Tongue Root Harmony and Vowel Contrast in Northeast Asian Languages

Abstract

Roughly speaking, the above ten languages can be divided into two groups: the socalled "Paleosiberian" and "Altaic" language groups. Ainuic, Amuric, Kamchukotic, Yeniseic, and Yukaghiric belong to the first group (Comrie, 1981;Vajda, 2009) and Japonic, Koreanic, Monglic, Tungusic, and Turkic belong to the second group. This thesis focuses on the second group, especially Koreanic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages, which have (or once had) a vowel harmony based on tongue root contrast.Turkic languages, another major member of the "Altaic" language group, are widely understood to have a different type of vowel harmony, namely, palatal harmony. They will not be extensively investigated per se, but their vowel systems and harmony patterns will be introduced where a comparison is necessary. Japonic (Japanese-Ryukyuan) languages, on the contrary, will be ignored simply because there is no clear evidence of the existence of vowel harmony in the history of the Japanese language.Note that, although I use the term "Altaic" thoughout the thesis, it is not to be understood as suggesting a genetic relationship among them. 1 Rather, I will use it as a bik-i 'beakie' biʧ-i 'beachie' hus-i 'housie' bin-i 'beanie' ʍil-i 'wheelie' snut-i 'snooty' b. non-high vowel stems gem-e 'gamie' hɜl-e 'hilly' got-e 'goatie' her-e 'hairy' hʌrt-e 'hurtie' post-e 'postie' nel-e 'nailie' bʌk-e 'Buckie' mom-e 'mommy' hel-e 'hailie' baʧ-e 'batchie' tost-e 'toasty' nɛs-e 'Nessie' man-e 'mannie' sɔs-e 'saucy' mɛs-e 'messy' las-e 'lassie' rɔk-e 'rocky' Tongue root harmonyTongue root harmony, also rather inadequately called tenseness harmony, horizontal harmony, relative height harmony, and cross-height harmony in the literature, is based on the opposition between the advanced vs. retracted position of the tongue root.A well-known, or arguably the first known example of a canonical tongue root harmony system (cf. Cenggeltei, 1959) is Igbo, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria (Ladefoged, 1964). As shown in ( 7), the eight simple vowels in Igbo fall into 9 Palatalized and plain consonants contrast only in words with RTR vowels (Svantesson et al., 2005, p. 28).

Vowel dispersion and Kazakh labial harmony

“…Typologically, Kaun connects cross-linguistic patterns of labial harmony with the phonetic properties of round vowels (cf. Cole & Trigo 1988, Nevins 2010, Ko 2012 for analyses without functional grounding).…”

Formalizing modulation and the emergence of phonological heads

“…In addition, it has been shown that ATR increases the bandwidth of F1 (Hess 1992), essentially widening the spectral range of the formant to absorb f0. 13 Tungusic languages have been claimed to exhibit retracted tongue root (RTR) harmony (Ko 2012). From the point of view of MT, RTR might be encoded as a convergence between F1 (which is raised) and F2, or as phonetic prominence associated with higher spectral tilt.…”

Labial harmony in Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolic languages: an element approach

“… 22 It is not immediately apparent that we can derive the difference between Mongolic and Tungusic languages from their vowel inventories, since Khalkha Mongolian (Mongolic) and Classical Manchu (Tungusic) have virtually the same inventories (see also Ko 2012 on this point).…”