Re: NATLANG: Vowel harmony rules?

On 15 Jun 2004 Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@NC...> wrote:

> (Bonus points for the rules for other natlangs)
  I have found examples of vowel harmony outside the Ural-Altaic
group.

  According these sources Niger-Congoan* and Nile-Saharan*
languages shows a harmony according to the distinction between
vowels with advanced -- non-advanced tongue root.

  (* I do not know the correct English names of these language
groups, but I hope the denominations I used are intelligible,
though.)

  E.g. Akan (a Kwa language) has ten vowels that form 5 pairs (in X-
SAMPA, advanced [+adv] comes first, non-advanced [-adv] comes
last): /3/ ~ /a/, /e/ ~ /E/, /o/ ~ /O/, /i/ ~ /I/, /u/ ~ /U/. Since
root tongue position accompanies with open - close and tense - lax
contrast, we could talk about "open-close" or "tense-lax" harmony
as weel but radiograms revealed that the tongue root position is
the primary.

  In these languages morphemes contain either only advanced or only
non-advanced vowels. The vowel harmony works across morpheme
boundaries, too: the dependent morphemes which comes together e.g.
with a verb show harmonic [+adv] and [-adv] alternation. This true
not only for the affixes but also for other dependent words, e.g.
for personal pronouns.

  An Akan example: /fi/ 'to leave' -> /mi fi/ 'I leave/ but /fI/
'to vomit' -> /mI fI/ 'I vomit'. (1sg personal pronoun has a form
/mi/ for [+adv] verbs and a form /mI/ for [-adv] ones.)

  I have found an Igbo (another Kwa language) example in another
source: /si_L/ 'to cook' -> /o si_Lri_L/ '(s)he cooked' but /sI_L/
'to tell' -> /O sI_LrI_L/ '(s)he told'. (Both 3rd personal pronoun
and past tense marker have harmonic variants for [+adv] and [-adv]
verbal roots. N.B. /_L/ denotes low pitch.)

  (I just cited my sources, therefore I do not know further details
about this.)