Re: Non-Finno-Ugric/Turkish vowel harmony systems and the evolution thereof.

Jeff wrote:

<<ATR is Advanced Tongue Root ??? (my memory for terms and acronyms is not so
good)>>

Yeah, that's right.   So [i] is [+ATR], while [I] is [-ATR]; [e] is plus, [E] 
is minus; [o] is plus, [O] is minus, etc.   It's the same as saying something 
is lax or tense, only I guess this system is more precise?

<<I remember seeing it. I was too confused to comment. IIRC you had to use
letters in some weird fashion in order to make all the distinctions. Which
language was that? Maybe feurieux could search the archives.>>

The language is Zhyler [ZY.'ler].   And since I had 21 or so underrepresented 
vowels, I obviously couldn't just used capitalized vowels to represent them, 
'cause English only has 5 orthographic vowel.   So instead, I included 
consonants, which kind of gave you hints (e.g., <F> was an alternation 
between /i/ and /e/, both of which are *F*ront vowels).   I mean, I had to do 
something.   There's an example of Zhyler in my sig.

Jesse wrote:

<<I did too read it, and I even commented on it.  Not that I have the time
to read or comment on much these days . . .>>

No, I remember that, and the thing was, your question (how you couldn't figu
re out how the system came to be historically) led me to think up a (what I 
thought was) brilliant solution, without knowing anything about the 
historical derivation of a vowel harmony system.   The system shows how every 
single underrepresented vowel came to exist, what vowels they came from in 
what situations, and also shows how there could have been no other 
underrepresented vowels (becauses I didn't do all the possible combinations). 
  That was what I actually wanted comments on, because I had no idea if what 
I'd come up with was historically plausible.

Dirk wrote:

<<Nez Perce harmony is of the "dominant-recessive" type.>>   <snip neat 
description>

Wow!   That's really cool!   But I'm wondering: What happens when more than 
one suffix is added that has a fixed vowel, but the vowels conflict (e.g., 
one from the dominant set, one from the recessive)?   Or do such things 
happen?

-David

"imDeziZejDekp2wilDez ZejDekkinel..."
"You can celebrate anything you want..."
               -John Lennon

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