Dialectal layers in West Iranian: a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Approach to Linguistic Relationships
Table 3: Posterior component distributions for select sound changes (we exclude components with probability mass under .05 for visual clarity)
['etymon', 'sound', 'reflex', '[ITALIC] p( [ITALIC] k=1)', '[ITALIC] p( [ITALIC] k=2)', '[ITALIC] p( [ITALIC] k=3)', '[ITALIC] p( [ITALIC] k=4)', '[ITALIC] p( [ITALIC] k=5)', '[ITALIC] p( [ITALIC] k=6)']
We find that Elfenbein1963’s (Elfenbein1963) identification of Marw Balochi burz as a Southwest Iranian loan is indeed highly probable. *u- in uaj́ra- ‘mace, club’. We see that change to b- shows a distribution similar to those of the prototypically Southwest Iranian sound changes discussed above, while change to g- and γ- shows Northwest Iranian behavior. Similarly, we find that change to s in *kaćiapa- ‘turtle/tortoise’ patterns with canonically Northwest Iranian changes ; hence, there is no strong reason to consider Balochi kāsib/kasīp a loan, as assumed by Korn2005, since it patterns with many other typically Balochi features. Finally, changes concerning the etymon *uafra- ‘snow’ suggest a Northwest Iranian origin for the presence of w- and a Southwest Iranian origin for metathesis in the form; hence, Gazi värf is probably a genuine Mischform, pace EilersSchapka1978, stemming perhaps from a scenario where speakers in contact with a neighboring dialect exhibiting metathesis imposed this sound change on their inherited reflex of *uafra-.