At 14:47 30/5/97, Peter Clark wrote:
I'm not too familiar with vowel-harmony. Would somebody mind giving me a quick example? (I really ought to start carrying my linguistics dictionary around with me! :)
Basically, the vowels used in affixes are conditioned by the vowel(s) of the root word. The term is used most frequently of the Finno-Ugric languages and the Turkic langs (which is one reason some people lump the whole lot together in a larger Altaic group). E.g. in Turkish the plural ending is either -ler or -lar according to whether the root word contains front vowels or back vowels, respectively, thus:
| adam (man) | adamlar (men) |
| kulak (ear) | kulaklar (ears) |
| ev (house) | evler (houses) |
| erik (plum) | erikler (plums) |
In fact these languages also often include rounded and unrounded vowels in their schemes of vowel harmony. Unfortunately, this would mean giving examples with diacritics and/or symbols which tend to get corrupted by some mail-readers. But look for a book on Turkish, Finnish or Hungarian and you'll soon get the idea.
Another sort of vowel harmony is often encountered in African languages where all the vowels are either lax or tense.
In my proposed scheme the written, stressed vowels are:
The unwritten, unstressed vowels in affixes are:
Copyright © 1997, Don Blaheta
Last updated: 2 Dec 1997