Gemination in Persian

There are a number of words with a geminated consonant in Persian. Historically, many of these geminates are the result of assimilation of two neighboring consonants with articulatory similarities. There are others, especially in poetry, which are connected with contexts in which a phonetically or phonologically historical long vowel precedes a consonant. Having been shortened, this long vowel causes the following consonant to become geminated. Unaware of the underlying causes of such gemination processes, classical specialists of prosody and rhetoric have recommended such geminated words to be avoided when possible. The present paper is an attempt to explicate the underlying causes of these geminations in Persian. Moreover, it deals with Arabic geminate borrowings and their evolution in Persian. Reference is finally made to the analogical type of gemination.