Re: a few questions

From:    John Cowan <cowan@...>
> Trebor Jung scripsit:
> > How did Estonian lose vowel harmony? And how does vowel harmony appear
> > in a language at all?
>
> Here's another question: is there any living language in which
> vowol harmono is actually still operating?  In Turkish and Finnish, at
> least, borrowings routinely violate it.
There have to be some in the former Soviet Union. Stalin apparently
once sent out an _ukaz_ instructing all publishing houses that
Russian words not undergo vowel harmony processes in any written
publications, even those not in Russian. This implies that some
*were* showing vowel-harmony, and since these were very recent loans,
they must have been active features of those languages.

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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
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