WPP, No. 104: Glottal Deletion and Compensatory Lengthening in Farsi

This study tested whether Farsi exhibits vowel compensatory lengthening.It has been suggested that, in Farsi, compensatory lengthening is triggered by the deletion of glottal consonants in coda position in informal speech (Darzi 1991).As a result, minimal pairs such as [tar] and [tarh] should contrast only with respect to vowel length.A corpus of 90 words of the form CVC, CVCG, CVGC, and CVCC (where V=a vowel and G=a glottal consonant) was recorded, and durations of vowels in different contexts were measured and compared.The results showed that the duration of lax vowels in CVC words and in CVCG/CVGC were significantly different, with the exception of /e/./e/ might behave differently because it is also the epenthetic vowel most commonly used in loanword adaptation.One surprising result was that, in general, the vowels in CVCC configuration were longer than CVC configuration.