Hiatus of Vowels and Resolving Them in Central Kurdish

Abstract

In this article, the authors have studied the phenomenon of hiatus of vowels and some approaches to resolve it in central Kurdish through descriptive-analytical method and have analyzed collected data in the framework of optimality theory. Analyzing the data which consists of about 80 simple, morphological, and compound words, shows that the most commonly used method used by central Kurdish speakers for this purpose is the glide formation process. In addition to glide formation, the vowel deletion process is only used in cases where two short vowels are located in the vicinity, due to the unauthorized glide formation -out of the open vowels. The analysis of the collected data for this study, based on the principles governing optimal phonological theory, shows that in central Kurdish, because there is no syllable without an onset the hiatus is not permitted and speakers of central Kurdish use glide formation and deletion processes to resolve hiatus of vowels. Finally, the constraints governing glide formation are determined as * OCP "IDENT-F (ROUND)" IDENT and the restrictions governing deletion are set to * OCP, GF (+ LOW), M.MAX "IDENT and Ranked.

Keywords

• hiatus
• glide formation
• shortening
• insertion
• deletion
• central kurdish
• optimality