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Re: NATLANG: Vowel harmony rules?

From:Tamas Racsko <tracsko@...>
Date:Sunday, June 20, 2004, 6:52
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.)