Re: Question about vowel harmono

At 7:28 am -0600 3/5/01, dirk elzinga wrote:
>On Wed, 2 May 2001, Patrick Dunn wrote:
>
>> Are there any other languages that use vowel harmony?
>
>Many languages of Africa have vowel harmony based on the
>relative advancement or retraction of the tongue root. Nez Perce
>also has this kind of harmony, as does Chukchi. In Nez Perce,
>the harmonic sets are:
>        dominant      recessive
>
>        i             i      u
>               o
>               a      &
>
>If a word contains a morpheme with a vowel belonging to
>"dominant" set, all of the vowels of that word will be from this
>set; otherwise, all vowels of a word belong to the recessive
>set.
Yes, Igbo has a similar system of vowel harmony which, according to
Carnochan ('Vowel Harmony in Igbo', 1960) is [SAMPA notatio]:

   dominant             recessive
i       u                e     8
  E     o                  a   O

[snip]

Notice that /i/ belongs to both sets; there are morphemes
>containing dominant /i/ which trigger harmony. Here is a near
>minimal pair illustrating how this works:
>
>        ci:c     'paternal aunt'
>        ci:ca?   'paternal aunt-vocative'
>        na?ci:c  'my paternal aunt'
>
>        ?i:c     'mother'
>        ?i:c&?   'mother-vocative'
>        n&?i:c   'my mother'
>
>The stem 'paternal aunt' is a harmony-controlling stem, shown by
>the dominant /a/ of the affixes. The stem 'mother' on the other
>hand, is not, as shown by the recessive /&/ of the affixes.
>
>I think it's a nifty system.
Indeed - and it applies to all affixes & not just suffixes as in the
FinnoUgric & Turkic systems.

Ray.

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