Re: vowel harmony

On Wed, 2003-06-18 at 08:45, Rob Haden wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 23:31:56 +0400, Pavel Iosad <edricson@...> wrote:
>
> >Well, basically, to develop a vowel harmony you'd need to turn your
> >triangular system into a rectangular one. Thus, you need at least two
> >low vowels. You could for instance split the low vowel into [&] and [A]
> >or some other variation thereof.
>
> OK, so what's a good, realistic way to do that?
(I am just a hobby linguist and don't know terribly much about this, but
the following sounds reasonable to me. OTOH, it may not be.)

It kind of depends on your language. Say you have two genders, one in
which the nominative singular is -ani and one where it's -anu (and,
indeed, all suffixes end in -i and -u according to gender (or -e and -o
or whatever you feel like, or they could start in it or whatever)). Now
pick words which belong to each gender: anol- (-i) and anel- (-u). Now
we get to use Tristan's Fourth Favorite Umlauts (after the more specific
u, a and i mutation, respectively), front/back mutation:

i. anolani > anol&n@ > &n2l&n > &nel&n
ii. anelanu > anelAn@ > An7lAn > AnolAn

Exceptions can be argued away by Tristan's Favorite Way of Creating or
Removing Irregularities, as the Case May Be: generalisation. Taking -etu
to me an invariant genitive plural:

iii. anoletu > anol7t@ > *generalisation* > &n2l7t > *yet more
generalisation/and or front mutation acting forwards* > &nelet
iv. aneletu > anel7t@ > An7l7t > Anolot

Now, you say that you have a mix of suffixes which don't seem to want to
work this way? If word order and pronouns are suitable, the pronouns
might cliticise.

But you say that *that* fails too? Or you just don't like that plan?
Well, Tristan's Vowel Harmony Plan B[1] might be able to help. Well,
lets have some words like this: anoler- and anelur- and -an can be our
nominative singular. The second syllable is going to cause Tristan's
Fourth Favorite Umlaut by virtue of being stressed, though other
syllables can be chosen for different reasons. This method can be
especially fun if you have a language family that has stress in a
different place from the post-all-of-this language so that your people
can go back and reconstruct the parent language and (partially) work out
where the stress went by virtue of this.

v. anoleran > Anol7ran > Anol7rAn > AnolorAn
vi. aneluran > &nelyran > &nelyr&n > &nelir&n

[1]: Being Plan B doesn't mean its necessarily worse. In fact, it might
be better. It's just Plan B.

Of course, if you'd prefer the more fun vowel system of
i y    u
e 2    o
       A
Nothing, stops you from making the appropriate changes to the above (so
that /e/ has two back forms, /A/ and /o/, and /o/ and /u/ have two front
forms each, /e/ and /2/ and /i/ and /y/). In fact, I would recommend it,
but only because I like that sort of thing.

--
Tristan.