Glottal Stops and Glottalized Vowels in Persian: A Reply to Navab Safavi et al

Abstract

In their article in Elm-e Zaban (Volume 7, Issue 11) titled “Acoustic Analysis of Glottal Stop Occurrence before Initial Vowels in Persian Words”, Navab Safavi et al report the findings of their research on the acoustic features of the glottal stop before the word-initial vowels in the Persian language and try to answer the question whether this sound is a phoneme or not. The research is based on the recorded pronunciation of some non-words with the CVCV syllable structure and also 30 Persian words with word-initial glottal stops (or “vowels” as the authors argue). The authors suggest that the criteria for the existence of the glottal stop consonant in the word group are not verified and conclude that a full glottal stop with the characteristics of a consonant does not exist before the word-initial vowels in the Persian language. It seems that this acoustic research suffers from weaknesses in terms of assumptions, critique of previous studies, methodology, conclusion, and references. The most serious weakness is the confusion between the realms of phonology and phonetics, and the lack of distinction between the status and characteristics of the two branches of linguistics. This reply takes up a number of phonological and methodological issues which challenge the main conclusions of the authors.

Keywords

• glottal stop
• glottalization
• syllable structure
• acoustic phonetics