Language 1b’s vowel harmony system was looking pretty boring, so let’s change that by introducing an additional axis of harmony: rounding!
The approach I took to introducing front/back harmony in this language was very non-traditional. The rounding harmony will occur in a much more standard fashion. The roundedness of the vowels [u], [y], [ɞ], and [ɒ] will transmit their roundedness to other vowels in the word. This is, by the way, part of why I introduced the rounded vowels in the last part: I imagine that rounding harmony will happen more easily if rounded/unrounded pairs already exist. Vowels affected by rounding will transform in this way:
i, ɯ, ɜ, ɑ → y, u, ɞ, ɒ
There’s a catch, though – unlike emphasis harmony, which spreads bidirectionally by default, rounding harmony often will only spread in one direction. In fact, emphasis harmony itself may be the result of two different processes, one spreading backwards (regressively) from the emphatic consonant and one spreading forwards (progressively) – which is why it often has different spreading patterns progressively than regressively.
I want to keep vowel harmony bidirectional in this language; the language makes extensive use of both prefixes and suffixes, and I think it would get confusing if they worked too differently. However, I’ll have the progressive spread be halted by the vowel [ɑ] – it’s such an open vowel that you need to move your lips significantly to make the rounded or unrounded version, and since you’re already moving them, you might as well unround them. This wouldn’t happen regressively, because the regressive harmony is based on anticipation of the rounding, not lingering on it.
I also don’t want this harmony to spread from affixes – that would cause all kinds of stuff that, while interesting, is not what I’m trying to do with this language. So instead, I’ll make this stress-dependent. Stress in language 1b always falls on a syllable in the stem (for reasons we’ll get into later), and so the vowel harmony will always be triggered by a stem vowel.
Our final table looks like this:
|
Front |
Back | ||
|
Unrounded |
Rounded |
Unrounded | Rounded |
|
i iː* |
y yː† |
ɯ ɯː |
u† uː† |
|
ɜ ɜː |
ɞ ɞː |
ɑ§ ɑː§ | ɒ ɒː |
* opaque progressively to backing harmony
† sometimes transparent to rounding harmony
§ opaque progressively to rounding harmony
(Note that the long rounded vowels will be transparent to rounding harmony outside the stem if they came from a diphthong. This is weird, and I might change it later, but it was the simplest solution.)
This overall system of vowel harmony might look too clean – there are two basic vowel forms, each one with four potential forms for the four potential combinations of backness and roundedness that correspond pretty exactly on the vowel chart. But I’m fine with this system for this language; the complex spreading rules and multiple hybrid vowels (vowels that are sometimes neutral) make this system weird enough for me. Besides, we can mess it up more in descendant languages.
Again, I have nothing to recommend for further reading, at least apart from what I’ve already recommended – Rose and Walker’s “Harmony Systems” is an excellent overview, and one of the only scholarly works on harmony that I’ve found that was concise and comprehensible to someone without a linguistics degree. That’s all for now! In the next installment, I’ll be giving the consonants some love. (And by “giving them love”, I mean killing a few of them in the name of phonaesthetics.)