In spoken Persian the numbers also undergo some modifications as well:
one | yek | یک | ye | یه |
four | cahār | چهار | cār | چار |
six | šeš | شش | šiš | شیش |
fourteen | cahārdah | چهارده | cārda: | چاردَ |
fifteen | pānzdah | پانزده | punza: | پونزَ |
sixteen | šānzdah | شانزده | šunza: | شونزَ |
seventeen | hefdah | هفده | hivda: | هیودَ |
eighteen | hejdah | هجده | hižda: | هیژدَ |
fourty | cehel | چهل | cel | چل |
fifty | panjāh | پنجاه | panjā: | پنجا |
sixty | šast | شصت | šas | شص |
Although technically yek ‘a, one’ and the indefinite ی ‘a’ cannot be used together with the same noun, in spoken Persian they are always used together in dependant clauses; for example,
یه مردی بود
ye mard-i bud… ‘there was a man…’ (very sporadically ye mard bud; but never mard-i bud),
یه کتابی خریدم
ye ketāb-i xaridam… ‘I bought a book…’, etc. In poetry occasionally this occurs because of the timing of the verse. For instance, in the following distich, Mowlānā Jalāl ud-Din Balkhi (aka Rumi), instead of
یک شبان
yek šabān has used
یک شبانی
yek šabān-i; because شبان šabān is disyllabic while he needed a trisyllabic word:
did musā yek šabāni rā be rāh
دید موسی یک شبانی را به راه
‘once Moses saw a shepherd on the/his way’
Although Persian does not have a definite article of any sort, and a noun is only syntactically introduced as definite, the spoken Persian has an [-e] enclitic, which functions as a definite article. This [-e] takes the stress:
mard-e| | مردی ‘the man’ |
ketāb-e| kojās? | کتابه کجاست؟ ‘where is the book?’ |
māšin-e| ro xaridam | ماشین رو خریدم ‘I bought the car’ (Tehrani, māšinaro xaridam) |
(Note: In the Persic dialects, such as Shirazi, Bushehri, etc., this definite enclitic is [-u], which just like its Standard Persian counterpart, takes the stress; as in مردو mardu|, زنو zanu|, کتابو ketābu|, ‘the man,’ ‘the woman,’ ‘the book,’ etc.)