Hiatus Resolution Strategies in Old Persian

Jam, Bashir

doi:10.22059/jolr.2025.398484.666925

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Bashir Jam

Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of English, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran.

https://doi.org/10.22059/jolr.2025.398484.666925

Abstract

Hiatus is a situation in which there is no consonant between the nuclei of two adjacent syllables. It occurs when the left syllable lacks a coda and the right one lacks an onset. The present research aimed at analyzing how hiatus occurs in Old Persian and the strategies used to resolve it. The old Persian cuneiform is a syllabary consisting of 36 graphemes, of which 22 represent a sequence of a consonant and the vowel /a/. According to the findings of this research, if this vowel is followed by one of the three vowels /i/ (I), /u/ (u), and /A/ (A) in a word, then there occurs hiatus in the underlying representation. In this research which is conducted within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004) it is discussed that hiatus in Old Persian is resolved using intervocalic consonant insertion, the deletion of vowel /a/ as well as a combination of them both. In so doing, the constraints and their rankings that cause all these hiatus resolving strategies in Old Persian are introduced. It is worth mentioning that based on an Old Persian pronunciation rule, in case the vowel letter A is the first letter of a word, it represents the vowel /a/ in some words and the vowel /A/ in some other words. However, if it is not the first letter of a word, then it only represents the vowel /A/. As converting this rule to an OT constraint required accesses to the graphematical information of Old Persian cuneiform and that it could not be explained using an analysis that was solely phonological, an orthographic constraint with access to the graphematical information was formalized. The results of the present paper explain some important and new facts regarding Old Persian syllabary, hiatus and its resolution strategies in this ancient language.

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Hiatus Resolution Strategies in Old Persian

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Volume 16, Issue 1 - Serial Number 30November 2025Pages 77-97

Volume 16, Issue 1 - Serial Number 30
November 2025
Pages 77-97