Vowel harmony: Encyclopedia - Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony (also metaphony) is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels.

Vowel harmony - Explanation

Harmony processes are "long-distance" in the sense that the assimilation involves sounds that are separated by intervening segments (usually consonant segments). In other words, harmony refers to the assimilation of sounds that are not adjacent to each other. For example, a vowel at the beginning of word can trigger assimilation in a vowel at the end of a word. The assimilation sometimes occurs across the entire word. This is represented schematically in the following diagram:

In the diagram above, the V_a (type-a vowel) causes the following V_b (type-b vowel) to assimilate and become the same type of vowel (and thus they become, metaphorically, "in harmony").

The vowel that causes the vowel assimilation is frequently termed the trigger while the vowels that assimilate (or harmonize) are termed targets. In most languages, the vowel triggers lie within the root of a word while the affixes added to the roots contain the targets. This may be seem in the Hungarian dative suffix:

The dative suffix has two different forms -nak/-nek. The -nak form appears after the root with back vowels (a and o are both back vowels). The -nek form appears after the root with front vowels (ö and e are front vowels).

The direction of the harmony assimilation may spread in any direction, from the beginning of the word to the end or from the end to the beginning. Progressive harmony (a.k.a. left-to-right harmony) proceeds from beginning to end; regressive harmony (a.k.a. right-to-left harmony) proceeds from end to beginning. Languages that have both prefixes and suffixes often have both progressive and regressive harmony. Languages that primarily have prefixes (and no suffixes) usually have only regressive harmony — and vice versa for primarily suffixing languages.

Vowel harmony - Features of vowel harmony

Vowel harmony often involves dimensions such as

• Vowel height   (i.e. high, mid, or low vowels)
• Vowel backness   (i.e. front, central, or back vowels)
• Vowel roundedness   (i.e. rounded or unrounded)
• tongue root position (i.e. advanced or retracted tongue root, abbrev.: ±ATR)
• Nasalization   (i.e. oral or nasal) (in this case, a nasal consonant is usually the trigger)

In many languages, vowels can be said to belong to particular classes, such as back vowels or rounded vowels, etc. Some languages have more than one system of harmony. For instance, Altaic languages have a rounding harmony superimposed over a backness harmony.

In some languages, not all vowels participate in the harmony processes — these vowels are termed either neutral or transparent. Intervening consonants are also often transparent. In addition to these transparent segments, many language have opaque vowels that block vowel harmony processes.

Finally, languages that do have vowel harmony sometimes have words that fail to harmonize. This is known as disharmony. Many borrowed loanwords exhibit disharmony.

Vowel harmony - Vowel harmony & umlaut terminology

The term vowel harmony is used in two different senses, explained below.

In the first sense, vowel harmony refers to any type of vowel harmony: that is, both progressive and regressive vowel harmony. When used in this sense, the term vowel harmony is synonymous with the term metaphony.

In the second sense, vowel harmony refers only to progressive vowel harmony (beginning-to-end). For regressive harmony, the term umlaut is used. In this sense, metaphony is the general term while vowel harmony and umlaut are both sub-types of metaphony. (Note that the term umlaut is also used in a different sense to refer to a type of vowel gradation.)

Vowel harmony - Vowel harmony archiphonemes and underspecification

See Neutralization, archiphoneme, underspecification for an explanation of archiphoneme and neutralization with an example of a Tuvan archiphoneme involved in vowel harmony.

Vowel harmony - Examples in selected languages

Vowel harmony appears in almost all Uralic and Altaic languages. Some have speculated that the vowel harmony of the northwestern Finno-Ugric languages influenced the phonological phenomenon of umlaut that most of the living Germanic languages display.

Vowel harmony - Uralic languages

In the Finnish language, there are three classes of vowels -- front, back, and neutral, where each front vowel has a back vowel pairing. Grammatical endings such as case and derivational endings — but not enclitics — have only archiphonemic vowels, which are realized as either A, U, O or Ä, Y, Ö, but never both, inside a single word. From vowel harmony it follows that the initial syllable of each single (non-compound) word controls the frontness or backness of the entire word. Non-initially, the neutral vowels are transparent to and unaffected by vowel harmony. In the initial syllable:

1. a back vowel causes all non-initial syllables to realize with back (or neutral) vowels, e.g. pos+ahta+(t)a → posahtaa
2. a front vowel causes all non-initial syllables to realize with front (or neutral) vowels, e.g. räj+ahta+(t)a → räjähtää.
3. a neutral vowel acts like a front vowel, but does not control the frontness or backness of the word: if there are back vowels in non-initial syllables, the word acts like it began with back vowels, even if they come from derivational endings, e.g. sih+ahta+(ta) → sihahtaa cf. sih+ise+(t)a → sihistä

For example:

• kaura begins with back vowel → kauralla
• kuori begins with back vowel → kuorella
• sieni begins without back vowels → sienellä (not *sienella)
• käyrä begins without back vowels → käyrällä
• tuote begins with back vowels → tuotteeseensa
• kerä begins with a neutral vowel → kerällä
• kera begins with a neutral vowel, but has a noninitial back vowel → keralla

Some dialects that have a sound change opening diphthong codas also permit archiphonemic vowels in the initial syllable. For example, standard 'ie' is reflected as 'ia' or 'iä', controlled by noninitial syllables, in the Tampere dialect, e.g. tiä ← tie but miakka ← miekka.

