Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 05:25, 15 December 2009

The Persian language has six vowel phonemes and twenty-three consonant phonemes. It features contrastive stress and syllable-final consonant clusters.

Vowels

Diachronically, Persian possessed a distinction of length in its underlying vowel inventory, contrasting the long vowels /iː/, /uː/, /ɒː/ with the short vowels /e/, /o/, /æ/ respectively.

Word-final /o/ is rare except for /to/ "thou, you (singular)", and word-final /æ/ is very rare in Iranian Persian, except for /næ/ "no." The word-final /æ/ in Early New Persian mostly shifted to /e/ in contemporary Iranian Persian (often romanized as "eh"), but is preserved in the Eastern dialects.

The chart to the right reflects the vowels of many educated Persian speakers from Tehran.

Diphthongs

Several diphthongs occur in Persian, including /ej/, /ow/, /aj/, /ɒj/, /oj/, and /uj/.

Chart

Historical shifts

Early New Persian had eight vowels: i, ī, ē, u, ū, ō, a, ā (in IPA: /i iː eː u uː oː æ ɒː/). The following chart describes their shifts into Tajik, Afghan Dari, and contemporary Iranian Persian.

Tajik      i  e  u  ů a o
          ┌↑┐ ↑ ┌↑┐ ↑ ↑ ↑
Early NP  i ī ē u ū ō a ā
          ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
Dari      e i ē o u ō a ā
          ↓ └↓┘ ↓ └↓┘ ↓ ↓
Iranian   e  ī  o  ū  a ā

See also: Tajik vowels

Consonants

(Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant. Allophones are in phonetic square brackets.)

Chart

Allophonic variants

Alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ are either apico-alveolar or apico-dental. The unvoiced stops /p, t, tʃ, k/ are aspirated much like their English counterparts: they become aspirated when they begin a syllable, though aspiration is not contrastive. Persian does not have syllable-initial consonant clusters (see below), so unlike in English, /p, t/ are aspirated even following /s/, as in /hastam/ "I am".

In Classical Persian, غ and ق denoted and , respectively. In modern Tehrani Persian (which is used in the Iranian mass media), there is no difference in the pronunciation of غ and ق; both represent or , depending on their position in the word.When /ɣ/ occurs at the beginning of a word, it is realized as a voiced uvular plosive . However, the classic pronunciation difference for غ and ق is preserved in the eastern variants of Persian (i.e. Dari and Tajiki), as well as the southern dialects of the modern Iranian variety (e.g. Yazdi and Kermani dialects).

Alveolar flap /ɾ/ can have a trilled allophonic variant at the beginning of a word, like in Spanish, Catalan, and other Romance languages in Spain.

Phonotactics

Syllable Structure

Syllables may be structured as (C) V (C) (C) .

Stress

One syllable in each word (or breath group) is stressed, and knowing the rules is conducive to proper pronunciation.

General rule:

I. Stress falls on the last stem syllable of most words.

Exceptions and clarifications:

II. Stress falls on the first syllable of interjections, conjunctions and vocatives. E.g. /'bale/ "yes", /'nakheir/ "no indeed", /'vali/ "but", /'cerā/ "why", /'agar/ "if", /'mersi/ "thanks", /'xānom/ "Ma'am", /'āqā/ "Sir"; cf. IV-3 below.

III. Never stressed are: 1) personal suffixes on verbs (-am "I do..", -i "you do..", .., -and "they do..") (with one exception, cf. IV-1 below); 2) a small set of very common noun enclitics: the ezāfe (-e/-ye) "of", -rā "", -i "a, an", -o "and"; 3) the possessive and pronoun-object suffixes, -am, -et, -esh, &c.

IV. Always stressed are: 1) the personal suffixes on the positive future auxiliary verb (the single exception to III-1 above); 2) the negative verb prefix na-/ne-, if present; 3) if na-/ne- is not present, then the first non-negative verb prefix (e.g. mi- "-ing", be- "do!", and the prefix noun in compound verbs (e.g. kār in kār mi-kardam); 3) the last syllable of all other words, including the infinitive ending -an and the participial ending -te/-de in verbal derivatives, noun suffixes like -i "-ish" and -egi, all plural suffixes (-hā, -ān), adjective comparative suffixes (-tar, -tarin), and ordinal-number suffixes (-om). Nouns not in the vocative are stressed on the final syllable: /xā'nom/ "lady", /ā'qā/ "gentleman"; cf. II above.

V. In the informal language the present perfect tense is pronounced like the simple past tense. Only the stress distinguishes between these tenses: the stressed personal suffix indicates the present perfect and the unstressed one the simple past tense:

In transcription, enclitics (like the ezāfe) and personal suffixes should be written separated from their words by a hyphen, to show that they are unstressed. Stressed prefixes should be joined with a hyphen. Interjections &c. should be marked with an acute diacritic on their initial syllable.

Colloquial Iranian Persian

When spoken formally, Iranian Persian is pronounced as written. But colloquial pronunciation as used by all classes makes a number of very common substitutions. They include:

• In the Tehrani accent and also most of the accents in Central and Southern Iran, The sequence /ɒn/ in the formal or written language is nearly always pronounced . The only common exceptions are high prestige words, such as "Qur'an", and "Iran," which are pronounced as written. A few words written as /ɒm/ are pronounced , especially forms of the verb /ɒmædæn/ "to come".

• In the Tehrani accent, the unstressed direct object suffix marker /rɒ/ is pronounced /ro/, or /o/ after a consonant.

• The stems of many verbs have a short colloquial form, especially /æst/ "he/she is" is colloquially shortened to /e/ after a consonant or /je/ after a vowel.

• The 2nd and 3rd person plural verb subject suffixes, written /-id/ and /-ænd/ respectively, are pronounced and .

• Many frequently-occurring verbs are shortened, such as /mixɒːhæm/ "I want" → , and /mirævæm/ "I go" → .

Example

See also

• Persian alphabet

References

1. ^ International Phonetic Association (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 124–125. ISBN 978-0521637510.
2. Windfuhr, Gernot (1987). "Persian". In Bernard Comrie (ed.). The World's Major Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 543. ISBN 978-0195065114.
3. ^ Mahootian, Shahrzad (1997). Persian. London: Routledge. pp. 287, 292, 303, 305. ISBN 0-415-02311-4.
4. Mace, John (1993-03). Modern Persian. Teach Yourself. ISBN 0844238155. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
5. ^ Jahani, Carina (2005). "The Glottal Plosive: A Phoneme in Spoken Modern Persian or Not?". In Éva Ágnes Csató, Bo Isaksson, and Carina Jahani (ed.). Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London: RoutledgeCurzon. pp. 79–96. ISBN 0-415-30804-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
6. ^ Mace, John (2003). Persian Grammar: For reference and revision. London: RoutledgeCurzon. ISBN 0700716955.
7. Thackston, W. M. (1993-05-01). "Colloquial Transformations". An Introduction to Persian (3rd Rev ed.). Ibex Publishers. pp. 205–214. ISBN 0936347295.

External links

• Farsdat – Persian speech database
• Virtual Persian Keyboard

• Language phonologies
• Persian language