Re: vowel harmony

BP Jonsson [sEd]:

> Um, I wonder.  In Finnish i and e are neutral,
whereas in Estonian *e actually split, remaining e
before lost front vowels but becoming õ /7/ before
lost back vowels.  Of course VH is no longer active in
standard Estonian.

Wow--I did not know that. I thought vowel harmony was
still active in Estonian. At any rate, I was wondering
how [7] got in the system. Didn't seem to fit.

> Sohlob
I saw that word and the first pronunciation that came
to me was [SlA:b]. I got a chuckle from that.

> The ancestor language had only three vowels /a i u/.
 These were affected by following vowels thus:

a > & /_...i
a > Q /_...u
i > e /_...a
i > 1 /_...u
u > o /_...a
u > y /_...i

> giving a system
Almost exactly the system I have in the language I'm
developing, only it's not quite vowel harmony; I call
it 'vowel gradation'. The language has the system [a],
[i] and [u], with the following allphonic variations:

[a] turns [i] into [e] in open syllables
[a] turns [i] to [I] in closed syllables
[a] turns [u] into [o] in open and closed syllables
[i] turns [a] into [&] in open syllables
[i] turns [a] into [E] in closed syllables
[i] has no effect on [u]
[u] turns [a] to [A]
[u] has no effect on [i]

A set of emphatic consonants (*) made [i] to [e] and
[u] to [o], and held [a] as [a], even if the gradation
would make it some other vowel quantity, but those
consonants merged out of the language at some point in
its history, leaving only the vowels, thus, giving a
bigger vowel system.

*--they were [p'], [t'], [tS'], [k'], [X\], [s'] and
[r], which I consider emphatic because of its
vowel-coloring status. The emphatic stops/affricates
became geminates medially and merged with the
non-emphatics initially. [s'?] became [ts] initially
and [ss] medially. [X\] still exists in some dialects,
but in most, it exists more as a constricted rough
breathing of the following vowel when it appeared
initially.

Syllabic structure forbade emphatics from appearing
finally, and [X\] was very rare non-initially; it was
only allowed intervocalically, where it shifted to [?]
in most dialects.

And since this language does the paucal number for a
small number of substantives (mostly pronouns) through
reduplication, you'd get effects like this:

/s'a/--/s'a.s'a/-->/t_sas.sa/

[*] In some African languages there is also
Advanced-Tongue-Root VH.

Maasai, if I'm not mistaken, has the following system:

[a], [e], [E], [i], [I], [o], [O], [u], [U]

Where [a] is the neutral vowel and the harmony's
between the tense and lax vowels. Is this the
'advanced tongue root' you're talking about? I tried
to make a conlang with that, but those lax vowels sure
are hard to tell apart from tense vowels, especially
in monosyllabic words, and especially if length is
phonemic.

=====
"Alle Idolen müssen sterben."
"All idols must die."

--Einstürzende Neubauten, "Seele Brennt" (Soul is on Fire)

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