Moreover, vowels on either side of a consonant must always match in terms of broad or slender. This is because consonants themselves can be either broad or slender, and which one you pronounce depends on the adjacent vowels. The result is that Irish spelling includes a lot of silent vowels intended to guide the pronunciation of the consonants.
@@Myzelfa Yes. I've learned more since. What Irish really has is broad and slender consonants: the vowels are purely an orthographic convention to show how the adjacent consonants are pronounced. Hence, the vowels each side of every consonant cluster must match.
The origin of Finnish vowel harmony is actually extremely old. It predates not only Finnish but the entire Uralic language family, and probably much further back (considering it is also found in Yukaghir and many other language families of Eurasia).
Classical Manchu has two types of vowel harmony which are ATR and Rounding harmony. Rounding harmony is a type of harmony that only occurs within words that are +ATR, never with words that are -ATR. In Manchu, the phoneme /i/ functions as a neutral vowel for ATR, but blocks Rounding harmony. So there, /i/ has a "double role".
I just started doing my first conlang about a week ago and was browsing the RU-vids for a "tutorial" to conlanging - mainly for pointers etc. and stumbled upon this series. As a Finn I find your usage of Finnish as examples fascinating, adorable and funny. If you still are reading the comments on your older videos - I would be interested in a video about using suffixes (and prefixes) instead of prepositions, given that there is a meme about our.... intesive suffix system in Finnish. Unless you already have a video about it, that is. EDIT: Hotellissä sounds just fricking WEIRD. :D
It took me forever to get some time to record this video, and then once it was recorded, it was _huge_! I didn't think it'd be that long! So then it took forever to get all the stuff prepped for it. And...yeah. Lost a week. May lose another with Comic-Con upcoming. Busy times for me ahead. Will try to keep to a weekly schedule, though. Note the links to the papers in the description above.
This topic is fantastic, I find it quite hard to understand the IPA and all the technicalities of language, but the harmony in those sounds is very cool.
You give examples of Finnish and Turkish having vowel harmony. It's also found in Hungarian in a big way when postpositions (which act as prepositions do in English) are tacked onto root nouns. Depending on whether the vowels in the noun are forward or back, these postpositions could be either -ban or -ben, for instance, or -rol and --röl, or whatever. I wonder if vowel harmony is a long-standing feature of Finno-Ugrian languages going all the way back to their proto-Uralic ancestor, and whether vowel harmony is also a feature of, say, Estonian.
Doug Hicton: Estonian HAD vowel harmony, but it has fallen away in Modern Estonian, with the four vowels /y, ø, ɤ, æ/ of the language's full set of nine (the others are /i, u, e, o, ɑ/) now able to appear only in initial syllables. The closely-related Võro language of south Estonia, however, has retained vowel harmony. Compare, for instance, the Estonian *küla* (village) with the Võro *külä*.
Correct me if this wouldn't actually be classified as such, but I believe that Yoruba has a system of vowel harmony that crosses word boundaries? For example, _owó_ = "money/price," _àké_ = "axe," but _owá àké_ = "the price of the axe."
That doesn't look like vowel harmony so much as case marking to me-or sandhi, which is a different phenomenon (a _real_ phenomenon, but a _different_ phenomenon).
Mongolian vowel harmony is interesting to me because it's difficult to explain but very intuitive in practice. I think of Mongolian suffixes as a kind of template; the template tells you where to put vowels or consonants, and vowel harmony tells you which vowels to put in there. So if a suffix is -VVS, where V represents a vowel, in practice that suffix may be realized as -aas, -ees, -oos or -öös. There are two groups of vowels, the first containing a, o and u, and the second containing e, ö and ü, while the vowel i is neutral. But it's not as simple as choosing between pairs of vowels like in Finnish. If the word root contains a and or u, it takes an ending with the vowel a, if it contains o and or u it takes o, if it contains e and or ü it takes e, if it contains ö and or ö it takes ö. If a word only has u it will take a, and it it only has i or ü it will take e. You might wonder what happens if a word contains both a and o, and the answer is that it doesn't really happen, I can't recall a case where this is ever ambiguous honestly. At the same time there is a second class of suffixes which only appear as u or ü, just depending whether the word falls into the first or second vowel class. Again, the neutral vowel i on its own is sorted with the second class. And that's pretty much it.
