05
Mar.
2025.
06
Mar.
2025.
Journée
entière
entière
Epenthetic rationales in Farsi
en ligne
Persian bans all word-initial consonant clusters, including branching onsets. In loans, the latter are repaired by epenthesis. In colloquial Iranian Persian, a.k.a. Farsi, the epenthetic vowel is /e/ by default. The latter is used when the first lexical vowel of a loan is adapted as a low vowel in Farsi: English “blog” > /belɒg/, “black” > /belak/. When the first lexical vowel is a high or mid-vowel, a copy of this is preferred over /e/: French “bloc” > /bolok/ ⁓ /buluk/, “trucage” > /turukɒʒ/, English “free” > /firi/, “grease” > /giris/. In this talk, I use Element Theory and Optimality Theory to attempt to answer the three following questions:
1. Why do low vowels not participate in vowel harmony, i.e. cannot be copied as epenthetic vowels?
2. Why is /e/ the epenthetic vowel by default?
3. Why, in loans with a first non-low lexical vowel, is a copy of this vowel preferred over /e/ to repair the prohibited cluster?
Pas d'interprétation en LSF
