Re: vowel harmony

At 13:49 18.6.2003 -0400, John Cowan wrote:

>Typically, neutral vowels arise from a collapse: thus i is neutral in
>Mongolian because i and 1 merged before the Classical period.
Um, I wonder.  In Finnish i and e are neutral, whereas in Estonian *e
actually split, remaining e before lost front vowels but becoming õ /7/
before lost back vowels.  Of course VH is no longer active in standard
Estonian.

In my Conlang Sohlob VH arose as the result of vowel-affection, merger
and then vowel height adjustment in unstressed syllables.

The ancestor language had only three vowels /a i u/.  These were affected
by following vowels thus:

a > & /_...i
a > Q /_...u
i > e /_...a
i > 1 /_...u
u > o /_...a
u > y /_...i

giving a system

i y   1    u
e          o
&     a    Q

This assymetrical system was made symmetrical by merging /i y/, /e 1/ and
/o Q/, giving the symmetrical:

i    1    u
&    a    Q

Now vowels in non-initial syllables were made to agree in height with the
vowel of the initial syllable, so that any given non-compound word can
contain only high or only low vowels.  Thus Sohlob VH is a high/low
harmony rather than the more familiar front/back harmony.[*]  As you can
probably guess the combined effect of these changes make for rather
complicated morphophonemic alternations in Sohlob.

[*] In some African languages there is also Advanced-Tongue-Root VH.

/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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