Re: vowel harmony

Staving Rob Haden:
>What are some ways to develop a front/back vowel harmony system?  I'm
>thinking about possibly doing this for my language, developing from an
>earlier vowel inventory of {a e i o u}.
>
>
You could start by pairing up your vowels by height as
[i]/[u]
[e]/[o]
[&]/[a]

One or other of the low vowels is a new allophone created by the vowel
harmony system.

Then you could have a rule that all vowels in a given word take the
frontness or backness of the vowel in the primary stress position. If this
is /a/, you use the original /a/ phoneme as your reference. For example,
the Khangaþyagon word rimak'hol ['4im&k"hol] "criminal" would become
*rumak'hol ['4umak"hol] under this system. What you do about all the new
homophones you've created is up to you.

You could make this a little more complex by allowing more than one point
of reference in a word. For example, secondary stresses could affect vowels
preceding them up to the previous stress, or following them to the next,
depending on whether stresses tend to occur early or late in a word.

Pete