Chris in the Weeds

Thoughts from Esoteria

Vowel Disharmony

This one isn’t a long one, but I found an interesting case of active vowel disharmony in Nora England’s grammar of Mam, a Mayan language. Most cases I know where vowels actively dissimilate are raising of adjacent vowels in hiatus, e.g. in many Basque dialects the article -a triggers raising of an immediately preceding vowel, as in seme-a “son-the” = semia. But this is not the case in Mam, where a number of causative suffixes have vowels of the opposite backness to the vowel of the preceding syllable in a non-hiatus environment.

In England’s survey, the most frequency of these suffixes was –pii (after o, u) vs –puu (after i, e, a), with 3/42 exceptions that failed to show disharmony.

Excluding vowels in hiatus, vowel disharmony still seems like a relatively rare process which is generally restricted to specific morphemes when it does occur, but it’s still interesting to discover examples.

2 responses to “Vowel Disharmony”

  1. sansdomino avatar
    sansdomino

    Reminescent of a small detail in the formation of the past stem of verbs or plural stem of nouns in Finnish (or all of Finnic actually, both formed with *-j): in bisyllabic stems, when the stem vowel is /a/, this turns into /i/ when following stressed (1st-syllable) /o u/, versus /oi(C)/ ~ /oj(V)/ when following stressed /a e i/. E.g. mutka ‘turn’ with partitive plural mutkia, but matka ‘travel’ : matkoja.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. chrisintheweeds avatar
      chrisintheweeds

      Interesting! On a slightly unrelated matter, since you seem to know a lot about Finnic and maybe other Uralic languages, to what extent does vowel harmony extend to clitics? Googling suggests it does in Finnish, but I’m not sure how typical of other vowel harmony systems that is.

      Like

      Reply

Leave a comment