Wikipedia
'''Ezāfe ''' , also written as izafet, izafe, izafat, izāfa, and izofa, is a grammatical particle found in some Iranian languages that links two words together; in the Persian language it consists of the unstressed 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 vowels, but it is indicated in Tajiki, which is written in the Cyrillic script.
Common uses of the Persian ezafe are:
- Possessive: barādar-e-Maryam 'Maryam's brother' (it 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-Mosaddeq Mohammad Mosaddeq, āghā-ye-Mosaddeq Mr. Mosaddeq
The Persian grammatical term ezāfe 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 "ezafe" 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 " construct state" with each other.
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 (the official name of the Ottoman Empire was Devlet-i Âliye-i Osmaniyye), but it is transcribed as -i or ı rather than -e. Ezafe is also used extensively in Urdu although its use is mostly restricted to poetic settings or to phrases imported wholesale from Persian since Urdu usually expresses the genitive with the Hindustani declined possessive postposition kā.