Vowel harmony is a grammaticalized feature of phonotactics, thus it may not work as expected from pure phonology, as evidenced by tuotteeseensa (not *tuotteeseensä). Even if phonologically front vowels precede the suffix -nsa, grammatically it is preceded by a back vowel-controlled word. As shown in the examples, neutral vowels make the system unsymmetrical, as they are front vowels phonologically, but leave the front/back control to any grammatical front or back vowels. There is little or no change in the actual vowel quality of the neutral vowels.

With respect to vowel harmony, compound words can be considered separate words. For example, syyskuu ("autumn month" i.e. September) has both u and y, but it consists of two words syys and kuu, and declines syys·kuu·ta (not *syyskuutä). The same goes for enclitics, e.g. taaksepäin "backwards" consists of the word taakse "to back" and -päin "-wards". If fusion takes place, the vowel is harmonized by some speakers, e.g. tälläinen pro tällainen ← tämän lainen.

Hungarian, like its distant relative Finnish, has the same system of front, back, and intermediate (neutral) vowels. The basic rule is that words with front ("high") vowels get front vowel suffixes (kézbe in the hand), back ("low") vowel words back suffixes (karba in the arm).

The only essential difference in classification between Hungarian and Finnish is that Hungarian does not observe the difference between Finnish 'ä' [æ] and 'e' [e] — the Hungarian neutral vowel 'e' [æ] is the same as the Finnish front vowel 'ä'.

Intermediate or neutral vowels are usually counted as front ones, since they are formed that way, the difference being that neutral vowels can occur along with back vowels in Hungarian word bases (eg. répa carrot, kocsi car). The basic rule is that words with neutral and back vowels usually take back suffixes (eg. répá|ban in a carrot, kocsi|ban in a car).

The suffix rules for words with both kinds of suffixes are the following:

• The last syllable counts: sofőr|höz, nüansz|szal, generál|ás, október|ben
  • A regular exception is i/í and e/é: they are transparent for the rule, so only the other sounds will be taken into consideration, e.g. papír|hoz, kuplé|hoz, marék|hoz, konflis|hoz
• Some words can take either front or back suffixes: farmer|ban or farmer|ben

While most grammatical suffixes in Hungarian come in either one form (eg. -kor) or two forms (front and back, eg. -ban/-ben), some suffixes have an additional form for rounded vowels (such as ö, ő, ü and ű), e.g. hoz/-hez/-höz. An example on basic numerals:

Vowel harmony - Altaic languages

Mongolian is similar. Front vowels in Mongolian are considered feminine, while back vowels are considered masculine.

Tatar has no neutral vowels. The vowel é is found only in loanwords. Another vowels also could be found in loanwords, but they are seen as Back vowels. Tatar language also has a rounding harmony, but it isn't represented in writing. O and ö could be written only in the first syllable, but vowels they mark could be pronounced in place where ı and e are written.

Kazakh's system of vowel harmony is primarily a front/back system, but there is also a system of rounding harmony that is not represented by the orthography, which strongly resembles the system in Kyrgyz.

Kyrgyz's system of vowel harmony is primarily a front/back system, but there is also a system of rounding harmony.

Turkish has a 3-dimensional vowel harmony system, where vowels are characterised by three features: [±front], [±high], [±rounded].

Turkish has two classes of vowels -- front and back. Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels. Therefore, most grammatical suffixes come in front and back forms, e.g. Türkiyede "in Turkey" but kapıda "at the door".

In addition, there is a secondary rule that i and ı tend to become ü and u respectively after rounded vowels, so certain suffixes have additional forms. This gives constructions such as Türkiyedir "it is Turkey", kapıdır "it is the door", but gündür "it is day", paltodur "it is the coat".

Compound words are considered separate words with respect to vowel harmony: vowels do not have to harmonize between members of the compound (thus forms like bu|gün "today" are permissible). In addition, vowel harmony does not apply for loanwords and some invariant suffixes (such as -iyor); there are also a few native Turkish words that do not follow the rule (such as anne "mother"). In such words suffixes harmonize with the final vowel; thus İstanbuldur "it is İstanbul".

Vowel harmony - Yokuts

Vowel harmony is present in all Yokutsan languages and dialects. For instance, Yawelmani has 4 vowels (which additionally may be either long or short). These can be grouped as in the table below.

