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

"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
> In Turkish, e.g. many suffixes have a vowel harmony whereby the vowel in
> the suffix may be /u/, /y/, /|/ or /u/ (where /|/ is the high, back
> unrounded vowel written as an undotted i in Turkish).  But the vowels
> certainly have separate phonemic status in the language.
Well, Turkish isn't what I was talking about.  What I meant was if the
vowel forms cause allophones in the consonants, as with, say,
roundedness, then why call the vowel phones phonemes, but the consonant
phones allophones?

For that matter, in Turkish, do all the vowels of a word have to be the
same backness?  Can you have roots that combine front and back vowels?
If not, then perhaps it could be analyzed as a word-level feature on the
whole word, either [+front] or [+back] word.  For that matter, in my
vowel-harmony conlang, I considered an orthography wherein sets of
vowel-harmony variants (for instance, if it were Turkish, /u/ and /y/)
would be indicated by the same letter, and then at the beginning of the
word, there would be a symbol that would indicate [+front] or [+back]
(or rather, in the case of that conlang, IIRC, [+high], [+mid], [+low]

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