Re: Consonant harmony (and intro)

Welcome, Kate. But forget the Insular Celtic languages as far as consonant
harmony is concerned - they are red herrings in this thread   :)

On Monday, July 18, 2005, at 04:20 , Joe wrote:

> Andrew Patterson wrote:
>
>> Welsh, soft and hard mutation. Don't ask me to explain, though I don't
>> speak it 'cos I'm from South Wales.
>>
>>
>
> Actually, Welsh doesn't have a hard mutation.  It has a soft, an
> aspirated, and a nasal mutation.
True.

> And I'm not sure you could call it consonant harmony, since it's
> grammatical, not phonetic.
True - it is not consonant harmony by any stretch of the imagination.
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On Monday, July 18, 2005, at 04:14 , Keith Gaughan wrote:
[snip]
> I don't think mutation or lenition in any of the Insular Celtic
> languages could be considered consonant harmony as they occur on
> word/morpheme boundaries and are triggered by consonants
or final _vowels_ in the case of lenition/ soft mutation.

> that used to exist but have since been lost.
Quite so - and even when the sounds were there, it was a matter of
_assimilation_, i.e. one sound affecting its neighbor. This is not
consonant harmony as Kate, Henrik & Wayne - correctly IMO - understood the
term.

And in the modern languages it is conditioned _grammatically_, as Joe says,
  and has nothing to do with phonological environment, whether consonants
or vowels.

Ray
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