He is actually rounding the vowel, though. I get this comment in German all the time. The thing is, officially [y], and [ø], etc. are in the same place as [i] and [e], just rounded, but the "front" rounded vowels in German are actually closer to being central, and just traditionally transcribed as front. The frontest of them in German is the /y:/, which is half-way between central and front. I believe the situation is similar in other languages, because it's a consequence of acoustics and/or articulation mechanics. I think legitimately front rounded vowels are used in some lects, though. I think I remember hearing them in some German dialect and I imagine they are probably an intermediary stage in the development of languages that unround them, like Proto West Germanic to Old English. I actually have a conlang sketch that differentiates between central highly rounded and front moderately rounded vowels.
He seems to pronounce /y/ as a cardinal /y/ (which sounds like /i/ but rounded; you may found similar kind of sound in Swedish ⟨syl⟩ [syːl]), while in Finnish (and also German, French, Turkish etc.) it's more central.
1. In Turkish, minor harmony's purpose is not to move your mount a lot while saying a word. eg. When use 'I - ı' letter in the last syllable of the stem, you should use 'A' at the suffix. When you say A or I, your mount is wide. 2. Estonian which is similar to Finnish has no vowel harmony but that language has a Võru dialect which has vowel harmony.
I have a con-lang with vowel harmony (front-back). I like the way it is, but I am in the middle of trying to take it through backwards stages towards a proto-language to an era before vowel-harmony so I can establish more consistency, do more with it, and also create related languages/dialects. It's been kinda hard doing it backwards. In this process, I'm interested in a few things so I can understand how to take my language apart into a proto-lang. 1) What causes a language to develop vowel harmony? (I'm particularly thinking about what the proto-lang roots of words like *lase* [lɑsɛ] and *láse* [læsɛ] would look like; I don't imagine a difference between [ɑ] and [æ] in this proto-lang, so I'm thinking of how that distinction would develop from the proto-lang.) 2) How would a language devolve from vowel harmony? And would it be all at once or gradual? Apparently there are some languages like Korean that once had language harmony but no longer does, but the process between is difficult to get information on. I largely imagine gradual, and one idea I've played with, for example, is the merger of counterpart vowels (e.g. *e* [ɛ] and *y* [ʌ] into simply *e* [ɛ]) resulting in the two becoming a single neutral vowel *e* [ɛ]; a second concept is having the counterparts *u* [u] and *ú* [y] where *u* shifts to become a neutral-vowel while *ú* remains a front-vowel (so both exist potentially in the same word). Are either of these possible in a naturalistic language and would anything in particular prompt it? 3) As far as compound words: is it simply that it would be highly peculiar to have compound words with conflicting vowel harmony conform to the previous, or is there some other reason in particular why you should NOT do that? Because whoops.
Ive understood that its at its heart very similar to the finnish one, with i and e in the middle working woth both fronted and back vowels, but i could be totally wrong on this not actually knowing korean
I've been trying to think of a way to acknowledge the skipping of a vowel or consonant when shortening identical sounds that appear next to each other...and the use of the velum at the beginning of this video seems like a great way to represent that. Very helpful...thanks very much.
Great video as always! I was wondering, would it be possible to do a video about switch reference systems in the future? Maybe not a complete video on them, but I've just been a little perplexed by how it works and you always explain things in an understandable way.
i recently found there's vowel harmony in some australian aboriginal languages. in warlpiri there is only three vowels a i and u and there can't be more than two different vowels in the same word
I sort of did this on accident. The affix markers in my most recent conlang all change from the original word they come from “hand” for instrumental etc. And as they evolved to be affixes rather than words the vowels all changed, to either be the same vowel sound or at least the same at the start and finish. geak + ie becoming (i)gikie and then ikie over evolution. Over a long period of time I think, because I don’t think they had a lot of interaction with others so their language change was slow. Thanks for the in depth talk about it. This was super interesting for something I only kind of understood.
