Persian Syntax

Persian (also known as Farsi), is the official language of Iran, and has official status in Afghanistan (where it is known as Dari) and Tajikistan (Tajik) as well. Persian is a synthetic language with indo-European origin, but also exhibits significant influence from the semitic languages, and in particular Arabic, using a modified Arabic alphabet as well as being comprised of an estimated 50% Arabic loanwords. (Hillman, 2012). Persian has some features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns, thus making it a synthetic language rather than an analytic one. Persian is an SOV language, thus having a head-final phrase structure. Because of its synthetic nature, Persian includes multiple types of markers, including question markers and ezafe. One of the most complex and controversial components of Farsi is the word “ra.” “Ra” is a post-positional morpheme used to mark the preceding noun as a definite, direct object in the accusative case. (Karimi, 1989). This paper shows the complexities of the syntax of Persian, including the complexities of “ra.