Persian grammar

Persian grammar (Persian: دستور زبان فارسی‎) is the grammar of the Persian language, whose dialectal variants are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan (in Samarqand, Bukhara and the Surxondaryo Region) 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. Persian grammar (Persian: دستور زبان فارسی‎) is the grammar of the Persian language, whose dialectal variants are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan (in Samarqand, Bukhara and the Surxondaryo Region) 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. While Persian has a standard subject-object-verb (SOV) 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 ('which'). The interrogative particle āyā (آیا), 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 (را) (in the spoken language, ro or o), follows a definite direct object noun phrase. Normal sentences are subject-prepositional phrase-object-verb. If the object is specific, the order is '(S) (O + rā) (PP) 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. In the literary language, no definite article (the) is used; rather, it is implied by the absence of the indefinite article (a, an). 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. 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.