West African Pidgin English tends to import Vowel Harmony into it, where the harmony sometimes I think blends through words even, so the word “chop” means food, or to eat, but if it follows -ATR, it ends up as /chɔp/, but following +ATR, it’s /chop/. And then there are some neutral vowels that it uses where vowel harmony can shift between +ATR and -ATR. I’ve only done very minimal looking into this, as there is unfortunately not as much information about WAPE available online as there are for many other languages.
"Stressed" and "unstressed" don't constitute real classes. Look again at [ATR] harmony. (Though note, if the vowel harmony system is still in place _after_ there have been some major sound changes, that can produce wacky results. That's what happened with Mongolian.)
Isn't Sindarin a system with declension and some vowel harmony? Maybe I'm misremembering what I read, but I think the suffixes affect the vowels with the root? Or would that be called something else entirely?
No, that's called umlaut. I talked about this in another comment. Same thing happened in the history of English (and Germanic, generally). Different thing.
My current conlang project has height and rounding harmony, and I'm wondering exactly what might be able to block rounding harmony? My immediate thought is labial consonants. They themselves don't spread the feature, despite being [+labial]. Is this plausible, or is autosegmental phonology getting to my head?
Dear David Peterson, I really enjoy all of your videos very much as I learn new things about creating my very own conlang but then again I stumble upon root word generators as it seems as if most, if not all, create words I can't pronounce or appear very wretched to the ears and sonority hierarchy since my conalng is a CCVCC language. Best wishes, Iamahelpfulperson
Look up "zompist word generator", you can define classes of phonemes so that you get words that follow the sonority hierarchy (eg if your language was CRVC you could do C=ptk R=wrl v=iau and define syllables as V CV RV CVC RVC CRV CRVC, and it would not produce stuff like wpit)
That just means the generator isn't programmed right. All the word generators I've seen allow you to define what your variables are, so you could have a syllable that's CVC (any consonants), but also CVNS, the latter two being nasals and stops. The best ones will allow for sound changes, too, and will change your nasals to be homorganic nasals. Even so, I don't use them. I don't really need them or like them (word generators).
All your examples seem to have two sets of harmonizing vowels, plus possibly some neutral ones. Is there a reasonable way to have three or more sets of vowels that harmonize among themselves?
It's hard to come up with really novel examples simply because you run out of vowels-and, of course, simply copying the previous vowel is kind of a trivial form of harmonizing. But you could do front vs. back, -ATR vs. +ATR and rounded vs. unrounded (leaving the low vowels out). This is what it would look like: (1) [+ATR] = i, y, u, ɯ, e, ø, o, ɤ /// [-ATR] = ɪ, ʏ, ʊ, ɷ, ɛ, œ, ɔ, ʌ (2) [-BACK] = i, y, e, ø, ɪ, ʏ, ɛ, œ /// [+BACK] = u, ɯ, o, ɤ, ʊ, ɷ, ɔ, ʌ (3) [-ROUND] = i, e, ɯ, ɤ, ɪ, ɷ, ɛ, ʌ /// [+ROUND] = y, u, ø, o, ʏ, ʊ, œ, ɔ With a suffix that matched the height of the base it would fully harmonize, but with an off-height base vowel, you'd get non-trivial harmonizing. No such system like this exists, but it could, in theory. (And, of course, you could expand it to the low vowels, but no language on Earth contrasts /ǝ/, /ɵ/, /ɑ/ and /ɒ/.)
Can an Ancient Greek , Welsch and Finnish combination , can work for vowel harmony, David? Or nahh? I have Japanese istead of Finnish for a backup... what is your opinion. And to add the Lative to Locative , japanese case in the conlag . So Locative/ Lative case one , as opposite ablative . Great?
I once read about a conlang using vowel disharmony. The first vowel in a word determined all vowels in a word except the last which was disharmonic. There were three classes of vowels; low (a), front (i,e) and back (o,u). If the first vowel was "a", the following vowels were low "a" or "e" or "o" and the last vowel in the word was high "i" or "u". If the first vowel was a front vowel "i" or "e" the following vowels were "e" or "i" until a disharmonic back vowel occurred, either "u" or "o". The "a" vowel was sometimes used as a neutral vowel within a word. The concept also made the words self-segregating. Would this work in a natural language or would assimilation destroy it eventually? And, Are there any natural languages that have or use vowel disharmony?
