Farsi Ezafe Trick for L1 English Speakers

October 28, 2023

I recently came across a neat trick in Modern Persian by Narguess Farzad (2004) for an intuition on the order of adjectives and possessives in Farsi (Iranian Persian). As an L1 English speaker, it can be difficult to get an intuition for the adjective order (postpositional) and how that works with the possessives in Farsi (also postpositional).

You simply write the English phrase as usual: left to right. Then underneath you write the Farsi translation: right to left. Because adjectives and possessives are postpositional, but Farsi is also written right to left, the two “reverse” and provide a simple way to get the correct word order in Farsi. Farzad provides the simple example:

Because possessive adjectives follow attributive adjectives, this extends to genitive constructions as well:

And to multiple adjectives: