Re: vowel harmony

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 23:38 -0500, Kit La Touche wrote:
> at least according to harrison's research, they're not flexible in
> this matter, which is what's interesting: he's been studying the loss
> of vowel harmony in uzbek (yeah, he specializes in turkic languages,
> as i said).  it seems that as the incidence of vowel harmonic words
> above the likelihood of vowel harmonic words by a random distribution
> of vowels* drops below a certain percent (i forget what it is, but
> it's steady across languages), the language pretty quickly looses
> vowel harmony with affixes.
>
>
> (sorry, hideous sentence that was.  ah well)
>
>
> do i need to clarify?  i feel i wrote that poorly.
>
Yes, I'm afraid to say I'm not sure I completely understood you.
Perhaps: if a series of changes (borrowings or phonetic drift or
whatever) in a language cause a large enough proportion of words to no
longer obey some sort of structured vowel harmony, that language would
pretty quickly lose its harmony in affixes? So that perhaps if in
"Starte", a language like Finnish, u: > y: (with y: remaining as is),
and A: > O: and &: > A:, perhaps, and that brought Starte above the
cut-off, then Starte would very likely loose its vowel harmony?

If so, that's certainly interesting!

And you're saying this to contradict my conjecture "I imagine in large
just because that's just the way it is", implying that a language could
have vowel harmony between [i 2: o: 3 a:] in one set and [i: e: u o A:]
in another with [2 e] being neutral. Which probably is a bit outlandish
actually and certainly not something I would wish to imply whilst
thinking about it! :)

Do I understand? Have I missed something you said, or miss-interpreted
something?
>
(PS: Is Uzbek presently losing its vowel harmony, or is it something
that has happened while Uzbek has been a written language or something?)
> >
--
Tristan.

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