Re: vowel harmony

at least according to harrison's research, they're not flexible in
this matter, which is what's interesting: he's been studying the loss
of vowel harmony in uzbek (yeah, he specializes in turkic languages,
as i said).  it seems that as the incidence of vowel harmonic words
above the likelihood of vowel harmonic words by a random distribution
of vowels* drops below a certain percent (i forget what it is, but
it's steady across languages), the language pretty quickly looses
vowel harmony with affixes.

(sorry, hideous sentence that was.  ah well)

do i need to clarify?  i feel i wrote that poorly.

kit

* through, say, sound change.

On Nov 21, 2005, at 9:23 PM, Tristan Mc Leay wrote:
> I imagine in large just because that's just the way it is. People seem
> to be pretty flexible when it comes to learning the intricacies of
> language. Also, it seems to be more than just a lexical-type process
> like noun genders, it's rather a neutralisation of phonemes in
> unstressed syllables. As I understand it, Finns don't even hear/
> produce
> the difference between [y] and [u] there e.g. "olymia" is for most
> people pronounced ["olumpia], not *["olympia] (I gather it's something
> along the lines of "lama" vs "yama" for "llama" in English, except
> phonologically motivated). No doubt we can blame the absence of /M
> 7/ in
> stressed syllables for the neutral behavior of /i e/. So if Finns
> don't
> pick up on/use [+/- front] in unstressed syllables, and if there is no
> [-back +high -rounded +short] phoneme, then [+high -rounded +short]
> has
> no choice but to equal /i/, whereas [+low -rounded +short], which
> remains ambiguous, is given a final interpretation based on the
> syllable's stressed vowel.
> --
> Tristan.

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