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The Explanation of Typological Markedness of Contemporary Standard Persian Pertaining to the Manner of Articulation of Uvular Consonant /G

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The Explanation of Typological Markedness of Contemporary Standard Persian Pertaining to the Manner of Articulation of Uvular Consonant /G The Explanation of Typological Markedness of Contemporary Standard Persian pertaining to the Manner of Articulation of Uvular Consonant /G/ Abstract Based on the recent acoustic studies, major allophonic variants of uvular consonant /G/ pertaining to its manner of articulation in Contemporary Standard Persian are: voiced stop [G], approximant [ʁ] and voiced fricative [γ]. Among these three, voiced stop [G] occurs more frequently in the phonological environments of this phoneme. Hence, the basic variant must be known as voiced stop [G] in this language. In this study, firstly we described the phono-typological status of Contemporary Standard Persian as a marked language pertaining to the major manner of articulation of /G/ on the basis of phonemic unmarked value of frequency of occurrence (Greenberg, 1966) and statistical universals of UPSID (1992) which introduces the voiced fricative [γ] as the most frequent and unmarked variant among these allophones in the phonemes of the world languages. Secondly to explain the marked typological status of this language, we investigated the manner of articulation of the phoneme in periods before the Contemporary Persian according to researches done by linguists. Based on these studies, uvular consonant /G/ in Dari and Middle Persian was voiced fricative /γ/ (the universal unmarked variant). Gradually Arabic voiceless uvular stop /q/ was incorporated into Persian due to language contact of Persian and Arabic and also the admission of myriad of Fasih Arabic loanwords in the late Dari Persian period. Then it merged with Persian voiced fricative /γ/ and corresponded to that in terms of voice feature. Thus, voiced uvular stop [G] was formed in allophonic distribution with voiced fricative [γ] in Contemporary Standard Persian. Key words: Phonological Markedness, Typological Explanation, Language Contact, Contemporary Standard Persian, Uvular Consonant /G/. References Abolghasemi, M. (1994). The History of Persian Language. Tehran: SAMT Press. Ali-nejad, B. and Hoseini-Balam, F. (2013). An Introduction to Acoustic Phonetics. Isfahan: University of Isfahan Press. Bijankhan, M. (2005). Phonology: Optimality Theory. Tehran: SAMT Press. Comrie. B. (1981). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Croft. W. (1990). 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