Ezāfe

Ezāfe (اضافه), also romanized as ezâfe, izafet, izafe, izafat, izāfa, ezafe, and izofa (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 (-ye or -yi after vowels) 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. Common uses of the Persian ezafe are: Possessive: "Maryam's brother" (it can also apply to pronominal possession, "my brother", but in speech it is much more common to use possessive suffixes: ). Adjective-noun: "the big brother". Given name/title-family name: , "Mr. Mosaddeq" Linking two nouns: "Tehran Street" or "Road to Tehran" After final long vowels ( or ) in words, the ezâfe is marked by a () intervening before the ezâfe ending. If a word ends in the short vowel (designated by a ), the ezâfe may be marked either by placing a hamze diacritic over the () or a non-connecting after it (). The is prevented from joining by placing a zero-width non-joiner, known in Persian as (), after the . The Persian grammatical term ezâfe is borrowed from the Arabic concept of iḍāfa ("addition"), where it denotes a genitive construction between two or more nouns, expressed using case endings. However, whereas the Iranian ezâfe denotes a grammatical particle (or even a pronoun), in Arabic, the word iḍāfa 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 (where the possessed is in the construct state and any case, and the possessor is in the genitive case and any state). Iẓāfat in Urdu-Hindi is a syntactical construction of two nouns, where the first component is a determined noun, and the second is a determiner.