Definitely nothing that works _just_ like this. The Spanish subjunctive is essentially using the opposite endings from the present with one of the present stems. I bet there are other actual examples of vowel disharmony that's local (i.e. a suffix takes one form or another that's the opposite of some feature of the previous vowel), but I don't know of any specific examples.
Do you think syllable stress might effect whether vowel harmony is progressive or regressive throughout a word? Say for example a language held stress on the first syllable making it the most prominent, would it be reasonable to assume that the language would develop regressive vowel harmony as following unstressed vowels in the word assimilated to be like the stressed first vowel? Just a thought
Nah. Finnish has mandatory word-initial stress; Turkish mandatory word-final stress. Both have progressive vowel harmony with affixes looking to the most recent syllable.
lər,lar in most Turkic languages. /lær, lar/ çocuk. then there are some German plurals Fuße Füße kitáb > ketab >kitabler. entered Turkish through Farsi or Kurdish. Old Turkish writing system has five written vowels, similar to the Mongolian system. /a ı/ei/ou/öü/ə of course, this requires two sets of consonants to indicate which of the pair is sounded. kök türkü
I can't imagine. It would defy the whole purpose of harmony. The only way I can imagine it happening is if, e.g., there was a word that had neutral vowels. In Finnish, /i/ and /e/ belong to both classes, but most of the time they engender fronted harmony. Some don't. I could see those that don't switching, but most of the time they're common enough words that they don't.
I’m working on a conlang with vowel harmony but the vowel in the suffix is exactly the same as in the base. So “language” is /mugzobr/ and in the accusative case it’s /mugzobruq/ but /izin/ is bull and in the accusative case /iziniq/ Is this natural or should I change it
In Finnish vowel harmony does not really get broken ever in spoken language. We have (a,o,u) as open vowels, never in same words as (y,ä,ö). Neutral vowels can be mixed in same word (e,i). The dominant vowels determine the cases endings over neutral vowels in words. An exception currently is word olympics. Written as olympialaiset. Just in spoken language we say olumpialaiset. If hotellissä sounds ok to you, it's then O differs how you pronounce it.
I don't think liha is a quirk. In Finnish, the root is either all front and neutral vowels, or all back and neutral vowels. Liha follows this pattern. Other words use i and ä, like riittää (stem: riittä-). Also, yhdessä comes from yksi. The stem of yksi is yhde-. For example, the genetive of yksi is yhde,
imagine nasal umlaut. like, similar to nasal harmony but the nasality stops spreading after reaching a stop/plosive, but may continue after liquids and semivowels, maybe even fricatives. Wait no, a nasal umlaut would only spread nasality to the next vowel I think.
Is there actually any example of a natural agglutinative language with vowel harmony that only uses prefixes? And if not, would it be possible to construct a conlang that has those 3 features?
Oh I'm doing that one! I did something weird though. A prefix which is being contracted still aplies to vowel harmony like this: rem + niwy -> r'newę rik + niwy -> r'niwy Is that logical? The lnguage i'm making heavily relies on contractions.
Vowel harmony goes from the base to the affix, not the affix to the base. This is ablaut, as happened with English plurals (e.g. goose~geese, tooth~teeth, mouse~mice, etc.).
David Peterson Hmm... I did vowel harmony in a way that it goes always front to back. So in a suffix the vowels of theaffix change, but in a prefix the vowels in the actual word change. Is that really so farfetched? I planned to do a naturalistic conlang out of that idea, but now it seems not really possible.
Actually it's "internettiä" (extra i is there because it's loan word ending in consonant) or usually "nettiä" because that inter- is unnecessary. Still, any Finnish word with only i,e for vowels gets the -ä version. (peli, peliä -- game, game.PART)
So, is it possible for /i/ and /e/ become /y/ and /ø/ because it's before rounded vowels? I kind of imagined that there would be a preemptive rounding of a vowel making /i/ and /e/ become /y/ and /ø/.
