A Comparative Study on the Historical Development of “ra” in Persian and Mazandarani

The syntactic marker "ra" in Persian and some Iranian languages was discussed in various sources from different viewpoints. Some linguists have studied the historical development of this marker from ancient Persian to the present day. Mazandarani is an Iranian varnacular which has retained many lexical and syntactic features of medieval and even ancient Iranian languages. In this article, the syntactic behavior of “ra” as a function marker of noun has been investigated and then, various functions of “ra” in contemporary Mazandarani have been compared with its historical development in Persian. Research data have been extracted from some old and new written sources of Mazandarani as well as through the field method from some Mazandarani native speakers or the author's linguistic knowledge as a native speaker of that area. A survey on data from Mazandarani dialect, shows that today, “ra” is used as a direct object marker, indirect object marker, and dative marker in this language. Syntactic behavior of "ra" in Mazandarani, as an Iranian language, confirms the existing theory about the historical development of "ra" in Persian. However, in many cases today, in Mazanderani, (ĵā-) and its various forms have been replaced for “ra” as indirect object marker and “ra” is less frequently used as dative marker. So it can be predicted that in recent future, “ra” will be stabilized as direct object marker.