LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Syllabification, Vowel Harmony, Consonant Harmony
17 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Vowel harmony is a huge topic in phonology. It"s likely most or all languages have some kind of harmony, either in verbs or nouns. Say you have 10 vowels in a word, and the first vowel is an e, and the next 9 vowels are all affected. You have the root, and everything is stacked onto it. The crucial thing is that the vowel e here (not. , that thing does not mix with something that is not fronted. They have to comply with the vowel at the top. This is an extreme example, but it shows harmony applies across very long distances. First word harmonizes with second, third word harmonizes with second, fourth word harmonizes with third, etc. It"s not that the fourth word harmonizes with the first (though in practice, it does. Vowel harmony is common among children and adults. It is a lot less common, and it is very restricted.
