What is vowel harmony?
Posted: 12 Sep 2017 04:30
I've spent about 5 hours listening to David J Peterson explain vowel harmony on conlangery but I till have no clue what it is .
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sangi wrote:On the other hand, if the initial vowel is /a/, then the high vowel should be /ɯ/ (although I think I might be wrong on that last bit).
This is the simplest way to view it. Vowel harmony is long distance assimilation where the the quality of a vowel is affected by other vowels in the word to make them more similar with each other in one way or another. What quality or qualities get affected is a matter of choice and different languages have different types of vowel harmony. The typical types have already been mentioned above (frontness, rounding, tongue retraction etc.), including the common inclusion of neutral vowels that don't participate in the harmony themselves.sangi39 wrote:Putting it simply, it's a long-distance assimilatory process in which the vowels in a word should belong to the same "class" as each other.
After writing this, I want to add that it's also possible to have more limited forms of vowel harmony where the only thing that matters for the harmony of a vowel is the immediately preceding vowel and nothing further than that. In Laal there's vowel harmony that turns the vowels /ə/ and /o/ into /ɨ/ and /u/ when the preceding vowel is one of /i ɨ u/. The rule doesn't go any further than that and any other combinations of /ə o/ and /i ɨ u/ occurring in the same word are totally fine. Furthermore, the rule only applies to suffixes and within word roots even combinations of high vowels followed by /ə/ or /o/ are possible, as shown by the example word sugo in the Wikipedia article.gach wrote:The usual way is to look at preceding vowels so that the vowel in a suffix is affected by all the vowels that have already appeared in the word. In this case the first (non-neutral) vowel in the word decides the harmony pattern of the whole word.
I want to thank everyone for clearing this up for me. But especially sangi39's example.gach wrote:sangi39 wrote:
meri
"sea"
merta (irregular back variant)
mer-tA
sea-PART
"(of the) sea"
meriä
mer-i-A
sea-PL-PART
"(of the) seas"
meressä
mere-ssA
sea-INE
"in the sea"
The notation A corresponds here to the a ~ ä (= /ɑ ~ æ/) vowel harmony pair. There's no obligation to look at any of the more complicated patterns in vowel harmony, but they are an interesting direction to explore if you decide to do so.
What is the vowel inventory like? Are you thinking /a e i o u y/? This vowel system is (used to be?) popular amongst new conlangers, although I couldn't tell you why.Ehesh wrote:One question though, Would it be to weird I make a 6 vowel conlang where vowel harmony only occurs on two vowels i >> Y?
DesEsseintes wrote:Ehesh wrote: However, I could imagine a system like /a e i o y/ where there originally was rounding harmony in high vowels only (as in Turkish), and then /u/ fronted to /y/.
Alternatively, if you really want /u/, you could say that it only occurs in root syllables, and causes rounding harmony (i.e. takes /y/ affixes). I actually have something similar going on in my conlang Sōkoan.
Hmmm... I don't think having vowel harmony there would be such an issue. What you could say is that at an earlier stage you had /i y u e ø o a/, with /i e a/ as neutral vowel, /y ø/ as front vowels and /u o/ as back vowels with front-back vowel harmony similar to Finnish. Then you could have /ø/ merge into /e/.Ehesh wrote:DesEsseintes wrote:Ehesh wrote: However, I could imagine a system like /a e i o y/ where there originally was rounding harmony in high vowels only (as in Turkish), and then /u/ fronted to /y/.
Alternatively, if you really want /u/, you could say that it only occurs in root syllables, and causes rounding harmony (i.e. takes /y/ affixes). I actually have something similar going on in my conlang Sōkoan.
I was thinking in /a e i o u y/ and maybe /ɜ/. I want 7 vowels. But Im worried that if I get vowel harmony i'm gonna screw it up
Hm, why do you say that? Having /a e i o u y/ and harmony affecting only the pair /u y/ seems very natural to me.DesEsseintes wrote:What is the vowel inventory like? Are you thinking /a e i o u y/? This vowel system is (used to be?) popular amongst new conlangers, although I couldn't tell you why.Ehesh wrote:One question though, Would it be to weird I make a 6 vowel conlang where vowel harmony only occurs on two vowels i >> Y?
If you want harmony to only affect /i y/ I would personally avoid having other high vowels. By that I mean, I wouldn't include /u/, because it would feel asymmetrical to me personally to have vowel harmony only affect front high vowels.
However, I could imagine a system like /a e i o y/ where there originally was rounding harmony in high vowels only (as in Turkish), and then /u/ fronted to /y/.
If I understood OP correctly he didn't want /u y/ to form a harmonising pair, but /i y/.Porphyrogenitos wrote:Hm, why do you say that? Having /a e i o u y/ and harmony affecting only the pair /u y/ seems very natural to me.DesEsseintes wrote:What is the vowel inventory like? Are you thinking /a e i o u y/? This vowel system is (used to be?) popular amongst new conlangers, although I couldn't tell you why.Ehesh wrote:One question though, Would it be to weird I make a 6 vowel conlang where vowel harmony only occurs on two vowels i >> Y?
If you want harmony to only affect /i y/ I would personally avoid having other high vowels. By that I mean, I wouldn't include /u/, because it would feel asymmetrical to me personally to have vowel harmony only affect front high vowels.
However, I could imagine a system like /a e i o y/ where there originally was rounding harmony in high vowels only (as in Turkish), and then /u/ fronted to /y/.
Oooh, okay. Well, hm, that could happen too, I think - just have /u/ extend rounding harmony rightward to all other high vowels (i.e. /i/), perhaps blocked by /e/. Eventually it would become phonemic after words started appearing with just /y/ and no /u/ - like if a word /ukil/ became /ukyl/ and then after initial vowel dropping became /kyl/.DesEsseintes wrote: If I understood OP correctly he didn't want /u y/ to form a harmonising pair, but /i y/.