Re: Interesting vowel harmony system from Australia

From:    william drewery <will65610@...>
> Consonant harmony! Wow, I've never heard of that
> before. I've heard of nasal harmony before, but
> figured that was as far as it went. At on time I had
> planned a conlang in which all consonants within a
> word had to be of the same family, such as all
> ejective or all voiced. But dropped it as too
> unnatural.
Some kinds of consonant harmonies are more unnatural than others.
I'd suggest you look at Gunnar Hansson's recent dissertation on the
topic.  The first part is a broad typological survey of consonant
harmony, and the second an optimality theoretic analysis thereof.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
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Chicago, IL 60637