@@orion410 Me with a native language that already has vowel (frontness + rounding) harmony: I'm going to steal it for a conlang Then my conlang became Thandian 2 (this is unrelated to the vowel harmony, I just included so many phonemes and it had an unnaturalistic orthography where every phoneme corresponds to a letter and vice versa and I made a new one preserving the grammar and only grammar)
Nice video! However, a couple of comments: You miss out nasal harmony, as attested in Guaraní. It's one of my favourite harmony types, and a really good example of how vowel harmony systems interact with consonant harmony systems. Quoting Wikipedia on this: Guarani displays an unusual degree of nasal harmony. A nasal syllable consists of a nasal vowel, and if the consonant is voiced, it takes its nasal allophone. If a stressed syllable is nasal, the nasality spreads in both directions until it bumps up against a stressed syllable that is oral. This includes affixes, postpositions, and compounding. Voiceless consonants do not have nasal allophones, but they do not interrupt the spread of nasality. You don't really talk about suffix-controlled harmony, which is a shame given how common it has been in the development of most Western European languages. The classic example is, I guess, Germanic umlaut, which you kind of refer to in passing but don't highlight as itself being a species of vowel harmony, but it's also been a key stage in the Brythonic Celtic languages (and the Romance languages) as well. It's also really cool for its after-effects, when the triggering suffix is lost through sound-change leaving only vowel alternations behind. Tangentially, it's also worth mentioning that the harmonic pairs don't always have to be monophongs: there are systems in which one of a pair is a diphthong and one is a vowel: so /i/ could harmonise with /əi/. It's rare, but an interesting consequence of some sound changes and seems to be particularly congruent with -ATR systems: compare vowel breaking.
@Some Kind of Master Ah, but there's the difficulty. Is, for example, the interchange between /p/ adjacent to oral vowels and /mb/ adjacent to nasal vowels simply an allophonic effect of the vowel upon the consonant; or is the interchange between /ã/ adjacent to prenasal stops and /a/ adjacent to non-nasal stops an allophonic effect of the consonant upon the vowel? It's difficult to say, therefore in my opinion it's best to see the Guaraní system as not being a species of vowel harmony or consonant harmony, but rather simply a harmony system. My point in raising this being that I don't believe it is possible (or helpful from the point of conlang creation) to see "vowel harmony" and "consonant harmony" as two totally different things, and never the twain shall meet. If you consider the two as separate phenomena rather than holistically: you could end up with a system with (for example), dorsal harmony affecting consonants so that uvulars and velars cannot co-occur within the same domain, and a system of frontness harmony in vowels such that /ɢiqy/ could potentially contrast with /gɯku/, which violates about three fairly basic Greenbergian universals.
Just a quick note that [+ATR] and [-ATR] aren't inherent features of vowels, some languages will pronounce a vowel as [+ATR] and another language will pronounce it as [-ATR] with or without harmony as well; although his classification is common.
It's probably a good way for people who're not used to speaking languages with tongue-root harmony to get a feel for it. Tho /a̘ a̙/ can also sometimes be more similar to [æ ɑ] than [ə a]
For you naturalists: vowel harmony can also be grammaticalized. E.g. in earlier forms of German, the plural of some nouns was marked be a suffix containing [i]. Because of backness vowel harmony, vowel within (monosyllabic) stems became umlauts. (This is a form of vowel harmony in the sense of general metaphony/assimilation of vowels. Sometimes the term "vowel harmony" is used only for progressive vowel harmony (suffixes are changed by the stem), not for regressive vowel harmony (stems are changed by suffixes), which is an umlaut; be careful with the terminology.) Even though suffixes with [i] disappeared in German entirely since then, the umlauts remained and were grammaticalized for plural (and some other stuff), also for nouns which didn't ever had an [i]-suffix. Examples: Haus:Häuser, Baum:Bäume, Apfel:Äpfel, Hut:Hüte.
This isnt vowel harmony. The same process happened in Brythonic languages (known as "affection" rather than "umlaut") giving plurals like car~ceir, cyllell~cyllyll, castell~cestyll, and even mab~meibion. Vowel harmony is like in Finnish where a suffix's vowel will change (i.e. harmonise) with the vowels in the word to which it is suffixed. For example, the -llA suffix can be -lla or -llä: kaura begins with back vowel → kauralla, but käyrä begins without back vowels →käyrällä, but it is the same suffix. Germanic umlaut and Brythonic affection are not "harmony" because 1. the suffix which caused the change is often absent in modern forms; 2. umlaut/affection works from the end of the word backwards through the word (harmony usually goes from start to the end); 3. the suffix which caused the umlaut/affection didn't change to match any feature of the word's root-vowel.