Actually turkish has 9 vowels (a e ı i o ö u ü)...These are mentioning in our alphabet. But in daily speech, we are using ä=é=ə sounds etc. And this sound isn't represented in our alphabet just represented with e sound
Hey David, I am currently working on an agglutinating conlang with a vowel harmony system. It features front vowels i, ë, ä; central vowels y, e; and back vowels a, o, u. The way it works is that front vowels can't go with back vowels. Central vowels can go with either. So suffixes will have either a front or a back vowel as default and switch to a central vowel if the stem has the other kind of vowels. That way you get the following alternations: i/y, u/y, ë/e, o/e and ä/a. I kind of like the whole idea, but I don't know of any natural language that does this kind of thing. What do you think of it?
I'm guessing "ë" is /e/, "ä" is /æ/, "y" is /ɨ/, and "e" is /ǝ/...? Weird romanization system. Anyway, I see what you're doing with the system, and it makes sense, conceptually, but I will say I've never seen it before. So it'd be like: -ko (suffix 1) danuko melikǝ -ki (suffix 2) danukɨ meliki Correct? Pretty cool. Like I said, I haven't seen it before, but if you can show how it evolved, that just means it hasn't happened to occur yet.
Yeah, you got that right! It's like the (non-low) vowels assimilate only partially, so instead of a back vowel being fronted, they kind of stop half-way as a central vowel, and vice versa. And yeah, as for the romanization system, I thought it'd be the most consistent, dots for front vowels ;)
trafo60 omg I am making a fusional language with vowel harmony, I love vowel harmony "makí"-to go "makel"-went "makeleta"-I went And then vokí- to try, vokœl-tried, vokœlœtä-I tried
@@centoe5537 Late as well. They do sound like words, but unnatural and like they were hard to produce - like you had to either try a lot to say those words, or then take a few beers too much and not try at all. Frankly, vowel disharmony also sounds rather unpleasant to the ear that is used to vowel harmony.
It is about getting familiar with the pronunciation. As Anna mentioned it requires extra effort. If those words are common and learned from childhood, there wouldn't be much problem.
For Turkish, no. Some words may resist, keeping harmony as it’s being borrowed, and some examples would be “Felsefe” (Philosophy) “Avrupa” (Europe), but most words just get borrowed as accurately as they can without any regard for harmony “antrenman (training), satirik (satirical), efsane (legend), ilah (deity) akü (a shortening of accumulator)” and other words might seem like they keep harmony but they get unharmonic suffixes. “hol, rol” (hall, role) -> “holü, rolü”. But because of the sheer amount of borrowings, none of these words sound particularly out of place.
Is tone harmony an attested characteristic of any languages? I'm imagining an affix carrying an inherent tone triggering sandhi in the preceding vowel's tones. Great video, and thanks!
Yes, but it's not called "harmony": it's called spreading. It's widespread in register tone languages. Basically, an affix comes in with no tone, so it gets its tone from the preceding syllable. That sometimes results in a radical change in tone, with a preservation of the tone melody, e.g. (made up example): _mánâ_ = book _mánálò_ = books Whereas a normal situation might be: _lùmé_ = cat _lùméló_ = cats Or: _tákì_ = shark _tákìlò = sharks I'll talk about this when I do a video on register tone languages.
I thought that vowel harmony was just keeping the same vowel e.g.: Hungarian : Ember Emberek Embereknek was I wrong, or was I right and just misunderstood the video ???
Yes, you have misunderstood. _Sometimes_ the result is exactly the same vowel, but not always. This is easiest to see with Turkish. In Turkish, the plural is either -lar or -ler, but _only_ those two. Sometimes the vowel will be exactly the same: ev "house" evler "houses" saat "hour" saatlar "hours" But this is merely a coincidence. When any other vowel occurs in the root, the suffix will be the one with the vowel that's closest to it. Thus: cocuk "child" cocuklar "children" köy "village" köyler "villages" ışık "light" ışıklar "lights" su "water" sular "waters" zemin "floor" zeminler "floors" That's all vowel harmony is: Getting close to the previous vowel (or next vowel) within a limited range specified by the affix.
