Re: vowel harmony

it seems to me likely that lexical items preserve a pattern like
this, which is called harmony for largely historical reasons, but
that affixation wouldn't be vowel-harmonic, simply because speakers
wouldn't have enough evidence that it's a harmony pattern when
acquiring the language to keep it that way.  harrison is doing
research on this at the moment - i don't know whether he's published
anything about it yet or not.  he's a specialist in siberian turkic
languages, tuvan particularly, so i should ask him about modern
mongolian.  (he teaches at my school.)

then again, there's finnish, which has frontness-harmony, with the
vowels [y], [ø], [æ] as front and [u], [o] and [A] as back (pardon
the mix of SAMPA and IPA).  the vowels [i] and [e] are neutral.  yet
how would an infant acquiring the language pick up on this?  there is
a somewhat weak featural way of describing the difference, i guess.
hm.  musings.

kit

On Nov 21, 2005, at 6:50 PM, Tristan Mc Leay wrote:
> 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.
> [snip]
> Tristan.

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