Re: vowel harmony

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 19:35 +0000, tomhchappell wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Kit La Touche <kit@S...> wrote:
> >
> > in natlangs, it's based on some feature - frontness, usually, rarely
> > height, occasionally roundedness, somewhat rarely nasality, though
> > that one has some more complex features.
> > kit
> >
> > On Nov 21, 2005, at 1:18 PM, veritosproject@g... wrote:
> >
> > > Watch my gmail reply-to.
> > >
> > > Is vowel harmony always based on different shapes of vowels (e.g.
> > > front/back vowels), or is it sometimes arbitrary?
As I understand it, Mongolian nowadays makes a distinction between
"front" /e u o/ and "back" /a U O/, with /I/ being neutral. Seems pretty
arbitrary to me. Obviously this is based on an earlier distinction that
I presume actually *was* front vs back.

> Don't forget ATR (advanced tongue root) vs. lack of same.
>
> Close vs. Open, Front vs. Back, Round vs. Unround, ATR vs. notATR,
> Nasal vs. notNasal, are essentially all the features there are to
> vowels; the Close vs. Open usually has at least three, frequently at
> least four, and sometimes more than four values; Front vs. Back
> frequently has at least three, and sometimes has more than three
> values;
Really? I thought having even three values was pretty rare, well, except
phonetically. But I'm of the impression that phonemically the third
value is almost always not relevant and so it'd be invisible to vowel
harmony. So a language with [i] [u\] [u] would have /i y/ as front
and /u/ as back; or one with [i] [i\] [u] would have /i/ as front and
/i\ u/ as back.

And certainly I was of the understanding that three was an absolute
upper limit, and *no* language had more than three backness values.
(Excepting when it's actually something like a tense-lax distinction
that is concomitant with a height distinction.)

--
Tristan.

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