Other Turkic languages such as Kyrgyz have a larger number of plural suffixes . In Turkish the plural of horse it Atlar, and in Kyrgyz , it's Attar . Other plurals in Kurgyz are tar, dar, nar , ter, and so forth .
Is there a form of vowel harmony where the root changes instead of the affix or is it called something else altogether? I'm asking because I added vowel harmony to one of my conlangs halfway through, when I didn't even fully understand the way it worked (not recommended) and it ended up that way, because it sounded better while reading words out loud. I don't know whether it's a naturally occuring thing in natlangs is what I'm wondering.
This is called umlaut in Germanic. That's how we got mouse/mice ([muːs] vs. [muːsi] > [myːs] > [miːs] > [mais]). It's not systematic, though (at least not in any language I know of), and usually only applied to mononucleic roots. One can imagine a language with a word like [karetu] with a [-li] affix becoming [kæretyli] _if_ such things could happen. My impression is that it can't (or wouldn't, naturally). A fruitful concept to explore for a conlang that's not bound by what's occurred in natural languages, though.
This is a response to David and not OP, but YT on tablet won't let me. Old Norse actually has umlaut (u-umlaut in particular) that passes through more than one syllable and through roots/stems with more than one syllable. For example, tǫluðu 'they spoke' as opposed to its singular counterpart talaði. Or fǫgnuðum, the dative plural of fagnaðr. In both cases, the u of the last suffix propagates backwards and rounds preceding a's to u in unstressed position and ǫ in stressed position. Not sure I can find longer examples, but that may be mostly due to the nature of derived Germanic languages, with short(ened) words and affixes compared to their ancestral state. Finding roots longer than two syllables and suffixes longer than one is difficult in general (the definite of fǫgnuðum-fǫgnuðunum-is tempting, but a false alarm, as it is merely a contraction of fǫgnuðum hinum).
20:48 A little correction to your examples of Spanish conjugation: "LLAME" means either "that he call" or "that I call" and it could also stand for lowercase "llamé" (meaning "I called"), as it is permitted to drop the tilde in uppercase block writing.
@@trubiso @trubiso Sorry to contradict you, but the new rules state that anyone has the option to adhere to the rules in force before the new ones. The ambiguity remains.
Sorry about I'm not linguist and I have no idea how to phrase that better in English like that: I feel vowel harmony is like I use paddle (=producing syllables) to push canoe (=whole word containing these syllables) forward. Of course most elegant and effort-saving I have to be in sync to sea swell (=vowel harmony; ability to organizing my breeth). The sea swell could be understood like somebody speaking during speaking. It can be heard at microfon, if somebody walks or makes sports exercises during speaking. Sorry, if that could sound somewhat strange. Maybe to get idea compare this canoe movie " ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MGvoLrADm_s.html " with this Lidepla conlang dubbing " ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--qB0qVZDexs.html " = "two syllable paddle conlanger but with different in-sync vowel harmony".
I think that there excists two types of producing spoken speech. These ones who speak very fast, these one try to convert their internal pictures into spoken speech. I could be wrong but I think that type of speaker doesn't care much about vowel harmony. The other type are speaking very slow, these ones hear to their own body impact sound (german: Körperschall) they produce by speaking. These auditive ones seems to be care of vowel harmony a lot. Well, but how to serve both of these "vowel/syllable paddler" (harmonizer versus sportive strength) within one conlang?
Contrary to your likes, David, vowel harmony frustrates me a lot. I like to learn languages, but there are some lingual features that cross me. I much prefer prepositions (or postpositions) to clensing. I prefer invariant verbs, as in bahasa melayu or English, to verbal conjugations, even though I manage with such conjugation systems as swahili, German, and romance languages have. I prefer languages without diacritic signs. In sum: my likes are on simplicity and invariance. My mother language has diacritics and verbal conjugation, but clensing only in personal pronouns.
Nah, but I've never done a phonetic study of Moro. It's just a default non-[ɑ] unrounded low vowel. Maybe it's [ɐ], but it wouldn't matter either way. The regions are just approximate. There's no front/back distinction that low, so as long as it's lower than [ǝ], it can alternate with it in the harmony system.
