Re: Consonant Harmony?

Muke Tever wrote:


>From: "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>
>>I began to wonder if there were conlangs with consonant harmony.
>> (I suppose some of the examples reminded me of some examples
>> of palatal harmony I'd studied last year.) None of my languages
>> have it, and I've never heard of any.  How about it? Are
>> there any?
(snip)

>I imagine consonant disharmony would be a lot more common.  "Root
>constraints" like those seen in Semitic or PIE have to come from
somewhere... >but I don't know if there are any live examples offhand...

I thought of that too.  An old study of the reconstructed Austronesian
vocabulary (Dempwolff's 2000-plus items) showed some similar contraints--
hardly any cases of final-syl CVC (out of basic CVCVC forms) where both C
were identical or differed only as to voicing.  Mergers and other changes
obscure this in the daughter langs., but it's still noticeable.  One
subfamily I'm interested in seems to have developed a constraint against
_same POV_ at least in cases of ...t-s#, ...s-t# and ...d-r# among others.

Langmaker generated a lot of identical ...C-C# forms for Kash, but I
generally avoid using them, since I "know" the proto-language didn't allow
them......

Sort-of-harmony-- IIRC there are S.Amer.languages (Yanomami springs to
mind)where the entire word is nasalized if there's a nasal anywhere in it.
That seems more like the Khmer register system, though it's more obvious
from a phonological POV.