Re: vowel harmony

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Tom Chappell wrote:

> I am afraid that I do not understand enough about the details of
> your questions, where they concern the differences between phonemics
> and phonetics and phonology, to see how the following examples
> answer them.
>
> However, the following examples are among the reasons I thought
> frontness/backness of vowel phonemes might have more than three
> values.
<examples snup>

The only vowels in your examples which were not strictly front,
central or back, were /I/ and /U/. Yet I'd be surprized if their
mid-centralization really were the defining feature. I'd expect the
height difference and the laxness to be more essential there - maybe
even the rounding (I know a guy who identified [2] as /U/). And since
these two phonemes seem to always have more than one feature that
distinguishes them from other vowel phonemes in the vicinity, the
existence of *phonemic* front-centralness or back-centralness is sorta
iffy. It's just never contrastive by itself.

John Vertical

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