, to ماشینام. Sometimes, ها is written attached to the word: ماشینها.

Ezāfe

Another way of expressing possession is by using subject pronouns or a noun phrase with ezāfe. Although in the third person this implies a change of person. These can also never be used as a possessive or direct object within a clause in which the same is the subject of the verb.
Object pronouns are the same as subject pronouns, but objects can also be marked with the possessive determiners described above, which get attached to the verbs instead of nouns and don't need the postposition; consider the example "Yesterday I saw him" shown below.
TransliterationPersianNotes
diruz ou rā didamدیروز او را دیدَمPostposition را rā needed when using a subject pronoun as an object pronoun.
diruz didamešدیروز دیدَمَشNo postposition needed; possessive determiner attached to the verb.

Demonstrative pronouns

The demonstrative pronouns are این and آن respectively. Their plural forms can be اینها and آنها for inanimate nouns, or اینان and آنان for animate nouns. Note that آن and آنها are also used as third-person subject pronouns.
Demonstratives can also be combined with the indefinite pronouns یکی and یکی ها to give: این یکی, آن یکی, این یکی ها and آن یکی ها.

Adjectives

s typically follow the nouns they modify, using the ezāfe construct. However, adjectives can precede nouns in compounded derivational forms such as xoš-baxt 'lucky', and bad-kār 'wicked'. Adjectives can come in any different orders after a noun and in this case adjectives that come at the end have more emphasis.
Comparative forms make use of the suffix -tar, and the superlative form uses the suffix -tarin.
Comparatives used attributively follow the nouns they modify, but superlatives precede their nouns.
The word 'than' is expressed by the preposition از :
Normal verbs can be formed using the following pattern:
NEG - DUR or SUBJ/IMPER - root - PAST - PERSON - OBJ
PersonSingularPlural
1st-am ـَم-im ـیم
2nd-i ـی-id ـید
3rd-ad* ـَد-and ـَند

* In the past tense, the past stem alone is used without any ending
PersonSingularPlural
1st-am-im
2nd-i-id /-in
3rd-e*-an

* In the past tense, the past stem alone is used without any ending
PersonSingularPlural
1st-am ـَم-emān ـِمان
2nd-at ـَت-etān ـِتان
3rd-aš ـَش-ešān ـِشان

PersonSingularPlural
1st-am-emun
2nd-et-etun
3rd-eš-ešun

Tenses

Here are the most common tenses:

Infinitive

The infinitive ending is formed with ن- : خوردن 'to eat'. The basic stem of the verb is formed by deleting this ending: خورد.

Past

The past tense is formed by deleting the infinitive ending and adding the personal endings to the stem. In the third person singular, however, there is no personal ending so خوردن would become خورد, 'he/she/it ate'.

Imperfect

The imperfect tense is made by taking the past tense as described above and prefixing it with 'می', thus می‌خوردم 'I was eating', 'I used to eat'. This tense can also have a conditional meaning: 'I would eat', 'I would have eaten'.

Perfect

The perfect tense is formed by taking the stem of the verb, adding ه to the end and then adding the different persons of the present tense of 'to be'. So خوردن in the perfect first person singular would be خورده ام 'I have eaten' and the 3rd person singular would become خورده است. However, in the spoken form, ast is omitted, making خورده 's/he has eaten".

Pluperfect

The pluperfect tense formed by taking the stem of the perfect, e.g. خورده, adding بود, and finally adding the personal endings: 'خورده بودم', 'I had eaten'. In the third person singular, بود bud is added.

Future

The future tense is formed by taking the present tense form of 'خواستن', to want, and conjugating it to the correct person; this verb in third person singular is 'خواهد'. Next, it is put in front of the shortened infinitive of the verb, e.g. خورد, thus خواهد خورد 'he/she/it will eat'. For compound verbs, such as تمیز کردن 'to clean', خواهد goes in between both words, and کردن is reduced to its stem, thus تمیز خواهد کرد 'he/she/it will clean'. In the negative, 'خواهد' receives ن. na- to make نخواهد خورد naxāhad xord 'he will not eat'. The future tense is generally avoided in colloquial Persian.

Present

The present tense is formed by taking the present stem of the verb, adding the prefix 'می', and conjugating it. The present stem is often not predictable from the infinitive and so is to be learnt separately. The present stem of the verb خوردن 'to eat' for example, is خور, so the present first person singular would be می خورم 'I eat, am eating, do eat'. The third person singular ending is د-. The negative -ن is pronounced ne before mī, but in all other tenses, it is pronounced na. Frequently the present tense is used together with an adverb instead of the future tense described above.
The present subjunctive is made by changing the prefix mi- of the present tense to be- or bo- : بخورم boxoram 'I may eat', 'let me eat', بنويسم benevisam 'I may write', 'let me write'.

Compound verbs

s such as کردن 'to do, to make' are often used with nouns to form what is called a compound verb, light verb construction, or complex predicate. For example, the word گفتگو means 'conversation', while گفتگو کردن means 'to speak'. One may add a light verb after a noun, adjective, preposition, or prepositional phrase to form a compound verb. Only the light verb is conjugated; the word preceding it is not affected:
Other examples of compound verbs with kardan:
In the spoken language, certain commonly used verbs are pronounced in a shortened form:
s in Persian generally behave like in English and precede their object. They come in two kinds: the basic prepositions such as dar 'in', which are placed directly before the noun or pronoun without an ezāfe, and a more numerous class, made from nouns or adverbs joined to the following noun by an ezāfe. They include the following: