Talk:Vowel harmony

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Please fix the part in Turkish, a copied and edited the Finnish version. A more scientific and factually correct version could be there. //Darius'

If you know more, go ahead and fix it! :) --Marnen Laibow-Koser 14:26, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Fixed a typo in Turkish, reworded some of the stuff about language families. --Marnen Laibow-Koser 15:26, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Added a section on Hungarian as well. Will add more as I think of it. --Marnen Laibow-Koser 15:49, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Traces in Korean and Japanese

Apparently there are traces of vowel harmony in Korean and vowel harmony was known to exist in Old Japanese - does modern Japanese contain any traces at all? In any case, it would be very interesting to read about what happened to the vowel harmony in these languages, how much there used to be, and what is still discernable today. — Hippietrail 13:41, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I do not know about vowel harmony in Japanese, but vowel harmony in Korean is still prevalent; though most speakers do not recognise it. Vowel harmony is still followed heavily in certain regional dialects, mostly notably the Gyeongsang Dialect. -- Bezant 17:00, 1 April 2005 (ETC)

I have never noticed anything that could be called vowel harmony in modern Japanese, though I'm certainly no expert on the language. Come to think of it, I can't think of any language with only 5 vowels where vowel harmony is present. Can anyone else? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 16:06, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

In Korean, minus the diphthongs, there are only 6 vowels. I believe that is the closest one could get to finding a language with few vowels and having vowel harmony. -Zippie

I know that ㅐ and ㅔ are written as diphthongs, and I'd assume they're diphthongs in origin, but it seems to me that in the modern language, they function as single vowels (am I right?), bringing the total to 8 vowels. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 05:09, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I do not know for certain whether such a statement could be made. --Zippie

[edit] 5 vowel harmony

Hi. I know 2 languages with only 5 vowels that display vowel harmony.

One is Nez Perce, a Sahaptian language. This language has been discussed quite a bit in linguistic literature, even in Chomsky & Halle's SPE.

The other is Coeur d’Alene, a Salishan language. This language is very cool. It has 2 types, one progressive & one regressive. In the regressive type, the vowels harmonize with "faucal" consonants (i.e. post-velar but pre-glottal). Some info about this language is probably worth mentioning after the article is cleaned up.

Peace. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 05:25, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)

Fascinating. Can you add sections to the article about these languages? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 16:19, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Ok. In due time.... Cheers — ishwar  (SPEAK) 17:47, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)
(should probably put up something about these languages on their own pages, first, though)
Just another interesting tidbit on harmony involving vowels. This occurs in Chilcotin. It is a type of Retracted Tongue Root harmony termed "Vowel Flattening", calling to mind the Coeur d'Alene phenomena. Here vowels are lowered (pharyngealized) due to the influence of underlying "flat" consonants. Some of these flat consonants affect only adjacent vowels, but others force assimilation throughout the entire word. The situation is further complicated by consonant harmony between flat and "sharp" sibilant consonants. (just made a page for this language...) — ishwar  (SPEAK) 07:59, 2005 Apr 16 (UTC)
ok, although a long while has passed, there is now an example of a language (Yawelmani) with 4 vowels with V harmony. it is also nice in that this one is a non-IE minority language. enjoy – ishwar  (speak) 00:17, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] why separate article?

I think that this article should be merged into a harmony article. There also exists tonal harmony (example: Vietnamese). Sometimes the assimilation involves both vowels and consonants, as in Coeur d'Alene. The division into vowel & consonant categories is unnecessary. - Ish ishwar 22:32, 2005 Mar 1 (UTC)

