Document Type : Research

Authors

• Azad Mohammadi
• Mahmood Bijankhan

University of Tehran

Abstract

The Kurdish language, a northwestern Iranian language, is part of the western group of closely related Iranian languages. It has three primary dialects: Northern , Central , and Southern Kurdish. This research focuses on the Sorani Kurdish dialect spoken in Marivan, The authors compiled a small corpus of words with Compensatory Lengthening (CL) and similar words from various dictionaries. In these words, the first consonant of the consonant clusters is deleted, leading to a CL of the preceding vowel. These words were prepared and phonetically transcribed by the authors. One of the authors, a native speaker of this dialect, used his intuition to assess the well-formedness of the data, validating the role of native speaker intuition in linguistic analysis. The study investigates whether CL exists in the Kurdish language. If it does, the deletion of a mora-bearing consonant in the coda position would result in a stray mora. This stray mora would then reconnect to its preceding vowel in languages where the coda consonant triggers and the vowel is the target of CL. the pharyngeal fricative /h/ and glottal fricative /ʕ/ are the only moraic consonants considered as approximants. The deletion of these consonants results in CL of the preceding vowel. CL serves as a nativization strategy in loanword phonology of the Kurdish language. This strategy balances the markedness of clusters where the first element is /h/ and /ʕ/ by violating two faithfulness constraints against preconsonantal deletion and identity of vowel length.

Keywords

• compensatory lengthening
• consonant deletion
• Kurdish language
• Optimality Theory
• Harmonic Serialism

Main Subjects

• Phonetics and Phonology