Re: [tied] *es- or *h1es- ?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson"

<liberty@...>

> wrote:
> >
> > 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.

Yes, I read more or less the same claim in 'Persian Grammar -
History and State of its Study'. At the end of a section on
the glottal stop it concludes:

> Thus, the question of the phonemic status of the glottal
> stop in Persian presented considerable problems. So did
> the question of whether vocalic onset was phonemic or not
> (such as omr 'life', âb 'water' or suffixes like - i).
> Krámský (1939) and Giunašvili (1965) did not think so. In
> the meantime, however, convincing arguments for accepting
> the phonemic status of a morpheme-initial glottal stop had
> come from distributional phonology (Jazayerey-Paper [1961];
> Scott [1964]; recently and evidently independently, Samare
> [1972]. By accepting the onset as a phonemic glottal stop,
> the distributional restrictions were eliminated, and the
> syllable boundaries became predictable (cf. the discussion
> of phonemic distribution below).

This all followed, however, several descriptions of how no
glottal stop was actually pronounced in most positions where
written in the Perso-Arabic script. In addition, I've been
studying Persian for several years now myself, including
access to a few native speakers of Farsi and Dari, and there
was seldom, if ever, heard a single glottal stop in their
actual speech. It never appears to manifest as anything more
than a syllable boundary, whether at the beginning of a word
or within.

Now I don't doubt that a theoretical description of Persian's
phonological system is simplified by reference to such a
"shadow segment", but if you will recall, we had a discussion
on cybalist of this very thing once, and were discouraged
from its use, at least on a certain level of description. I
took that advice to heart, and in that light must insist that
no glottal stop be claimed where none truly exists. I don't
see why it can't simply be stated that there is in Persian
hiatus between a word boundary and initial vowel?

I was also listening to a song in Hungarian the other day, and
noticed that the line "Vár a szívem ezer álma" divided into
syllables as var.O.si.vEm.E.zEr.al.mO rather than va.rO.si.vE.
mE.zE.ral.mO, and so clearly the word boundary produces hiatus
there too (it was my understanding that the same applies to
many other languages as well), yet no glottal stop is posited
for Hungarian.

> 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 -

Oh yes. I don't doubt it, but I'm judging by what I, and others,
have actually heard in Persian, not by how I see it written.

David