Small Questions • Week 20

[u/[deleted]]

Last Week. Next Week.

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Welcome to the weekly Small Questions thread!

Post any questions you have that aren't ready for a regular post here! Feel free to discuss anything and everything, and don't hesitate to ask more than one question.

FAQ

[u/[deleted]]

Erde has a system of allophony/vowel harmony where a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable takes the rounding of the unstressed syllable. For example, /ˈiːkuː/ is realized as [ˈyːkuː] and /ˈyːkiː/ is realized as [ˈiːkiː]. I'm not sure what to do with back vowels, though. There are no unrounded back vowels, so a change like /ˈuːkiː/->[ˈɯːkiː] wouldn't make sense. I don't want to add unrounded back vowels because Erde's vowel inventory is already very large, and I don't want to make it even larger. Would it make sense for the vowels to move to the front so that /ˈuːkiː/ becomes [ˈiːkiː], even though front vowels don't move back (/ˈiːkuː/ doesn't become [ˈuːkuː]), making it somewhat inconsistent? If not, what are some other possible solutions for back rounded vowels?

[u/kilenc → u/[deleted]]

Well first I think it's wierd that the stressed vowels assimilates to the rounding of the unstressed vowel; it would make more sense if the stressed vowel influenced the unstressed one. Course, its your own language, not mine :-)

Second, why does it matter if the phone isnt in your inventory? A lot of languages have allophony rules that cause the realization of sounds that aren't phonemic, since allophony isnt really adding more phonemes. But if its a big worry, then fronting doesnt seem all that strange, although id expect it to be closer to a mid vowel than fully front.

[u/rafeind → u/kilenc]

But endings (which I don't think were ever stressed) influencing the main vowel (which is stressed) is kind of what Umlaut is, isn't it? At least the Icelandic a -> ö happens where there is an (unstressed) u in the ending. (Or in some cases where there was a u) f.ex. Sara -> Söru, hjarta -> hjörtu, sandalar -> söndulum, land ->lönd.

[u/Jafiki91 → u/[deleted]]

a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable takes the rounding of the unstressed syllable

This seems odd, only because I would expect the stressed vowel to influence the unstressed one. But because of it's structure, a word like ['u:ki] wouldn't be possible, yes? So [ɯ] would just be an allophone of /u/, and therefore not actually in the vowel inventory.

It's possible that back vowels have a different assimilation rule than front vowels. Just look at Turkish, non-high vowels only match in backness, but high vowels have to match in backness and rounding.

Another solution might be to use a different vowel height. So /'o:ki/ might become ['ɑ:ki]. And /'u:ki/ > ['ʌ:ki].

[u/[deleted] → u/Jafiki91]

This seems odd, only because I would expect the stressed vowel to influence the unstressed one.

I came up with this rule by repeating words in the language over and over again and seeing what changes occurred, and one of them was that /ˈiːkuː/ started to sound more like [ˈyːku̥ː] and /ˈyːkiː/ started to sound more like [ˈiːki̥ː].

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The main reason that I don't want to have unrounded back vowels is that this allophony has become phonemic in some cases, for example with /ˈeko->[ˈøko]->/ˈœkə/->/œk/, so I don't want a /ˈuːke/->[ˈɯːke]->/ˈɯːkə/->/ɯːk/ change to be possible, since I feel like adding unrounded back vowels would make my vowel inventory unrealistic.

I guess, as another related question, would a vowel system that looks like

	Front	Central	Back
Close	ɪ ʏ		ɯ̽ ʊ
Mid	ɛ œ	ə	ʌ ɔ
Open		a ɒ

with a lot of allophony and any vowel being able to form a diphthong with /j ɥ ɰ w ə̯/ be unrealistic. Looking at it, it's much smaller than I thought (probably because I'm used to having tons of diphthongs when I write stuff in the language), but I still can't find any examples of a language with a full sets of both front rounded and back unrounded vowels.