@@entwistlefromthewho I see that there is no vowel harmony in modern German, but the umlauts arose as a grammatical marker because of (backness) vowel harmony (or vowel assimilation) in earlier forms of German. Since many people watching Artifexian's conlanging videos are interested in naturalistic conlanging, I thought they could get inspiration from it; they could develop a protolang with vowel harmony which evolves into a language with grammatical umlauts (or another vowel change).
Opaque vowels can also behave in a way where they don't start their own harmony, but instead just act as to split the domain in two, in case anyone is wondering.
It's worth noting that even Hungarians cannot always agree on vowel harmony for certain words, especially in cases of LOAN words. You see, most old or long ago incorporated roots in Hungarian are in harmony themselves. However, loan words such as Fotel (which comes from French fauteuil (I guess)) are often not in harmony on the root level and this interfere with the Hungarians' learned intuition regarding vowel harmony between roots and suffixes. So it's not that Hungarian vowel harmony is complicated but incorporating foreign words into the language sometimes is.
Finnish too - mostly. For anything Olympic -- tends to go to back-harmony and change y for u. Many loan-words ending with -ääri, -iikka, or -logia tend to be considered compound-like and we already give leave to compounds anyway so no problem there...
Finnish has backness harmony, but it's a bit different than illustrated, in that i and e are considered neutral and can mix with both back and front vowels. The front counterparts of the vowels a, o and u are ä, ö, and y.
@@k.umquat8604No, I'm a Turkish NATIVE speaker and Turkish only has Frontness Harmony: Aa vs Ee Iı vs İi Oo vs Öö Uu vs Üü and Roundness harmony only for high vowels, I think this is what made you think that Turkish has height harmony: İi vs Üü Iı vs Uu
Then there's Khalkha Mongolian, which I have heard described as a front+atr system, from a pure front system, with the old u>ʊ and ø>ɔ (with the pair ɛ and ɑ staying the same and /i/ being neutral) or analyzing the "-ATR" vowels as being centered, so y>ʉ ø>ɞ, again with with the pair ɛ and ɑ staying the same and /i/ being neutral. I used the second interpretation to create one with rounding harmony, too, so old i>ɨ, and I justified the presence of neutral /i/ by saying the original neutral was /ə/, but before the i>ɨ change, /ə/ became a vowel that's somewhere between [ɪ] and [ɘ], and once the i>ɨ change happaned the ɪ~ɘ vowel chainshifted to /i/.
This isn't really relevant to vowel harmony but it is extremely cool: If you do take a high vowel or semivowel and make it -ATR (which can take some practice) then you get overtones rather than normal formants. These appear in numerous musical traditions around the world, such as in Northern Canada, Mongolia, Turkey, and Tibet. This may not be attested in any natlangs, but I know my own conlang isn't the only one to use overtones as the basis of syllable nuclei, and it's a very fun and rich concept to explore.
Excellent video, as usual! I think a good watch after this video would be Joseph Windsor’s talk at the LCC8 (last talk of the first day, available on TH-cam) on feature trees which could help a lot with all this. I believe it could help better visualize the opposition of two sets of vowels, plus it could also introduce some nifty features on top of vowel harmony
There's also something called parasitic harmony, where whether or not a segment can be the target of a harmony depends on the similarity of the target and the trigger before the assimilation.
This was actually really useful for analyzing my conlang's tone sandhi! It's lost all but two tones from the root lang, a neutral and a fry tone, and I didn't have the vocabulary yet to explain how it worked, since I was doing it entirely by speaking gibberish until it sounded right (the remaining fry vowels are all back, but I actually accidentally evolved a fried front ø, I'm going to make that a regionalism). So now I know how to actually explain it - forward tone harmony, clausal (isolating lang), schwas are transparent, front vowels are opaque. You're a godsend.
