--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson" <liberty@...>
wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "etherman23" <etherman23@...> wrote:
> > >
> > > That's the standard theory but not a single IE language lacks
> > > native words with initial vowels.
> >
> > I had always understood that Farsi was an IE language.
>
> But you don't mean to imply that Farsi has no vowel-initial
> words, do you?
Yes, I do. My ultimatimate source appears to be Yadullah (or -o-)
Samareh. My immediate source is J.D. O'Connor's 'Phonetics', which
makes the explicit point that Persian words do not begin with vowels.
Looking through his list of sources, I find a Ph.D. thesis entitled
'The Phonological Structure of Syllable and Word in Tehrani Persian'
by 'Samareh, Y.', and this would explain several references to Persian
in O'Connor's book.
Resorting to Google, I finally found a definitive statement at
<
http://preview.rosettaproject.org/archive/indo-european/asia/pes/phon-v3?page=9>
'Diachronically, the glottal stop is the confluence of the
non-phonemic vocalic onset in the Persian component, and of both `eyn
and hamze in the Arabic loan component.' from p683 (Section 33.3.5) of
Persian Phonology by Gernot L. Windfuhr within a larger work I cannot
identify.
> Farsi has asb 'horse', âb 'water', ân 'that', emruz 'today',
> in 'this', onogh 'neck', and ostokhân 'bone', and all native
> words, to name only a few.
There is no substantive contradiction - I can find plenty of otherwise
accurate sources implying that Thai does not have initial glottal
stops. Glottal stop indications can easily vanish - Windguhr give an
apparent example _a:ya:_ 'whether' and two paragraphs later (same
page!) states that all syllables start with a single consonant and end
with zero, one or two consonants.
Richard.