The Explanation of Typological Markedness of Contemporary pertaining to the Manner of Articulation of Uvular /G/

Abstract Based on the recent acoustic studies, major allophonic variants of /G/ pertaining to its manner of articulation in Contemporary Standard Persian are: voiced stop [G], [ʁ] and voiced [γ]. Among these three, voiced stop [G] occurs more frequently in the phonological environments of this . Hence, the basic variant must be known as voiced stop [G] in this . 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 of the world . 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 and was voiced fricative /γ/ (the universal unmarked variant). Gradually 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/.

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