I don't agree:
  1. The phenomenona seem to be unrelated in many cases. Sure, 'harmony' is a common denominator, but we don't merge Major scale, Natural minor, Harmonic minor, etc. either (probably a bad example because those actually seem to be more related to each other). Of course there could happen to be an article tonality talking about the bigger picture (if there is a bigger picture).
  2. If the tonal harmony, consonantal harmony and vowel harmony subjects were all covered comprehensively, the merger of them would be a monstruous big and messy article. The respective subjects merit separate treatment. This article here is in a deplorable state right now, but it has much potential.
In short, it may well be that an analogy can be pointed out in some general article; but I think it would only be confusing to merge all 'harmony' articles. — mark ✎ 00:36, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Well, harmony is often used to generally refer to any long-distance assimilation processes. So, some general linguistics survey books group them together. But, of course, countless numbers of other general linguistics books do not even mention consonant harmony. I have never seen one of these type books mention tonal harmony (but I havent read a lot of these books...).
There is a general scale article on wikipedia. But I do agree that it appropriate to treat the major scale types, minor, major, etc., with separate articles. So, perhaps it is appropriate here, too.
Additionally, I think that much more can be said about vowel harmony than consonant harmony, which is mostly of the sibilant or coronal type (as far as I know). So that is a vote for separate articles, too.
But, I feel that there is a similarity among the various types of harmony that might be worth pointing out. As I mention above, other authors have thought so, too.
Re: the unrelatedness of different harmony types. Would you care to offer an example? I think that this would be a nice discussion note: a compare & contrast.
Thanks for your comment. Cheers! - Ish ishwar 06:26, 2005 Mar 3 (UTC)
I got here a bit late, but I'd like to get an explanation of tonal harmony in Vietnamese. I had never heard of it (unless it's tone sandhi what you're talking about). --Pablo D. Flores 17:42, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Vietnamese doesnt have tone sandhi—tones are not affected by neighboring tones in any environment. What is called tonal harmony is the phonological patterning of tones in reduplication. The tradition analysis of Northern Vietnamese counts 6 tones. These tones are be grouped into 2 registers: (1) "High" and (2) "Low". All reduplicants must be in the same tonal register as the base. This is fairly similar to other kinds of harmony. I will put something in Vietnamese phonology one day (right now I am making pages for Native American languages). But, I have listed all of my sources at the bottom—Pham (2003) is very interesting. Peace. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 05:21, 2005 Apr 1 (UTC)
(P.S. There is a "sticky" issue with these registers, though. Although called "high", the "high" register has 2 tones with high pitch contours and 1 tone with a low pitch contour, and vice versa for the "low" register. So, in other words, a mismatch between phonology & phonetics, which, as you might guess, is what everybody is interested to talk about.)

I am providing below from Crystal (1997) an example of the term harmony to refer to both consonant and vowel harmony. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 17:49, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)

[edit] helpful quotes

Below are some reference that may be helpful in the article clean-up:

  • Crystal, David. (1997). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (4th ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

harmony (harmonic, dis-) A term used in PHONOLOGY to refer to the way the ARTICULATION of one phonological UNIT is influenced by (is 'in harmony' with) another unit in the same word or PHRASE. An analogous notion is that of ASSIMILATION. The two main processes are consonant harmony and vowel harmony. In the typical case of VOWEL harmony, for example, such as is found in Turkish or Hungarian, all the vowels in a word share certain FEATURES - for instance, they are all articulated with the FRONT of the TONGUE, or all are ROUNDED. The subsets of vowels which are affected differently by harmonic processes are harmonic sets. Disharmony (or disharmonicity) occurs when a vowel from set A is (e.g. by SUFFIXATION) in words which otherwise have set B, thus forming a harmonic island (if TRANSPARENT) or a new harmonic span (if OPAQUE). The span within harmony operates (usually the word) is the harmonic domain.


  • Trask, R. L. (1996). A dictionary of phonetics and phonology. London: Routledge.

vowel harmony (also harmony) 2. (also metaphony) Any phonological process in which the quality of a vowel is altered in such a way as to make it more similar to another vowel in the same phonological word: assimilation of non-adjacent vowels. Some analysts restrict the term 'vowel harmony' to instances of left-to-right assimilation, preferring other terms, such as umlaut or affection, for cases of right-to-left assimilation.

metaphony 1. A synonym for umlaut. 2. Any type of assimilation between non-adjacent vowels in a word, including vowel harmony and umlaut. The term is applied both to the historical change and to the resulting alternations. 3. A label applied in a quite bewildering fashion to a wide range of historical changes and synchronic alternations involving vowels, including at least umlaut, vowel harmony, ablaut and such vowel alternations as those in Spanish verbs like pode 'be able', puedo 'I can'. NOTE: The term was originally coined in sense 1, but it is perhaps preferable to restrict it to sense 2, as recommended by Lass (1984: 171-172).

umlaut (in senses 1 and 2, also metaphony) 1. A type of phonological change in which a vowel assimilates in quality to a following vowel, as when pre-Old English *mu:siz (the plural of mu:s 'mouse') developed into *my:siz (the ancestor of modern mice). The term is particularly used with Germanic languages. See also affection. 2. A synchronic alternation in vowels deriving from such a change, as in English mouse/mice.


  • Trask, R. L. (1993). A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics. London: Routledge.

Umlaut A type of inflection by vowel change in the root, as in tooth/teeth and mouse/mice. Umlaut differs from Ablaut only in its historical source, and both terms are usually only used by linguists who are aware of the historical facts.


