Bakhtiari studies

About this book

"Bakhtiari, a Southwestern Iranian language in the Luri language continuum, is spoken by over a million people in the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Almost a century after Lorimer's (1922) publication on the phonology of Bakhtiari, the present study re-examines this topic in the light of contemporary linguistics, the study of lexicon and texts, and crucially, native speaker intuition. This new research clarifies some of the important questions left by Lorimer and in doing so, leads to surprising insights into the basic structure of the system, which shows some fundamental divergences from Middle and New Persian, and even from the other Luri languages. The first part of the book situates the language within its larger geographic and genetic context, defines the language and its varieties, and provides a summary of research on the language. The second section, which constitutes the core of the study, is devoted to an in-depth analysis of the phonological system, including segmental phonology (inventory, contrast, allophonic processes, and distribution), syllable structure and an array of morphophonological processes, as well as stress and intonation. The final three sections of the book comprise an interlinearized Bakhtari folktale, tables of verb paradigms, and a semantically organized lexicon containing 1500 items."--Page 4 of cover.