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Download or read book Towards Proto-Persian written by Daniel A. Rees and published by ProQuest. This book was released on 2008 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intent of the present course of inquiry is to examine historical Persian phonology in light of advances in Optimality Theory (OT) as applied to language change and variation, and in doing so to present a historical reconstruction of Proto-Modern-Persian (henceforth Proto-Persian). The phonemic inventories and synchronic phonological processes observed in the modern dialects of Persian bear witness to a number of changes accounted for within the framework of OT. Taking into account previous literature on pre-Modern Persian diachronic change, colloquial speech from various speakers of the three principal Modern Persian dialects of Iranian, Dari and Tajik, is analyzed and a comparative reconstruction is generated, positing proto-forms as predecessors to attested phonemes based on patterns of predictability in the data. OT unifies the phonological account of both variation and change by tying all processes to the physiological notions of ease of articulation and parsing, bolstering the claim that sound change at the lexical level is based on gesture economy at the articulatory level. As a direct result of this reconstruction, it is quantifiably demonstrated that the Afghan dialect of Persian, Dari, is not only the most conservative of the three major dialects, but it is merely a slightly modified version of what will be labeled Proto-Persian.