Vowel harmony is local, so it's usually the previous vowel, but in systems with a neutral vowel, the harmony passes through. So for example, in Finnish, _vuosi_ is "year". The last vowel is a front vowel, but it's neutral, so the backness of the first diphthong passes through, and produces _vuosissa_, not *_vuossisä_.
In general with finnish, all of the vowels in the base word are in the same class or neutral, so the first vowel would always match the suffixes. Though that is broken by loanwords and compound words, in which the last one matters for the suffixes. So answer from me is, at least not in finnish.
Isn't there consonant harmony too? I've been thinking about the German -heit and -keit suffixes. They mean the same thing and the h and k sounds are similar, but k is articulated; so maybe one suffix evolved from the other? wahr*heit*, dunkel*heit*, ein*heit*, frei*heit* traurig*keit*, punctlich*keit*, sichtbar*keit*, haltbar*keit* If I switch them around (i.e. say wahrkeit instead of wahrheit), they tend to want to switch back
There is such a thing as consonant harmony (see the relevant comment below), but this isn't it. This is simply irregular application of a suffix. My guess is it was a product of mishearing (e.g. _traurigheit_ can actually sound like _traurigkeit_, and once people started mishearing it, they could start misapplying it).
Is that thing that happens in Arabic where emphatic consonants will affect the pronunciation of the vowels around it considered vowel harmony or something else?
I'm not a linguist, so i cant give you a scientific, or a linguistically sophisticated answer, but I am a native speaker of Arabic, so maybe i can try to explain it. Throughout my years in school, whenever this phenomenon was discussed, it was described as "assimilation", not "vowel harmony", because the sound that's causing it is the consonant, not the vowel. So a word like "كتاب kitab: book" is pronounced "kitæ:b", but a similarly sounding word "خطاب khitab: speech" is pronounced "xitˤa:b" even though "æ" is the original vowel. This is because of the pharyngeal consonant "ط tˤ" that comes before it. This also happens to other consonants, not just vowels that come close to the emphatic consonants, for example "اصطبر isˤtˤabara" is supposed to be pronounced "isˤtabara" from the pattern "افتعل iftaʕala", however, the pharyngeal /sˤ/ forces the /t/ to assimilate to /tˤ/ for easier pronunciation. I hope this is clear enough.
No, because vowel harmony is _long term_ assimilation. Look at the examples Aysar Aburrub gave below for an example of what happens in Arabic. It only affects the vowel immediately following the emphatic consonant (which, by the way, includes /r/ and sometimes /l/, for some reason), or the consonant touching the emphatic consonant. It would be harmony if you had this: /qasiir/ > [qɑser] That is, the affected vowel spread its affectedness to a following vowel that was no longer in the conditioning environment.
David Peterson I freely admit I'm not an expert on this area, but after doing some reading it seems like an Ergative language could get by with something like an Antipassive.
***** That's not really the right way to think about it. Ergative language shave antipassives _instead_ of passives, but they do the exact same thing: They raise the marked argument to unmarked status and delete the former unmarked argument. They're both valency reducing structures.
I wonder: is it reasonable to say that in English, the letter r is equivalent to a vowel? because I can insert it between anything in the place of a pronounced vowel, and many silent ones too... also: 7 segment displays can represent letters of my alphabet! (also its 24 letters, but only 8 base glyphs)
The greeting at the beginning was in Zhyler. :) But yeah, some day I'll do a video on why Zhyler's vowel harmony doesn't work, and how linguistic theory and conlanging don't necessarily mix.
Hard to find something new? So one of my conlang's use of creaky voice as a harmony trait isn't too out there? Granted, the way the creakiness was developed is definitely odd so having odd vowel harmony wouldn't really hurt my development too much.
There are natural languages where creaky voice is phonemic, and natural languages where creaky voice spreads. My guess is your language is not doing something unheard of.
