Word Formation (1)

An important step in learning any language is to get familiar with the way words are formed in that language. Persian is a language with relatively few independent stems and is therefore highly dependent upon prefixes, suffixes, and other methods of creating new words out of old ones. In this lesson you will get familiar with the structure of nouns and adjectives, how they are made from each other, how they are made using verb stems, and so on.

As in many languages, it is very common in Persian to attach two words (noun or adjective) together to make new nouns and adjectives.

More interestingly, the present stem of a verb can attach to the end of a noun to create a new noun or adjective. These Noun+VerbStem compopunds are understood roughly as "someone or something that does the verb to the noun", e.g., in the third example below, the word for "ruler" (“خَط‌کِش”) literally means "a thing that draws lines", or simply "line-drawer". Similarly you can give rough literal translations for the other ones, e.g., soup-cooker, air-traveller, etc.

In many cases, new words are formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to existing words. Each of these affixes conveys a distinct meaning. However, as is normally the case in word formation across languages, sometimes the meaning of the composite word is somewhat different from what you'd expect from the meanings of the parts (e.g., see the third example below). Below are some examples of everyday words featuring prefixes. Suffixes will be considered in the next lesson.

• “با” (meaning “with”)

• “بی” (meaning “without”)

• “نا” (meaning “not”)

As you probably noticed, the last example is an exception to the norm since the prefix's contribution seems to be more like "without" rather than "not".

• “هم” (meaning “with the same”)