Vowel harmony pls

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ÜberBen
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Vowel harmony pls

Post by ÜberBen »

Hey,
I've started working on pretty much my first conlang and I want to give it a vowel harmony system like Finnish
(Two groups A and B that cannot coexist and a neutral group C).
the phonemic vowels are / i e~ɛ a o~ɔ u y ø~œ ɯ ɤ~ʌ / , plus length.
Can you give me some advice?

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Frislander
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Re: Vowel harmony pls

Post by Frislander »

Go listen to the Conlangery episode on the subject. Then go and listen to all the other Conlangery episodes, because you really should.
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alice
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Re: Vowel harmony pls

Post by alice »

Alternatively, if you're too lazy... you have nine phonemic vowels, eight of which represent the eight possible combinations of front/back, round/unround, and high/mid, while /a/ is neutral. So you need to require the vowels in the suffixes to agree with the vowels in the roots in one or two of these features. You could be interesting and make the harmonising feature height, so a suffix might take /i/ after high vowels and /e/ otherwise.

If you really want something more like Finnish, you'll need to get rid of the back unrounded vowels and add /æ/ as an alternant for /a/.
Zompist's Markov generator wrote:it was labelled" orange marmalade," but that is unutterably hideous.

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