Hello! Now that I’ve shown off the protolanguage (and done what was probably a far too lengthy explanation of emphasis harmony), I’m getting into the descendant languages, creating the vowel harmony systems as they evolve from emphasis harmony in the two descendants: Language 1a and 1b.
Language 1b
(Yes, I know, I’m explaining Language 1b before I explain Language 1a. But I’d already decided on the naming convention, and this one makes more sense to introduce first.)
In Language 1b, emphasis harmony causes vowels to back. The emphatic vowel [iˤ] goes to [ɯˤ], and the emphatic vowel [aˤ] goes to [ɑˤ]. [a] also changes when not emphatic, going to [ɜ]. (I was initially skeptical of the realism of this last change, but a similar thing happens in Arabic. Many dialects of Arabic have non-emphatic [a] going to [æ] in most environments, and in Tunisian Arabic, it shifts all the way to [ɛ].) None of the vowel changes in Language 1b are affected by stress.
This leaves us with a paradigm that looks like this:
|
Front |
Back |
|
i, iː¹ |
ɯ, ɯː |
| u², uː² | |
|
ɜ, ɜː |
ɑ, ɑː |
¹opaque progressively
²sometimes transparent bidirectionally
Language 1a
In language 1a, emphasis causes the lowering of vowels. The emphatic vowel [iˤ] goes to [eˤ], the emphatic vowel [uˤ] goes to [oˤ], and the emphatic vowel [aˤ] goes to [ɑˤ]. Unemphatic [a] goes to [ʌ] when short, but it goes to [ɑː] when long. This makes [ɑː] a neutral vowel, and, interestingly, means it’s transparent to vowel harmony – an unusual characteristic for a long low vowel, but one that makes sense given the background history. This leaves us with a system that looks like this:
| High | Low |
| i, iː | e, eː |
| u, uː | o, oː |
| ʌ | ɑ |
| ɑː² | |
¹opaque progressively
²transparent bidirectionally
But wait! There’s a twist!
See, emphasis doesn’t just alter vowel quality – it can alter consonant quality too. Emphatic /kˤ/ often goes to /q/, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that this would impact other velar consonants. If this change occurs after emphasis harmony is established, it could create a velar-uvular consonant harmony system:
proto xaːkˤ > xˤaˤːkˤ > modern χaːq
proto xaːk > modern xaːk
Velar-uvular consonant harmony isn’t common, but it does occur in some Totonacan languages. But what we have here isn’t just velar-uvular consonant harmony – it’s a system of consonant-vowel harmony. Uvulars only occur in words with low vowels, and velars only occur in words with high vowels. This sort of harmony, “faucal harmony”, is very rare, though it occurs in Interior Salish. However, emphasis harmony leaves behind an interesting and (as far as I know) unprecedented property: faucal harmony can occur in words without any uvulars in the stem.
proto tˤuv > tˤuˤv > modern tov
proto tˤuv-ik > tˤuˤvˤ-iˤkˤ > modern tov-eq
I’m not too worried about this, despite its apparent lack of precedent. The sound changes that arrived at this point are all naturalistic, and I don’t think that it would be likely to get removed via assimilation, given the clear link between low vowels and uvulars in other contexts.
This leaves us with two pretty fun vowel harmony systems evolved out of the old emphasis harmony system. The harmony system in language 1b is still pretty bland, but there are things coming that will make it a bit more interesting. For further reading on emphasis harmony and faucal harmony, I recommend Ananian and Nevins’ Postvelar Harmonics: A Typological Odyssey, which goes into far more detail than I can about emphasis harmony in Palestinian Arabic and faucal harmony in Interior Salish. I also recommend Rose and Walker’s Harmony Systems, an excellent guide to consonant harmony, vowel harmony, and vowel-consonant harmony – especially good if you’re considering implementing some type of harmony in your language. In the next installment, I’m going to further complicate the vowels by discussing diphthongs and vowel coalescence!