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

>At 5:45 pm +0200 27/6/99, Kristian Jensen wrote:
>>Raymond Brown wrote:
>>-----<snip>-----
>>>Maybe all I should've written was: "How is that different from nasal
>>>spread?"
>>
>>That's essentially what I meant to say as well. :-)
>
>[snip]
>>>
>>>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.
>>
>>I think this also depends on how narrowly one wants to transcribe
>>languages. In English for instance, words like "keel" and "cool" are
>>normally phonemically transcribed in the IPA as /kil/ and /kul/,
>[etc snipped]
>
>I had a feeling you might answer like that  :-)
>
>>
>>Again, how is that different from nasal spread?
>
>Dunno - once thought I did     :=(
>
>Matt?

Well, I had basically dropped out of this thread, but since I've been
called by name, I'll drop back in again.  Forgive me if I say anything
incoherent: I've been celebrating the beginning of summer by getting
sloshed on Sangria, and my head is a little light...

When I originally invoked the notion of nasal spread, I meant the
spread of nasalisation from a nasal consonant to the surrounding
vowels.  In Mixtec, for example, when a word begins with a nasal
consonant, all of the following vowels in the word will be nasalised,
unless there's a non-nasal, non-glottal consonant somewhere in the
word, in which case that consonant will block further spreading.
(We have a less interesting kind of nasal spread in English, where
a vowel becomes nasalised if followed by a syllable-final nasal
consonant.)

What I was asking for (with a certain dubious tone in my voice) was
a language with a *phonemic* contrast between oral and nasal vowels,
in which all of the vowels in a word must be either oral or nasal.
In such a language, /katima/ and /ka~ti~ma~/ would be possible words,
but /kati~ma/, /ka~tima~/, /katima~/, etc., would not be possible
words.  That, as I see it, would be an example of nasal vowel harmony,
and would be quite a different phenomenon from nasal spread, which
involves the interaction of a nasal consonant and an adjacent vowel
(or vowels).

Matt.

------------------------------------
Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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