> In the English language, this
> glottal stop (or rather plosive) occurs only at the beginning of words which
> begin with a vowel, like {a,e,i,o,u}, therefore it is not represented by a
> separate character.
Check out a word like "butter":
Subcontinental pronunciation: battar
North American pronunciation: baDar
British pronunciation: ba'ar (could be written nicely with a hamze in the
middle! But luckily we've all agreed to write it as "butter".
On the other hand, "color" and "colour" and many more examples exist side
by side in the world.
Persian words also have more than one spelling per word. The makers of
searchable databases/dictionaries will just have to make sure to
include all the variants.
> because it can also occur in the middle and at the end of words, it needs to
> be represented by a special character of its own.
Persian, like English writing system is not phonetic. The point here is
not to develop a transliteration system for Persian or to discuss whether
the spelling of Persian words is logical (it's not!).
There is a relationship in Persian between "yeh" and "hamze".
Check out the way you pronounce these words first in slow speech, then
again in fast speech: (try not to think about the writing)
sAat "hour"
xAen "traitor"
taqAod "retirement"
moallem "teacher"
zaif "weak"
pambei "of cotton"
Now this group:
pAin "below"
Aine "mirror"
tanhAi "loneliness"
masnui "artificial"
And this group:
lAeq "worthy"
qAeb" absent
hqAeq "truths"
(I didn't make these up. THey're standard in this sort of discussion.)
Depending on your dialect and whether you're saying them fast or slow,
you'll get different results, sometimes a /y/="yeh", or "/'/=glottal stop,
or just a brief pause. And there are even sub-categories of these three.
> used to represent a glottal stop (or plosive) at all, but by a centuries old
> convention it is used to represent the Farsi <ezafeh>, when it follows the
> letter <heh>. That convention has served the language adequately for
> centuries, and one does not simply change a centuries old convention by an
> arbitrary decision.
Absolutely. It is a done deal.
---
> the same in Farsi and Arabic. For example, in Farsi we use a shape
> <dandaneh> for <hamza> in <pangu'an> which would be a shape like <vav>
> if we had used the Arabic style.
I think that (nicely) reflects that Persian has borrowed the word from
French and Arabic from English which have 2 completely different
pronunciations.
Well, I hope the silent lurkers are enjoying the digressions. Please
forgive but I'm extremely frustrated that I can't type certain
words that have existed in a certain writing system for so many hundreds
of years...
-Connie
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