Ezāfe , also romanized as izafet, izafe, izafat, izāfa, ezafe, and izofa, is a grammatical particle found in some Iranian languages, as well as Persian-influenced languages such as Turkish and Hindustani, that links two words together. In the Persian language, it consists of the unstressed short vowel-e or -i 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, which is normally written without short vowels, but it is indicated in Tajiki, which is written in the Cyrillic script, as -и without a hyphen.
Linking two nouns: خیابانِ تهران khiābān-e tehrān "Tehran Street" or "Road to Tehran"
The Persian grammatical term ezāfe is borrowed from the Arabic concept of iḍāfa, where it denotes a genitive construction between two or more nouns, expressed using case endings. However, whereas the Iranian ezafe denotes a grammatical particle, in Arabic, the wordiḍāfa 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.
Ezafe in other languages
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, but it is transcribed as -i or -ı rather than -e. Ezafe is also used frequently in Hindustani, though its use is mostly restricted to poetic settings or to phrases imported wholesale from Persian since Hindustani expresses the genitive with the native declined possessive postposition kā. The title of the Bollywood film, Salaam-e-Ishq, is an example of the use of the ezafe in Hindustani. Other examples of ezafe in Hindustani include terms like sazā-e-maut "death penalty" and qābil-e-tārīf "praiseworthy". It can also be found in the Bengali language especially for titles such as Sher-e-Bangla, Jamaat-e-Islami and Mah-e-Romzan. The Albanian language also has an ezafe-like construction, as for example in Partia e Punës e Shqipërisë, Party of Labour of Albania. 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" Në një zyrë të afërt "In an adjacent office" Jashtë zyrës së tij "Outside his office" Besides the above mentioned languages, ezafe is used in Kurdish among all the 50 million Kurds who live in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, e.g Çem-ê Dîclê..... river-EZAFE Tigris..... The Tigris River
Etymology
Originally, in Old Persian, nouns had case endings, just like every other early Indo-European language. 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'
: Auramazdāha 'Aura Mazda '
However, over time, a relative pronoun such as tya or hya began to be interposed between the first element and its genitive attribute.
by the willwhich of Auramazdah
Tisdall states that the modern Persianezafe stems from this relative pronounwhich, which in Eastern Iranian languages was yo or yat. Pahlavi shortened it to ī, and after noun case endings passed out of usage, this relative pronoun which, became a genitive "construct" marker. Thus the phrase
mard-e xub مردِ خوب
historically means "man which good" rather than "good man." In other modern Iranian languages, such as Northern Kurdish, the ezafe particle is still a relative pronoun, which declines for gender and number. 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.
