Abbas Safardoost; Aliyeh Kord Zafaranlu Kambuziya
Abstract
In the first part of the article, we looked at the distribution of nasals in Persian (: m & n) to determine how they are distributed in consonant clusters. The results suggest that there is a strong tendency among nasals to be complementarily distributed in the consonant clusters of etymologically ...
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In the first part of the article, we looked at the distribution of nasals in Persian (: m & n) to determine how they are distributed in consonant clusters. The results suggest that there is a strong tendency among nasals to be complementarily distributed in the consonant clusters of etymologically Persian words. In the second part of the article, we asked, what are the distributional-phonological characteristics of loanwords in Persian? The results suggest that the distribution of phonological features of loanwords tends to be more dispersed and more balanced than the corresponding features in etymologically Persian words. However, if in the process of borrowing new words, a specific morphological structure of the donor language has been extensively borrowed by the recipient language, such distinctions have been weakening. Furthermore, we suggested that multiple donor languages and the randomness of the borrowing process are two reasons why phonological features of loanwords are more dispersed and more balanced. We also explained why the nC cluster is the most frequent nasal cluster in Persian. We suggested that the reason lies in the fact that n has an oral stop stricture, a property that has been ignored in the description of nasals, which makes it a proper candidate to co-occur with 16 obstruent consonants of Persian. Our data came from a lemmatized corpus-driven list of words, which contains 55000 words.
