The innovations remain in Modern Persian, which is one of the few Indo-European languages to lack grammatical gender, even in pronouns.
While Persian has a standard subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, it is not strongly left-branching.
The interrogative particle âyâ (آیا), that asks a yes–no question, in written Persian, appears at the beginning of a sentence.
If the object is specific, the order is (S) (O + râ) (PP) V. However, Persian can have a relatively free word order, often called scrambling, because the parts of speech are generally unambiguous, and prepositions and the accusative marker help to disambiguate the case of a given noun phrase.
The scrambling characteristic has allowed Persian a high degree of flexibility for versification and rhyming.
The indefinite article in both spoken and literary Persian is the number one, یک yek, often shortened to یه ye.
Plural forms are used less often than in English and are not used after numbers or زیاد ziyâd "many" or بسیار(ی) besyâr(i).
[1] Nouns adopted from Arabic usually have special plurals, formed with the ending ـات -ât or by changing the vowels.
Arabic nouns can generally take Persian plural endings, but the original form is sometimes more common.
Inanimate subjects do not require plural verb forms, especially in the spoken language: ketâbhâ unjâst ('the books "is" there').
The first-person singular accusative form من را man râ 'me' can be shortened to marâ or, in the spoken language, mano.
It can be simplified even more to the colloquial spoken form by dropping h, for ease of pronunciation, to ماشینام mâšinâm.
Object pronouns are the same as subject pronouns (followed by the postposition را râ), but objects can also be marked with the possessive determiners described above, which get attached to the verbs instead of nouns and don't need the postposition; consider the example "Yesterday I saw him" shown below.
However, in the spoken form, ast is omitted, making خورده xorde 's/he has eaten".
The pluperfect tense is formed by taking the stem of the perfect, e.g. خورده xorde, adding بود bud, and finally adding the personal endings: خورده بودم xorde budam 'I had eaten'.
For compound verbs, such as تمیز کردن tamiz kardan 'to clean', خواهد xâhad goes in between both words, and کردن kardan is reduced to its stem, thus تمیز خواهد کرد tamiz xâhad kard 'he/she/it will clean'.
In the negative, خواهد xâhad receives نـ na- to make نخواهد خورد naxâhad xord 'he will not eat'.
The present subjunctive is made by changing the prefix mî- of the present tense to بـ be- or bo- (before a verb with the vowel o): بخورم boxoram 'I may eat, let me eat', بنويسم benevisam 'I may write', 'let me write'.