I still don't understand how [i] and [e] can be considered neutral in Finnish. What is the historical explanation? It makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong: one of my vowel harmony languages has front vowel harmony and ATR harmony only with high vowels, with [a] being the only neutral vowel, which resulted when the old vowels [a] and [ɑ] merged. Is that unrealistic?
uneducated guess number 1: There's no back counterparts. uneducated guess number 2: /i/ and /e/ weren't always considered neutral, but eventually the back equivalents merged with their front counterparts. I'd put more money on the latter, since other Uralic languages (namely Estonian) have back, non-low, unrounded vowels. In reality, I wouldn't put money on either one if I were you, but the latter still sounds more likely to me, or at least sounds like an explanation for the former.
They're neutral because they're in both sets. As I said, though, they do spread fronting harmony when they're root-initial most of the time (just a few examples where they don't). Your system has [ATR] harmony _only_ with high vowels and then also fronting...? How? Anyway, a merger is an easy way to produce a neutral vowel (roughly as you described it), but most languages that have a neutral vowel simply never make a distinction at that height/rounding/backness.
Well, in my system, all vowels in a word must agree in their front quality, and all high vowels within a word must agree in their ATR quality. So the ATR pairs would be /i/ vs /ɪ/, /y/ vs /ʏ/, /u/ vs /ʊ/, and /ɯ/ as a neutral vowel (only with respect to ATR harmony, not to front harmony). The system was actually inspired by Gwedyr's system, but as I was evolving it I decided that the ATR contrast would be lost in the low vowels because they would be too hard to distinguish. Is that unnatural?
When it comes to [ATR], it's _very_ important to distinguish mid from low. I think it's _unusual_ for there to be [ATR] harmony with the high vowels and not the mid vowels. I think the presence of /i/, /ɪ/ _and_ /ɯ/ is unusual (as phonemes rather than phones, I mean). If you looked at Gweydr's system, I think it having literally four low vowels with [-ATR] and [+ATR] vowels in both the front _and_ the back is so unusual as to almost be impossible. I can see a language evolving all four of those as phonemes rather than them existing of necessity as a part of the vowel harmony system I created. I remember having qualms about this when creating it, but then thought, "Why not?" Not a great example of a system. Or, rather, it's a system that's definitely doomed to reanalysis and destruction. (Would make it fun to have an orthography that still made the distinctions the spoken language no longer did, though.) So for me, the real question with your system is what's going on with the mid vowels?
Kind of. It's called consonant harmony, and the most common place you see it is with sibilants. Let's say you had a suffix that was -as/-aʃ. This is how it would happen: danak + -as = danakas masan + -as = masanas veʃtu + -as = veʃtuaʃ tʃonil + -as = tʃonilaʃ Happens in a few languages. I did in Shiväisith (which is a clue that the word "Shiväisith" itself is a compound, leading to the disharmonic root).
@Rubbedi Bubb Kind of, but not really. They're similar in that they affect vowels, but vowel harmony is usually progressive (i.e. previous vowel affects the following), while umlaut is regressive (i.e. the following vowel affects the previous). Plus, umlaut (as studied in Germanic languages) is triggered by a close vowel /i/ or a semivowel /j/ (for example, PGc. *fuljaną > OE. fyllan).
I'm slightly baffled by both of the last two replies... First, how can you create the grammar without _any_ words? What would it operate on? That's generally not how it works in the real world. The whole point behind evolving a conlang is that grammar itself emerges from lexical material (i.e. grammar comes from words). Every tense affix, every case suffix, every auxiliary-all of this comes from lexical material (i.e. words). Second, Latin and Greek either don't have words which "have to work with grammar", or all languages do. Latin and Greek aren't special. Plus, of course, all languages have borrowings. Those borrowings most certainly do not work with the grammar of the language as intended, but they get borrowed into the language anyway, and speakers have to make do. That in itself is interesting, because it reveals what the grammar does with a token that behaves differently from expectations.
You did great with the pronouncing, except for when you pronounce the Y, it's a very hard and closed U sound, not like the English Y which sounds like i
If I've taken a year of college-level Arabic (which I have), I wouldn't claim to speak it, but I also don't think it's fair to say I've simply studied the grammar.
I was just impressed with the variety of languages you cite as examples. Very often though, linguists can go on and on about, say, Turkish's vowel harmony and amazing agglutinative structure, but don't actually speak a word of Turkish, so
