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

On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, dirk elzinga wrote:

> I wouldn't put any money on it if I were you. It has already been noted
> in recent discussions that the most basic contrast in vowels is one of
> height (thus some have argued that Kabardian really has only two vowels:
> <schwa> and [a]; I personally find the arguments compelling). Height
> harmony would neutralize this very basic kind of contrast by requiring
> all vowels within a harmonic domain to be of the same height. As far as
> I know, this situation does not exist in natural languages. Features
> which do trigger harmony include: fronting/backing, rounding, or tongue
> root advancement/retraction. Height is sometimes involved in harmony;
> there are systems where vowels harmonize for some feature (usually
> rounding) iff they are of like height--Yawelmani/Yowlumni is like
> this--but height contrasts are never neutralized in such a system.
Aren't there languages with height dissimilation, such that all the
vowels in a word must be either mid or non-mid?  E.g., /e/ and /o/ can
co-occur, as can /a/, /i/, and /u/, but /e/ cannot co-occur with
/i/, for example.  I seem to remember that there are such languages.
Could that be considered a sort of vowel harmony?

> 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...

Matt.