  • Bussman, Hadumod. (1996). Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics. K. Kazzazi & G. P. Trauth (Transl.). London: Routledge Reference.

vowel harmony
1 In the broad sense, every form of qualitative assimilation between vowels with regard to their place of articulation: e.g. all forms of umlaut. Vowel harmony is an assimilatory process that can be explained phonetically as a way to facilitate articulation.
2 In the narrow sense, qualitative dependence of the suffix vowel on the root vowel, cf. the distribution of the plural allomorph in Turkish {-ler, -lar} in evler 'the houses' and altar 'the horses' and the Finnish case endings {-ssä, -ssa} in Helsingissä 'in Helsinki' and Sakassa 'in Germany'.

umlaut (also vowel mutation)
1 German term for an (anticipated, partial) assimilation of the vowel of the syllable with main stress to the vowel of the following (secondary stressed or unstressed) syllable) (⇒ vowel harmony). A distinction can be drawn between palatalization (or 'fronting'), velarization (or 'backing,' ⇒ secondary articulation), raising, and lowering (⇒ raising vs lowering). The most significant example is i-umlaut, found in all Germanic dialects (with the exception of Gothic), which brought about a palatalization of back vowels and a palatalization and raising of low vowels. English reflexes of i-umlaut can be found in various plural forms (e.g. mouse > mice) and in other cases (e.g. drench < West Gmc. *drankjan). When the conditioners for umlaut disappeared, umlaut became grammaticalized (⇒ grammaticalization, morphologization). This is especially clear in languages such as German, where umlaut plays a role in plural formation (Haus : Häuser 'house : houses') and in derivation (Häuschen 'little house'). A-umlaut, which occurred in various Germanic dialects, is also known as breaking.

[edit] cleaning

hi. so i did some editing. i suggest that the list of examples is bit longish. maybe make some cuts? also it is all from only 3 familes. not very representative of our linguistic planet. i think that we should especially include something from an African language with tongue root harmony, such as Akan.

peace – ishwar  (speak) 01:29, 2005 July 30 (UTC)

[edit] questionable paragraph about Hungarian language

The article states that

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'.

What exactly is meant by this? Though the writing system uses the same letter for both vowels, for example the first and second 'e' in the word ember are clearly pronounced differently (the first one as [æ], while the second one as [e]).

[edit] Too much jargon!!!

There is way too much jargon in this article, much of it not even wikilinked. It is very hard for a non-specialist to decipher. For instance what on earth does "the process degrammaticalizes, becoming pure phonotactics" mean? A bit of jargon, fine. But too much is too much. Ireneshusband 08:50, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The origins of vowel harmony in Eurasia

Why is vowel harmony used across language families in Eurasia? Did the Finns learn it from the Mongols? Or did the Tatars learn it from the Mari? I've wanted to know the answer to this for years. Why does the old Turkish word for iron--timur--not have vowel harmony, when the modern Turkish--demir--does? Ireneshusband 09:59, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Good questions. By the way, vowel harmony is not restricted to Eurasia; it occurs in many indigenous Australian languages, for example. I don't know if it is found in Africa or indigenous America, though. So I take your question as "Why is vowel harmony so widespread?" Although we don't have the complete answer, there are examples of languages in most of the stages of acquiring or losing vowel harmony, so we can put together a sort of "Just So Story". Vowel harmony does not have to be acquired by borrowing. It's reasonably clear in the case of Finnish and Hungarian that their common ancestor (Proto-Finno-Ugric) had vowel harmony, and Finnish and Hungarian both inherited it. The same is true of the common ancestor of the Turkic languages.
Then how does a language that has no harmony acquire it? The process probably begins with assimilation rules: for example, when a suffix containing a front vowel is attached to a stem containing a back vowel, the back vowel may be slightly (and eventually, more than slightly) fronted, in order to reduce the distance the tongue has to travel between the positions of the two vowels. We see this happening in Old English, for example, with the word for "goose". The plural suffix for some nouns, including "goose", had a front vowel. This caused the "o" sound in the Old English goose-word to be fronted and eventually unrounded: we see the results in our modern word "geese". The suffix that caused the vowel-change has been lost, though.
I don't know the specific story behind demir versus timur. Perhaps timur was a loan word in Old Turkish; sometimes loan-words are exempted from harmony rules. ACW 23:26, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] pronunciation of hungarian "e"

Is the Hungarian front vowel "e" pronounced [æ] or [ɛ]? And, is it a front vowel?-- FrostytheSnowman 'sup? 12:13, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vowel disharmony?

If Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process", than vowel disharmony would be a dissimilatory phonological process. Is there something like this amoung natural languages? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gazibara (talk • contribs) 00:10, 11 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] A-mutation

The article on A-mutation is up for deletion unless someone declares an interest in it. Please don't let it go by default - let's have a conscious decision about whether we want it or not. --Doric Loon 20:28, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

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