Persian/Lesson 5

In lessons 1 through 4, you learned some greetings and how to read, write, and pronounce Persian words.

In this lesson, you will learn about Persian verbs: their agreement with the subject, their location in a sentence, and how to conjugate the most common one,, in the simple present tense.

Dialogue:
Reza and Shirin have just met:

If you intend to help complete this dialogue, please see and Persian/Planning for suggestions that emphasize this lesson's topic: simple present tense forms of بودن.
 * colspan=5 |
 * colspan=5 |
 * }

Explanation
 * Shirin and Reza have just met.
 * While "âqâ" is an honorific used in Persian before Male given names, it is not translated to "Mr." in English.

Vocabulary



Subjects
In both English and Persian, sentences have subjects and verbs. In a sentence that expresses an action, the subject is usually the main actor or agent. In a sentence that makes a comment about a topic, the subject is usually that topic. A verb is a word like talk that expresses an action, or one like is that links the subject to the words that comment about it: Each sentence above, like all complete sentences in English and Persian, has a subject and a verb, even if the subject is only implied. Subjects have grammatical “number” and “person”:
 * First, second, or third person: indicates whether the speaker or addressee is included
 * Singular or plural number: indicates how many people or things are included

Grammatical person and number may be represented by the following pronouns:

Present tense forms of
Persian verbs are conjugated by adding suffixes, similar to the way English verbs like talk take the suffixes -s, -ed, and -ing to make verb forms like talks , talked , and talking . In Persian, though, the verb’s suffix clearly indicates its grammatical person and number. For example, the table on the right shows the simple present tense “full” forms of the Persian verb, consisting of the stem and various suffixes to indicate the person and number:


 * Say each of the personal pronouns from the table above. While saying each one, imagine and point to the people to whom the pronoun might refer.  For example, while saying, imagine another person next to you and point to that person and yourself.
 * Repeat the personal pronouns as above, but after each one, say the corresponding simple present tense full forms of from the table above.  For example, when saying, point to two imaginary addressees and then say.
 * }
 * }

The full simple present tense of appeared as  and  in the first and third lines of the dialogue above.

also appears in abbreviated form above, once as the word and once as the suffix  following. That's because the verb has both a full form using the stem  and a short form. The long form is a bit more formal in tone and often carries the sense of “exists”.

The short form is used more often than the long form, especially in casual speech. As shown below, most of the short form is written as suffixes (technically clitics since they attach to phrases rather than just words) like in , but the third person singular form is written as a separate word:  :

can be used with singular or plural subjects to express existence, like "there is" or "there are" in English.

For plural “animate” subjects (one that refers to multiple people or to a thing that might be thought to behave figuratively like multiple people), existence can also be expressed with the plural form.

Some sources disagree with this and say is only used as a copula, never used for existence.

Colloquially, may be a suffix pronounced ‹an› after consonant or ‹n› after vowel.

Word order
As the previous dialogues have shown, the verb usually comes last in a simple Persian sentence. For example, the last word in each Persian sentence below is a form of the verb :

Grammatically, subjects are optional in Persian. Since the suffix of a conjugated verb clearly indicates the number and person of the subject, subject pronouns are often omitted from Persian sentences, except when used for emphasis.



Exercises

 * Translate the following Persian sentences into English:


 * }

Fill in the blanks.
 * Fill in the blank with someone's name.
 * Fill in the blank with an occupation (e.g. ), a role (e.g. ), or a nationality (e.g. ).
 * Fill in the blank with an occupation.
 * to ask about someone's nationality
 * or other nationalities
 * Translate the following English sentences into Persian:
 * to ask about someone's nationality
 * or other nationalities
 * Translate the following English sentences into Persian:
 * Translate the following English sentences into Persian:
 * Translate the following English sentences into Persian:
 * Translate the following English sentences into Persian:


 * }

Review
In this lesson, you learned how to conjugate two sets of simple present tense forms of the Persian verb ....