Re: THEORY: vowel harmony [was CHAT: Another NatLang i like]

At 2:17 pm -0700 24/6/99, JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:
>On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, dirk elzinga wrote:
[snip]
>> One of the most interesting harmony systems is found in Nez Perce, an
>> American Indian language spoken in the Northwest US. There are five
>> vowels in Nez Perce:
>>
>>         i       u
>>                 o
>>         ae      a
>>
>> These vowels belong to one of two sets: R={i, ae, u} and D={i, a, o}
>> such that if a morpheme contains any vowel of set D, then all vowels
>> within the harmonic domain (=word) are of set D. Otherwise, all vowels
>> are of set R. (Note that the intersection of the vowel sets is not
>> empty since [i] is found in both of them.) What is interesting about
>> this harmony pattern is that there is no obvious phonetic correlate to
>> harmony; that is, there doesn't seem to be any one feature which
>> triggers harmony (well, there really is, but it's a strange, twisted
>> tale, and I fear I'm testing your patience already :-).
>
>Not at all.  I'm guessing tense/lax, but given your warnings about
>twisted tales, it's probably something more complicated than that...
I'd guess it's to do with tense/lax also.

This type of vowel harmony is not uncommon in west African languages.  In
Igbo, e.g. we find a set of four tense vowels and a corresponding set of
four lax vowels:

   TENSE    i   E    o   u
     LAX    e   a    O   U

Thus, e.g. 'you' is either 'i' or 'e' depending upon the vowel harmony
required by the following word, thus:

  i siri  (you cooked)
  i sErE  (you quarrelled)
  i zuru  (you stole)
  i zoro  (you hid)
but
  e sere (you said)
  e sara (you washed)
  e zUrU (you bought)
  e zOrO (you got up)

[details from 'Vowel harmony in Igbo' - J.Carnochan in 'African Language
Studies I' (1960)  ]

Ray.