Re: Interesting vowel harmony system from Australia

Trebor wrote:

<<And what about other langs (nat or
con) with the four genders masculine, feminine, vegetable, and neuter (or
something similar, at least)?>>

I can think of another Australian language.   ;)   Dyirbal is famous for its
"genders": masculine, feminine, plants, and then poisonous plants.   Is that
right?

<<I googled for 'jingulu' to see if there was any more information on it
online, and found this very interesting paper discussing vowel harmony in
Jingulu: <
http://eprint.uq.edu.au/archive/00000444/01/rpvowel.pdf> .
Do any conlangs have a system like this?>>

This sentence strikes me as odd: "This
simply follows a standard Australianist tradition of minimally specifying
the underlying contrasts for vowels, motivated by the fact that in three
vowel systems, great surface variation in the realisation of vowels is
found."   Perhaps if the actual surface variation were noted, a different
system
would arise.

Anyway, this vowel harmony system seems rather simple.   Kind of reminds me
of the consonant harmony system in an Amerind language that I've seen twice,
and whose name I've twice forgotten.   In that language, a word that has [S]
will
change all /s/'s to the left to [S].   (I think it goes the other way, too.)
 I believe the
glottal consonants [?] and [h] block the spreading, though.

Anyway, nowhere in this paper is it mentioned that the suffixes that trigger
harmony are comprised *solely* of high vowels.   There are some high vowel
suffixes that don't trigger harmony, but there are no disharmonic suffixes
which
do, even those that begin with a high vowel.   Oh, but this paper's going in
a
different direction.   I'll refrain from commenting for the moment.

[Having now read the whole article...]

Wow... This whole article depends on mounds and mounds of theoretical
assumptions
I am either unconvinced by or disagree wtih.   I think I'll say no more about
it.

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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