Re: Hinession Dialect Continuums

From: "Andreas Johansson" <andjo@...>

> I don't off-hand think of any language I know to have /ht/, but I used to
think
> that a Persian girl I know pronounced the word "Ohm" very odd, till I
realized
> she was simply pronouncing it as written: [o:hm]. Persian, at least in
Roman
> transliteration, does seem to have odd clusters in h-; I'm thinking of
names
> like "Shahrazad" or "Pehlevi".
/ht/ can be found in some Native American languages, at least Algonquian
ones. Icelandic realizes voiceless stops as preaspirated when doubled, IIRC.

Also, Farsi, which does not allow two initial consonants, does have cases of
clusters of three medial consonants, which result from a compound of two
words -- and the name Shahrzad is such a case; it means "daughter of the
city". Adjectives usually follow nouns in modern Persian, a result of Arabic
influence, so compounds of native words are pre-Islamic in origin.

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