Namaeh Farhangistan

Namaeh Farhangistan

Voicing in Persian Glottal Consonants

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Vahid Sadeghi
Professor, Department of English and Linguistics, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran
10.22034/nf.2025.494070.1378
Abstract
Persian glottal stop [?] and fricative [h] tend to be voiced in certain phonological contexts. When glottal consonants that are transcribed as voiceless [? h] undergo voicing, they are realized as creaky and breathy voice. In this paper, we explored the extent to which glottal consonants in Persian differ in terms of percentage voicing and voicing intensity in different phonological positions, namely pre-vocalic, intervocalic and post-vocalic, in a corpus of Persian spontaneous speech. Results suggested that glottal stop [?] is often voiced, and that it is partially voiced in all positions, and not especially between vowels or post-vocalically. On the other hand, glottal fricative [h] shows a wide range of voicing, with some tokens being mostly voiced (in intervocalic and post-vocalic positions), and other tokens only partially voiced (pre-vocalic position). We suggested that this difference is due to the physiological mechanism involved in the production of glottal stop and fricative. We argued that it would be more appropriate to treat Persian glottal stop [?] and fricative [h] not as segments, but as two phonatory gestures: spreading and constriction. It was further suggested to assume that these gestures have underspecified magnitudes.  
Keywords
Chaknai consonants: stopped vowel: self vowel: vowel: voicing

Subjects

Ariza-García, A. (2018), “Phonation Types and Tones in Zapotec Languages (A Synchronic Comparison)”, Acta Linguistica Petropolitana 14, p. 485-517.
Bijankhan, M. (2000), “Farsi Vowel Compensatory Lengthening (An Experimental Approach)”, Proc. 5th ICSLP, Beijing.
Cho, T. and P. Keating (2009), “Effects of Initial Position Versus Prominence in English”, Journal of Phonetics 37, p. 466-485.
Darzi, A. (1991), “Compensatory Lengthening in Modern Colloquial Tehrani Farsi”, Studies in Linguistic Science, 21(2), p. 23-37.
Deme, A. et al. (2020), “Intervocalic Voicing of Hungarian /h/” Approaches to Hungarian, vol. 16: Papers from the 2017 Budapest Conference, Veronika Heged˝ us & Irene Vogel (eds.), p. 48-71. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins.
Esling, J. H. et al. (2019), Voice Quality (The Laryngeal Articulator Model), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Firth, J. R. (1957), “Phonetic Observations on Gujarati”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 20, p. 231-241
Garellek, M. (2013), Ph.D. dissertation, “Production and Perception of Glottal Stops”, UCLA.
_________ (2014), “Voice Quality Strengthening and Glottalization”, Journal of Phonetics 45, p. 106-113.
_________ (2020), “Acoustic Discriminability of the Complex Phonation System in !Xóõ”, Phonetica 77, p. 131-160.
Garellek, M. et al. (2023), “Voicing of Glottal Consonants and Non-modal Vowels”, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 53(2), p. 305-332. doi:10.1017/S0025100321000116.
Gordon, M. and P. Ladefoged (2001), “Phonation Types: A Cross-linguistic Overview”, Journal of  Phonetics, 29, p. 383-406.
Khan, S. D. (2012), “The Phonetics of Contrastive Phonation in Gujarati”, Journal of Phonetics 40, p. 780-795.
Kingston, J. and R. L. Diehl (1994), “Phonetic Knowledge”, Language 70, p. 419-454.
Kreiman, J. and D. Sidtis (2011), Foundations of Voice Studies, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell.
Ladefoged, P. (1963), “Some Physiological Parameters in Speech”, Language and Speech 6, p. 109-119.
Ladefoged, P. (1971), Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago.
Ladefoged, P. and I. Maddieson (1996), The Sounds of the World’s Languages, Oxford, Blackwell.
Mitterer, H. (2018), “Not All Geminates Are Created Equal (Evidence from Maltese Glottal Consonants)”, Journal of Phonetics 66, p. 28-44.
Pandit, P. B. (1957), “Nasalisation, Aspiration and Murmur in Gujarati”, Indian Linguistics 17, p. 165-172.
Pierrehumbert, J. and D. Talkin (1992), “Lenition of /h/ and Glottal Stop”, Papers in Laboratory Phonology II, Gerard J. Docherty and D. Robert Ladd (eds.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 90-117.
Sadeghi, V. (2007), “Compensatory Lengthening in Persian”, The 16th  International Congress on Phonetic Sciences, Saarbruken.
_________ (2008), “Compensatory Lengthening in Persian (The Timing of
Non-modal Phonation)”, ISCA Conference on Experimental Linguistics, Athens.
_________ (2011), “Laryngealization and Breathiness in Persian”, The Twelfth Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Florence.
Samareh, Y. (1977), The Arrangement of Segmental Phonemes in Farsi, Tehran, Tehran University press.
Schertz, J. and S. Khan (2020), “Acoustic Cues in Production and Perception of the Four- way Stop Laryngeal Contrast in Hindi and Urdu”, Journal of Phonetics 81, Article 100979. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.wocn.2020.100979.
Seyfarth, S. and M. Garellek (2020), “Hysical and Phonological Causes of Coda /t/ Glottalization in the Mainstream American English of Central Ohio”, Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 11, 24, p. 1-33. http://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.213.
Shademan, Sh. (2003), “Glottal-Deletion and Compensatory Lengthening in Farsi”, UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, no, 104, p. 61-81.
Teras, P. (2018), “The Phonetic Variation of Short Intervocalic /h/ in Estonian”, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018, K. Klessa, et al. (eds.), p. 883-887. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-178.
Wells, J. C. (1975), “The Association’s Alphabet”, Journal of the International Phonetic Association 5, p. 52-58.
Westbury, J. R. and P. A. Keating (1986), “On the Naturalness of Stop Consonant Voicing”, Journal of Linguistics 22, p. 145-166.
Namaeh Farhangistan
Volume 24, Issue 2 - Serial Number 96
Nameh Farhangestan (Iranian languages ​​and dialects)
May and June 2025
Pages 75-98

  • Receive Date 26 October 2024
  • Revise Date 07 November 2024
  • Accept Date 09 January 2025