Adpositions in Persian Language

The present text outlines the characteristics and use of adpositions in Persian language but before we do that, it would be a great idea to tell you what exactly an adposition is. You must have heard about the prepositions in English. They are short words that you put before nouns to add a certain meaning to the sentences but they do not really mean anything on their own. Take the last prepostion I used. That was “on”. Without this word the meaning of the sentence would be corrupted and it would sound pretty awkward and there ise even a chance that you would not be able figure out what I mean. That said, “on” has no meaning when outside the sentence. It does not refer to any object, any concept, any state or any change. Such words are called adpositions. They help to build sentences and link words but thay are meaningless by themselves. While English is a prepositional language, there are other languages where adpositions come after the nouns and when that happens they are called postpositions.

Now that we have explained what an adposition is, it is time to take a look at the adpositions in the Persian language. This is yet another prepositional language, just like the English language. Indeed, Persian language is quite rich in prepositions and they not only help create spatial relations in sentences, they are also responsible for all of the grammatical cases. Unlike the ancient Old Persian language, the New Persian language has no case inflections. That means the words do not change and stay the way they are no matter where you use them in the sentence. Instead, the prepositions help us understand whether a certain word in a sentence in the target of the action or where the action is taking place. Prepositions in Persian can tell us many other things about what exactly is going in a specific sentence. For instance, it is with the help of prepositions that we distinguish between going to a location or going away from that location. Finally there is one postposition that marks the direct object of the sentence.

Persian has not always been so rich in adpositions. As said, the Old Persian language has few adpositions and had little use for them either. It was the decay of case endings followed a process of grammaticalization of adpositions mostly from nouns, that gave the language its present character.