Re: Deriving vowel harmony diachronically (was Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?)

Hallo!

On Sat, 20 Jan 2007 21:06:43 -0600, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> How did you go about deriving vowel harmony? (Jörg, same question!) I
> have some ideas about it, but I'd like to see how others go about it.
OK.  Pre-Proto-Albic (Proto-Indo-Albic, or whatever you may want to
call it) had only three vowels: *a, *i and *u.  What happened is that
the vowel features [+open], [+front] and [+round] became autosegmental,
i.e. they bound to morphemes rather than to segments.  A further change
was that all roots acquired the feature [+open], independent of the
vowel they actually contained.  This probably was because the stress
was on the first root syllable.  So most roots have only [+open] attaching
to them (*a was the most frequent vowel in Pre-Proto-Albic), while some
have either [+open] and [+front] (those that had the root vowel *i)
or [+open] and [+round] (those that had the root vowel *u).  In most
affixes, the feature [+open] was lost where present, resulting in
vowel positions with *no* feature attaching to it.  There were thus six
possibilities:

1. [+open] only (mostly in roots)
2. [+front] only (mostly in affixes)
3. [+round] only (mostly in affixes)
4. [+open]+[+front] (mostly in roots)
5. [+open]+[+round] (mostly in roots)
6. no feature (affixes only)

Now, in Proto-Albic, the vowels are realized by attaching the
autosegmental vowel features to the vowel positions.  Where a morpheme
has two vowel positions, both vowels are realized the same because
the same features attach to them.  Thus, you can never have a root
which contains two different vowels.  The resulting vowels are
/a/ for type #1, /i/ for type #2, /u/ for type #3, /e/ for type #4
and /o/ for type #5 in the list above.  What about type #6?
This resulted in a vowel *borrowing all features from the nearest
vowel*, i.e., vowel harmony.

In the next stage, Old Albic, another process - umlaut - kicked in.
If a morpheme has only *one* vowel feature attached, this feature
spreads to the preceding morpheme.  This results in lowering high
vowels before /a/, fronting back vowels before /i/ and rounding
unround vowels before /u/.  This results in two new combinations
of features not occuring in Proto-Albic, and thus in front rounded
vowels:

7. [+open]+[+front]+[+round] > /2/
8. [+front]+[+round] > /y/

The result is the seven-vowel system of Old Albic.

Now to your scheme.

> The idea I have for a language I'm working on involves the construct
> state form of nouns.
> - Early in the development of the language, construct nouns end in /i\/.
> - Intervocalic /p/ came to be pronounced [p\] or [B].
> - Central vowels adjacent to /w/ or one of the fricative allophones
> of /p/ get rounded. (It might even be plausible for [p], [p:], and
> [m] to condition this rounding, but IMHO it seems a little more
> realistic for only [p\], [B], or [w] to condition it, because in
> those cases the lips are open somewhat, whereas with [p] and [m] the
> lips are completely closed.)
> - Rounded central vowels shift to back. These would lose their close
> association with fricative allophones of /p/.
> - Unrounded central vowels shift to front.
This makes perfect sense.

> The development of some example endings so far:
> (here k stands for any consonant besides /w/ or /p/)
> aki\	> aki
> eki\	> eki
> iki\	> iki
> @ki\	> eki
> i\ki\	> iki
> oki\	> oki
> uki\	> uki
>
> (here p stands for fricative /p/ or /w/)
> api\	> apu (or maybe Qpu; not sure if /a/ is subject to rounding)
> epi\	> epu
> ipi\	> ipu
> @pi\	> opu
> i\pi\	> upu
> opi\	> opu
> upi\	> upu
>
> - Because of the relative abundance of -uCu and -oCu (and possibly -
> QCu) forms, coupled with the relative scarcity of -uCi and -oCi forms
> (and nonexistence of -QCi forms), stems with back vowels and final
> consonants *other* than /p/ or /w/ will analogically adopt the -u
> ending.
I'm sorry but I can't follow.  Are /p/ and /w/ so overambundant that
they occur more frequently than all other consonants combined?
I'd expect the -oCi and -uCi forms to be more frequent than the
-oCu and -uCu forms.  Or does the abundance of /i\/ and /@/ have
to do with this?

> [...]
>
> I'm not sure what to do with it next. Quite possibly, -epu and -ipu
> will be changed by analogy to either -epi/-ipi or -opu/-upu. On the
> other hand, they might stay around; vowel harmony is sometimes not
> 100% consistent throughout a language. Also, the current endings
> remind me of the distribution of possessed forms in Ainu, which seem
> to show either inconsistent vowel harmony or inconsistent vowel
> *dis*harmony, depending on the analysis. In fact my system is
> directly inspired by Ainu. I wonder if the Ainu endings evolved in
> some similar way!
>
> Besides the final vowel, this also leaves an ablaut pattern, where
> some words with a front vowel internal to their non-construct form
> and a back vowel in their construct form, a pattern which could also
> be analogically extended or leveled.
>
> I welcome any comments on this scheme (especially as regards the
> plausibility of its steps), as well as anyone else's ideas on how
> vowel harmony could develop.
Apart from the point commented above where I couldn't follow because
your analogy seems to go uphill, it makes perfect sense to me.

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