Izāfa
The izāfa or ezāfé (Persian: اضافه), also written as izafet, izafat and izofa, is a Persian language grammatical construct which links two words together; it consists of an unstressed vocal -e or -i [1] (with a connecting -y- after vowels) that sometimes approximately corresponds to the English preposition of. It is generally not indicated in writing in the Persian script,[2] though it is in Tajik.
Common uses of the ezafe are:[3]
- Possessive: barādar-e Maryam 'Maryam's brother' (this can also apply to pronominal possession—barādar-e man 'my brother'—but in speech it is much more common to use possessive suffixes: barādar-am).
- Adjective-noun: barādar-e bozorg 'the big brother'
- Given name/title-family name: mohammad-e mosaddegh Mohammad Mosaddeq, āghā-ye mosaddegh Mr. Mosaddeq
The term is inherited from Arabic iḍāfa, which means a genitive construction. It is also traditionally used often in Iranic languages and sometimes Turkic languages, where it applies to a typologically quite different structure. Ottoman Turkish did use it extensively borrowing it from Persian, in its original function (the official name of the Ottoman Empire was Devlet-i Âliye-i Osmaniyye), although there it is transcribed as -i or ı rather than -e. It is also used extensively in Urdu, mainly in poetic settings.
See also [edit]
- Koh-i-Noor diamond
Notes and references [edit]
- ^ The short vowel "-ِ" (known as Kasra or kasré) is pronounced as -e- or -i depending on the accent.
- ^ Simin Abrahams, Modern Persian (Routledge, 2005: ISBN 0-7007-1327-1), p. 25.
- ^ Leila Moshiri, Colloquial Persian (Routledge, 1988: ISBN 0-415-00886-7), pp. 21–23.
- Karimi, Yadgar. 2007. "Kurdish Ezafe construction: implications for DP structure". Lingua 117(12):2159-2177.
