Re: Consonant Harmony?
| From: | dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, February 17, 2000, 19:01 |
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Nicole:
A lot of people have already weighed in with the example of
nasal harmony in Guarani, but there are other kinds of
consonantal harmony which haven't been mentioned.
In some Semitic languages (various dialects of Arabic and
Berber) there is spreading of a feature variously referred to as
"emphatic", "pharyngealization", "laryngealization" (I suppose
the label depends on the analyst's theoretical persuasion as
much as the concrete instantiation in the dialect under study);
this feature spreads to all of the coronal consonants within a
certain span (determined either morphologically or
phonologically; I don't remember which). This certainly
qualifies as harmony in the sense that I think you're asking
about.
Additionally, there are Native American languages which show
sibilant harmony; these include Athabaskan (Navajo and
relations) and Chumash (if memory serves). In these languages,
sibilant consonants [s, S, ts, tS] must agree in place of
articulation. The Navajo case isn't particularly compelling as
Harmony (with a captial H), but serves to illustrate the point.
There are two prefixes in the verbal prefix collection which
alternate between [si-] and [Si-]; these are s/Si- 'perfective',
and s/Si- '1s'. If a Navajo root contains an alveolar sibilant
[s, ts, etc], the prefixes match its place and are realized as
[s(i)]. If the root contains an alveopalatal sibilant [S, s] the
prefixes match that and are realized as [S(i)]. Volume 2 of the
series Phonetics and Phonology, published by Academic Press,
contains an article on this kind of sibilant harmony. It's
pretty dense, theoretically speaking, but there's data in it
which might give you a better idea of the phenomenon.
There is also the well-known child language phenomenon where
consonants will all match up within a word, so that adult [dag]
'dog' becomes child [gag]. This has also been referred to as
consonant harmony.
In Nootka and other Northwest coast languages, there are certain
ways of speaking when referring to animals and persons with
disabilities/deformaties. These are used primarily in stories to
help identify characters and to give some idea of personality
traits. The modern analog is the Warner Bros character Tweety
Bird who turns coronal and velar consonants into [t]: "I tawt I
taw a putty tat." In many cases the speech alteration involves
consonant harmony of this kind. For example, when Deer speaks in
Nootka, all sibilants become laterals. When small birds speak,
all sibilants become alveopalatal, etc. This is another kind of
harmony you could look into. There's a famous paper by Edward
Sapir which gives an exhaustive list of these kinds of speech
modifications; it's called "Abnormal Speech Types in Nootka" and
can be found in the volume of Collected Writings edited by David
Mandelbaum.
I'm sorry I'm so short on precise examples, but those are some
ideas of other kinds of consonant harmony which haven't been
mentioned yet.
Happy hunting!
Dirk
On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, nicole perrin wrote:
> I was toying with the idea of vowel harmony in a new lang, but I never
> really liked it as a trait, so I got curious. Are there any natlangs
> that use "consonant harmony?" For example, in a particular word, all
> the consonants must be voiced? Or labial? Or fricatives? I don't know
> which distinction I would choose (voicing, POA, quality, etc.), but do
> natlangs do this at all?
>
> Nicole
> --
> nicole.eap@snet.net
>
http://nicole.conlang.org
> --
> my fear is greater than my faith
> but i walk the missionary way
>