In vowels in suffixes must harmonize with either /u/ or its non-/u/ counterparts or with /ɔ/ or non-/ɔ/ counterparts. For example, the vowel in the aorist suffix appears as /u/ when it follows a /u/ in the root, but when it follows all other vowels it appears as /i/. Similarly, the vowel in the nondirective gerundial suffix appears as /ɔ/ when it follows a /ɔ/ in the root; otherwise it appears as /a/.

In addition to the harmony found in suffixes, there is a harmony restriction on word stems where in stems with more than one syllable all vowels are required to be of the same lip rounding and tongue height dimensions. For example, a stem must contain all high rounded vowels or all low rounded vowels, etc. This restriction is further complicated by (i) long high vowels being lowered and (ii) an epenthetic vowel [i] which does not harmonize with stem vowels.

Vowel harmony - Korean

There are three classes of vowels in Korean: positive, negative, and neutral. These categories loosely follow the front(positive) and mid (negative) vowels. Traditionally, Korean had strong vowel harmony; however, this rule is no longer observed strictly in modern Korean. In modern Korean, it is only applied in certain cases such as onomatopoeia, adjectives, adverbs, conjugation, and interjections. The vowel -(ŭ) is considered a partially neutral and a partially negative vowel. There are other traces of vowel harmony in modern Korean: many native Korean words tend to follow vowel harmony such as 사람 (saram), which means person, and 부엌 (Buŏk), which means kitchen.

Proponents of Korean as an Altaic language use the existence of vowel harmony in Korean to support their argument.

Vowel harmony - Japanese

Modern Japanese lacks vowel harmony, but it is evident that such a process must have existed at one time. Linguists point to the word "funabashi" (ship's bridge), which is a compound of "fune" (ship) and "hashi" (bridge). Linguists theorize that the transformation of "e" to "a" is due to a vestigial system of vowel harmony (the voicing of "h" as "b" is due to rendaku). Some linguists present this phenomenon as evidence that Japanese is an Altaic language.

Vowel harmony - Other languages

Vowel harmony occurs in many other languages, such as

• Akan languages,
• several Bantu languages,
• Coeur d’Alene,
• Coosan languages,
• Dusun languages,
• Maiduan languages,
• Nez Percé,
• Nilotic languages,
• Takelma,
• Telugu,
• Utian languages,
• Warlpiri language#Vowel harmony.

Vowel harmony - Other types of harmony

Although vowel harmony is the most well-known harmony, not all types of harmony that occur in the world's languages involve only vowels. Other types of harmony involve consonants (and is known as consonant harmony). Rarer types of harmony are those that involve or tone or both vowels and consonants (e.g. postvelar harmony).

Vowel harmony - Vowel-consonant harmony

Some languages have harmony processes that involve an interaction between vowels and consonants. For example, Chilcotin has a phonological process known as vowel flattening (i.e. post-velar harmony) where vowels must harmonize with uvular and pharyngealized consonants.

Chilcotin has two classes of vowels:

• "flat" vowels [ᵊi, e, ᵊɪ, o, ɔ, ə, a]
• non-"flat" vowels [i, ɪ, u, ʊ, æ, ɛ]

Additionally, Chilcotin has a class of pharyngealized "flat" consonants [ʦˤ, ʦʰˤ, ʦ’ˤ, sˤ, zˤ]. Whenever a consonant of this class occurs in a word, all preceding vowels must be flat vowels.

If flat consonants do not occur in a word, then all vowels will be of the non-flat class:

Other languages of this region of North America (the Plateau culture area), such as St'át'imcets, have similar vowel-consonant harmonic processes.

See also

• Consonant harmony
• Altaic languages
• Hungarian language
• Uralic languages
• Turkic languages
• Turkish language
• Korean language

Vowel harmony - Links

• A Little Close Harmony: Sounds of a language ‘echoing’ each other

Vowel harmony - Bibliography

• Jacobson, Leon Carl. (1978). DhoLuo vowel harmony: A phonetic investigation. Los Angeles: University of California.
• Krämer, Martin. (2003). Vowel harmony and correspondence theory. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Li, Bing. (1996). Tungusic vowel harmony: Description and analysis. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.
• Shahin, Kimary N. (2002). Postvelar harmony. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub.
• Smith, Norval; & van der Hulst, Harry (Eds.). (1988). Features, segmental structure and harmony processes (Pts. 1 & 2). Dordrecht: Foris. ISBN 9-0676-5399-3 (pt. 1), ISBN 9-0676-5430-2 (pt. 2 ) .
• Vago, Robert M. (Ed.). (1980). Issues in vowel harmony: Proceedings of the CUNY Linguistic Conference on Vowel Harmony, 14th May 1977. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
• Vago, Robert M. (1994). Vowel harmony. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 4954-4958). Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Vowel harmony", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki