Re: CHAT: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)

Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:

>Regarding the Turkish back-unrounded sound, written as {dotless-i}, I'm
>finding its existence rather odd; I thought languages with front rounded
>vowels (which Turkish has - {ö} and {ü}) wouldn't generally have back
>unrounded too. I've generally held the belief that, typologically speaking,
>the front-rounded and back-unrounded axes are mutually exclusive; perhaps
>I've misunderstood something there...
>
>As described, the Turkish vowel system, on the surface, has four closed
>vowels: [i], [y], [M], [u] (it has [u], right?). That seems rather
>overloaded to me; is it really correct?>
 Overloaded maybe; but it's totally symmetrical, which has to do with the
V-harmony system.  Each vowel has a rounded/unrounded version, so i/ü, e/ö,
u/dotless i, o/a.  In somewhat old-fashioned generative terms, the system
can be described with just 3 features:  front, high, round (plus and minus).
While i/ü and e/ö do indeed correspond exactly in terms of place of
articulation, u/i- and o/a probably do not (alas I've never heard Turkish)--
that could be because, while front rounded V are "highly marked" (rare in
universal terms), back unrounded V are even moreso (much rarer universally).
But in terms of Turkish V-harmony, u/i- and o/a are partners.

My understanding is that dotless i is [barred i]; perhaps it wobbles between
that and unr. [u].

In other languages with V-harmony, what is the unrounded counterpart of /u/?


>And more about back-unrounded vowels, and their position in Westerners'
>phonetic knowledge: English just happens to have two back-unrounded vowel
>phonemes, /V/ and /Q/, but somehow English language literature doesn't seem
>to admit to that very often, and speaks of back-unroundeds as if they were
>something very foreign. What's with that? The Latin alphabet clouding
>thoughts?
Again in generative terms (as I understand them, and not too well at that),
English would require: front, back, high, low, tense.  The feature {round}
is present, but redundantly/phonetically: +fr is -ro, +back is +ro.  Central
vowels [-fr, -ba]  and +Low V [æ, a, A] are redundantly (by definition) -ro.
Hope this makes sense; draw a table and fill it in with +/- marks.  I think
OT handles the problem a little better, in that unrounded Front V and Low V,
vs. rounded Back V, would be the norms-- any V that doesn't fit requires
some Constraint or other to be violated (rounded front, or unround back--
which accords with intuition/universals, that these are somehow "odd").