Re: Umlaut, Vowel Harmony etc

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 09:03:00 +0000, Chris Bates
<chris.maths_student@...> wrote:

>Can anyone tell me how changes towards such a system work in practice? I
>understand that vowels influence neighbouring vowels, but for instance
>is it usually progressive or regressive, and how does it stop? I mean,
>if for instance one vowel influences a neighbouring vowel to becoming
>rounded, and then that vowel does the same, then roundedness would
>spread throughout the language before too long, so the application of
>such rules must be limited somehow since we don't find any languages
>with all rounded vowels, or all high vowels, etc that have taken harmony
>right to the extreme.
Kazakh has pretty extreme vowel harmony rules (which are broken umpteen
ways by all the Arabic and Russian borrowings.

The vowels are clumped into two groups: front and back.
The front vowel ("thin" vowels in Kz.) group are:
/& e 1 y 2/, and /i/ (but it can be retained in an otherwise back-vowel
word.
The back vowel ("fat" vowels) group are:
/A a o/, /u/ does double duty in the same way as /i/, and there's another
vowel I can't even begin to place on the IPA/CXS charts!  It's halfway
between /O/ and /u/, *very* short, and the epiglottis moves up in the
throat when you say it properly.

Anyway, words have either all front vowels or all back vowels, and this
helps to account for the 6 different plural endings (front and back, with
three different forms of each, used according to what the final phoneme of
the word is (one for voiced consonants, one for unvoiced, one for vowels).

Kyrgyz is even worse.  It has _twelve_ plural endings!

I love Central Asian Turkic languages!  They've got some delightfully
vicious characteristics! :)

As to how some bizarre system like this originates in the first place, I'm
as stumped as you are.

I do have a hypothesis based on the Turkic language family that the more
isolated a language, and the less contact it has with other languages, the
more complex, structured and regular its character (grammar, syntax,
phonemic morphology etc).  You go from Kyrgyz (mountain-dwelling
traditionally-nomadic culture) to Kazakh (steppe nomads on horseback,
considered "primitive" and "uncivilised" by the Uzbeks), to Uighur, spoken
by a sedentary trading culture and only has the front/back distinction, to
Uzbek and (eventually) Turkish, which have abandoned the idea altogether.
Then you have something like English, which has been influenced by so many
different languages, and has an almost vestigial case system, if it has one
at all.

Take a look at almost any "proto-" lang.  Almost invariably they are highly
structured and regular.  IMO, it's interaction with other langs that bends
pre-existing structure in a lang.  Eventually, the structure collapses, or
becomes filled with so many exceptions to the rules that the rules
themselves become basically worthless (again, see English :) )

What do you people think?

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