Definite and Indefinite Nouns

The goal of this lesson is making you familiar with definite and indefinite nouns in Persian. This lesson is more technical than most of our other lessons, and you can mostly ignore it if you are not interested in syntactic and semantic details.

A noun is said to be indefinite when it does not refer to a uniquely identifiable thing. For example, in the sentence “I read a book”, the word “book” is indefinite because we don’t know which book it is talking about. On the other hand, when we say “I read the book”, the speaker and listener both presumably know exactly which book is being referred to, and the word “book” is therefore definite. The colored elements in the following examples are indefinite.

The examples show that words meaning "one", "some", and even "two" can make nouns indefinite. As you see in the last example, another way to make a noun indefinite is to attach the suffix "ی" (usually meaning “one” and pronounced similar to the English "ee" as in the word "free") to it. The suffix can be attached either to the main noun or to its adjectives, as shown in the second and third examples below.

In English, indefinite nouns are usually marked by words like "a" and "some". Thus, Persian is not very different from English in this regard. However, when it comes to definite nouns, the situation is different. In English, the definite marker is "the". In (Formal) Persian, however,there are no definite markers. Definite nouns are marked simply by not having an indefinite marker. The following pair of examples make this clear.

Keep in mind that the suffix "ی" does not always mean “one”. It can be translated into “one”, “any”, “some”, or even nothing, depending on the context. In all of these cases, however, it marks indefiniteness (fun fact for nerds: technicallly, it has been argued that what it marks is "non-uniqueness", which is a slightly different concept from indefiniteness. You really shouldn't care about this unless you are a semanticist).

In the second example above, the suffix "ی" functions as an indefinite article, but is not translated into English as “some”, “one”, etc.

There is one special case in which the suffix "ی" does not mark indefiniteness, and is in fact most naturally translated as "the"! This happens in the presence of the word “که” meaning “that”.