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

At 3:58 pm -0500 29/6/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
......
>> But then they're not taking the "classical
>> phonematist" approach.
>
>Of course, that's a fairly radical interpretation.
Maybe - but alternative ideas to the phonemic theory have been around for
some time.  Firth put forward his ideas of prosodic phonology when he was
Professor of General Linguistics in the University of London in 1944 to
1956.

I think it is as well occasionally to remind ourselves that phonemes are
just a theoretical abstraction and not 'fundamental realities' built into
the fabric of the universe, so to speak, as some people sometimes give the
impression.  The theory works quite well in many respects, but when it
comes to denoting affixes in a language like Turkish or Hungarian, then
phonemic notation is not so good IMO.  And, indeed, some sort of
supersegmental approach better explains vowel harmony as Kristian has
recently shown.

I tend to be a bit 'magpie-ish' with these different phonological theories
and pick & choose the bits & pieces I like or which seem most useful to me.

Ray.