Loss of vowel harmony?

[Porphyrogenitos]

Does anyone know if there there any examples of Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, or other languages that have lost a system of vowel harmony? What sort of vowel changes might result from/lead to such a loss?

[linguoboy]

Korean is an example. Hard to say what the cause might be, but it is significant that the Sino-Korean component of the vocabulary is massive (comparable to the Latinate element in English) and ignores the rules completely (outside of a few nativised borrowings). Early Modern Korean also went through an extensive vowel shift which changed what was probably a simple front-back contrast into something more complex and all dialects except Jeju lost the "light" vowel arae-a which variously merged with either the "light" vowel /a/ or the "heavy" vowel /u/ (the "heavy" counterpart of arae-a). There are still many speakers who prefer "light" allomorphs of verbal endings after stems with /a/ or /o/, but increasingly the tendency in Seoul speech is to use "dark" allomorphs everywhere.

[gach]

Vowel mergers are the easiest way to accomplish this. Much of Uralic doesn't have a working vowel harmony and the most accessible case of harmony loss within the family is Estonian. There the full nine vowel system /a ɤ æ e i o u ø y/ has collapsed into the standard five vowel system /a e i o u/ in unstressed syllables making vowel harmony defunct in the process.

A couple of forms of Mongolic have collapsed their entire vowel system into a five vowel one. Dagur for example has the significant mergers /y ø/ > /u o/ > /u/ and /u o/ > /ʊ ɔ/ > /o/ containing the so called rotation of the rounded vowels and their eventual mergers. Loss of the original harmonic pairs *u ~ *ü and *o ~ *ö is exactly what's driven vowel harmony loss in the Mongolic family.

[vokzhen]

As for results, which granted I know little about and it's mostly from Korean and a couple of Niger-Congo languages that have partially lost ATR harmony, it's by and large as linguoboy said. There's no major vowel changes or anything triggered specifically by losing vowel harmony, merely that certain forms of affixes are preferred over others. Perhaps one set becomes attached to certain words, rather than phonological categories, so that later mergers mask the reason and you get assigning of words to one affix or another, just as non-harmony-related sound changes can create different inflection classes by disrupting older, phonologically-predictable alternations. Korean does have y ø > ɥi we, which I guess might be in part because vowel harmony is no longer applying pressure to keep /y ø/ intact.

[linguoboy]

Korean does have y ø > ɥi we, which I guess might be in part because vowel harmony is no longer applying pressure to keep /y ø/ intact.

It's questionable whether Korean has ever had /y/ and /ø/. Martin phonemicises these as /wi/[*] and /oi/, respectively, which reflects both the etymological spelling and their present realisations according to most speakers. They are both treated as "heavy" vowels for the purposes of vowel harmony, but as mentioned above this is the unmarked category.


[*] Technically a simplification of */wui/ since he uses the digraph /wu/ for the high back rounded vowel in order to distinguish it from /u/, its unrounded counterpart.

[Particles the Greek]

Estonian???

[linguoboy]

Estonian???

[Trebor]

Estonian???

What is this a picture of?

(My screenreading program, Jaws, doesn't describe images.)

[Pabappa]

It is a picture of former Prime Minister of Estonia Mart Laar. Seemingly a rather funny looking fellow, the kind who would just get laughed at if he tried to run for office in the USA.

[Porphyrogenitos]

Thanks for the responses, everyone! And yeah, I guess I forgot about Estonian.

[linguoboy]

It is a picture of former Prime Minister of Estonia Mart Laar. Seemingly a rather funny looking fellow, the kind who would just get laughed at if he tried to run for office in the USA.

You mean a country where this man is governor of our 11th most populous state?

[Trebor]

It is a picture of former Prime Minister of Estonia Mart Laar. Seemingly a rather funny looking fellow, the kind who would just get laughed at if he tried to run for office in the USA.

Ahh, tänan* for the explanation.

*Estonian for "thank you".

[CatDoom]

I imagine that prime ministers would tend to be somewhat less photogenic than American presidents, since they're not directly elected.

Then again, anyone can take the occasional bad photo:

[vtardif]

For the record, Trebor, linguoboy's image was of Chris Christie making a ridiculous expression, and Catdoom's was of John F Kennedy staring into the distance looking dazed.

[Trebor]

For the record, Trebor, linguoboy's image was of Chris Christie making a ridiculous expression, and Catdoom's was of John F Kennedy staring into the distance looking dazed.

Thanks for the heads-up. If only the ZBB had an "add caption" feature...