Vowel Raising and its Rule Conversion in Varieties of Persian Language: A Generative phonology Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this article is the survey of raising vowel process and its rule conversion, in varieties of Persian language based on a Generative phonology framework. In this study, “12” varieties of Persian have been selected purposefully and their data were extracted from written sources such as articles, these and other written sources about these varieties. In each of these varieties, phonological rules were discovered and their rule conversion were mentioned in other tables. Then, in order to discover natural rule, we analyzed these rules based on the principles of generative phonology and criteria that Jensen (2004: 117) has proposed for the phonological analysis of the rules. In this article, 2 kinds of raising vowel and their rule conversion, the environment of these rules and the kinds of rule conversion are surveyed. Some of the results are: 1) the most natural rule isn’t necessarily the simplest rule, on the other hand the simplicity is the necessary condition for the rules to be natural but it isn’t efficient condition. 2) We can discover rule /a/ → [e] as the conversion rule of /e/ → [a] synchronically but diachronically and historically both rules are the same.

Keywords

• raising vowel
• rule conversion
• rule inversion
• symmetry rule
• natural rule