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

At 11:29 pm +0200 25/6/99, Kristian Jensen wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>>
>>That, surely, is the nasal *spread* that Matt was referring to?
>>
>>I could see no examples of vowel harmony in any of the examples.
Sorry - I should've said, I guess, _mere_ vowel harmony.

[....]
>
>Well, just because none of the examples quoted had affixes to
>demonstrate that, it does not mean that there isn't a harmonizing
>feature.
Obviously.

[....]
>>The nasalization affects _consonants_ also.  It seems to me we a feature o=
f
>>nasality which spreads across a domain that effects both vowels and
>>consonants (even tho some consonants 'resist' it), i.e. 'nasal spread'.
>
>
>Now I'm confused. Doesn't spreading and vowel harmony have a lot to
>do with each other? The reason why nasalization spreads to consonants
>as well is because nasality is a feature that can indeed be easily
>applied to consonants.  Other vowel features that are harmonized like
>front/back or roundness are not that easily applied (if at all like
>front/back) to consonants.
So can features like roundness & unroundness.  Some languages have
dental/alveolar sounds and/or velar sounds with & without lip-rounding.
Both Russian (and other Slav langs) as well the Gaelic langs show that
consonants can have fronting & non-fronting (palatalized & unpalatalized,
'slender' & 'broad') features as well as  vowels.

Examples of rounding and of fronting speading across whole syllables are
legionary.  I believe there are some languages where such features spread
across broader domains, tho I don't have notes to hand.

>In other words, vowel features like
>front/back 'spreads' less easily across vowels in a morpheme than
>nasality. So front/back harmony is much like saying 'front/back
>spreading, just as well as nasal harmony is much like saying 'nasal
>spreading'.
Yes, yes - they both spread; and harmonizing is involved in both features.
But I've always understood vowel harmony to be just that: _vowel_ harmony.
Any effects on intervening consonants are, as I understand it, minor.   The
harmonizing is certainly spread over a domain, usually roughly equal to a
'word', but essentially is a harmonizing of vowels.

I assumed when Matt wrote:
"Really?  I know of languages with nasal *spread* (Mixtec, for example),
"but I've never heard of a language with nasal *harmony*.  Examples?"

=2E..that he was asking for similar examples of nasal vowel harmony.

The sort of features described for Desano have been familiar to me for many
years.  I assumed Matt would be aware of this and that that was what he
meant by 'nasal spread'?  What else would it mean?

Maybe all I should've written was: "How is that different from nasal spread?=
"

>
>_Desano_
>     suprasegmental tier   [+nasal]
>                            /|  \
>     segmental tier         johso -> [Jo~hso~] 'kind of bird'
>
>_Mongolian_
>     suprasegmental tier   [-back]
>                             / | \
>     segmental tier         kobagun -> [k=F8begyn] 'boy, son'
>
>(Mongolian example courtesy of "An Introduction to Phonology" by
>Francis Katamba)
>
>So from a multi-tier perspective, IMHO, there isn't much difference
>between the front/back vowel harmony (or spreading) from nasal
>harmony (or spreading).
Maybe not much - but in the first example the initial _consonant_ is
changed to harmonize.  I see no evidence in the example above of a fronting
or palatalization of any of the Mongolian consonants, tho certainly all the
consonants are capable of being so modified.
---------------------------------------------------------------
At 5:07 pm -0500 25/6/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
>> The nasalization affects _consonants_ also.  It seems to me we a feature =
of
>> nasality which spreads across a domain that effects both vowels and
>> consonants (even tho some consonants 'resist' it), i.e. 'nasal spread'.
>
>So, then, you'd define them as:
>
>harmony: affecting only vowels
>spread: affecting all phonemes
vowel harmony - affecting only vowels

I understand that examples of consonant harmony do occur - but books seem
vague on this.

I assumed that when Matt talked of 'nasal spread' he did mean that.  Guess
I should've waited for Matt to reply first  :)

Maybe this is just a matter of semantics.
------------------------------------------------------------------
At 1:32 pm -0600 25/6/99, dirk elzinga wrote:
=2E....
>
>I then went on to describe the harmony system of Nez Perce, where the
>harmonizing sets don't seem to share much in the way of phonetic
>similarity, making the harmonizing feature rather unobvious. These sets
>are:
>
>        R =3D {i, ae, u}
>        D =3D {i, a, o}
>
[snip]
>
>Several people guessed that tense/lax might be the harmonizing feature,
>and this is indeed my analysis of it, although I use the somewhat
>different feature of tongue root retraction rather than "lax", since
>"lax" implies the absence of a tensing gesture, while what is happening
>in Nez Perce is an active retraction of the tongue root.
Yep - I agree, that is a better analysis.  When I was writing about Igbo
vowel harmony, I was a little unhappy about the lax/tense description.
Retracted/non-retracted is, I think, what this sort of vowel harmony is
about.

[snip]
>
>Whew! That's a lot of phonology. Gotta luv it!
I do! I do!

Ray.