Finnish vowel harmony is front vs back, but the i and e are both middle vowels and they can occur with either front (a, o, or u) or back (ä, ö, or y) Consider the name of Finland in Finnish: Suomi
I’m an English native speaker but I grew up speaking Hungarian with my family and I’m obviously interested in language. I tried to learn the proper vowel harmony rules (I intuitively know them but I couldn’t explain it) but I always ended up frustrated because the rigid rules just kind of felt wrong and for me producing the harmony just kind of feels like something that happens without rules (I honestly still don’t know which vowels trigger the harmony and which vowels go together). The explanation of Trojan and Hybrid vowels might explain some of my frustration. The example he gave “fotel” is interesting I seem to favor different harmonies for different noun cases, I think with a preference for a over e, ő over ó, e over o, and á over é, but I think some of those depend on context and tone of voice.
Hungarian vowel harmony is great because you have suffixes like _-kor_ that ignore all harmony, suffixes like _-ban/-ben_ that follow frontness harmony but not rounding harmony, suffixes like _-hoz/-hez/-höz_ that follow all harmony, and then there's _-at/-ot/-et/-öt_ which follows all harmony but also does something wonky with back vowel roots that I can't quite figure out.
Nem tudom, ez mennyire releváns, de tudod, hogy egyes magánhangzók miért kötőhangok és nem a toldalék részei? Mert nem következetesek. _köd - ködöt - ködös; föld - földet - földes_ (nem _földös); örömet/örömöt_ (mindkét verziót hallottam már) _ház - házat - házak - házas,_ de _gáz - gázt - gázok - gázos_ Az olyan toldalékok, mint a _-ban, -ben_ vagy a _-hoz, -hez, -höz_ mindig következetesek _(házban, gázban; házhoz, gázhoz)._
Turkish harmony classifies itself as Great Vowel Harmony and Little Vowel Harmony. Great Vowel Harmany says that: a, ı, o, u -> a, ı, o, u e, i, ö, u -> e, i, ö, ü And Little Vowel Harmony says that: a, e, ı, i -> a, e, ı, i o, ö, u, ü -> u, ü Combining then gives: a, ı -> a, ı e, i -> e, i o, u -> u ö, ü -> ü Note: this means that o and ö can only exist in the first syllable.
3:36 What determines whether a vowel is dominant or recessive in a dominant-recessive harmony system? It sounds like quite an interesting type of system!
Como quisiera que alguien de habla hispana pudiera hacer videos como estos... Entiendo algo, pero de lingüística a ingles, de ingles a español, de español a lo que entiendo... :'( How I wish someone Spanish-speaking could make videos like these ... I understand something, but from linguistics to English, from English to Spanish, from Spanish to what I understand ... Gracias por el video!
Image not necessarily a harmony system, but a system where both vowels and consonants change to signify meaning. For instance, maybe 'rock' would be 'kapi', where /k/ signifies naturally occurring, /a/ signifies a large amount of it, /p/ signals it is inanimate, and /i/ signals it is neither (generally) good or (generally) bad. This could be a really cool system. Not very naturalistic, but still very cool, like a highly simplified version of Ithkuil.
I've been working on an Elvish language for some time, and I thought it might be cool if it featured some sort of vowel harmony. Problem is, I really dislike [ø], and I also wanted the language to be front-vowel heavy, so most of the 'classic' systems (Turkish, Finnish etc.) were kinda out of the question. I think I've finally arrived at something I like: So the proto-language had an ATR harmony system with four vowels in each set. +ATR: i, e, æ, o -ATR: ɪ, ɛ, a, ɔ First, i and ɪ merge, resulting in a neutral, transparent vowel. Later on, o raises to u, and later still, gets fronted to y in some contexts. Finally, ɛ and æ merge. As a result, you have one set consisting of e and y/u vs. a and o. The neutral vowel i can occur with either set. Roots containing only i will trigger harmony with the first set (e, y/u). Finally, ɛ does double duty. So there are some affixes with an e/ɛ alternation and some with an ɛ/a alternation. For instance: -le/-lɛ syndele, koralɛ -hɛl/-hal erihɛl, visahal I'm not sure yet what to do with roots containing only ɛ.
Very good video, a while back I made my harmony system but as it has atr and roundedness harmony without backness harmony and restrictions (on just the roundedness) based on backness instead of height it doesn't quite fit to the guiding principles you established, but I think I'll just justify that as naturalistic by saying the roundedness harmony arose real recently and hasn't had much time to round (pun not intended) itself out!
Biblidarion goes into some detail on this and Artifexian mentions it. Dipthongs. Because people are lazy, sounds either merge, or often in the case of end-of-syllable/word vowels, lost. It's typically the first part of a dipthong that sticks around; eg "iu" would eventually turn into "i" whether through merging, or losing the "u" if it's at the end of a syllable/word. So if you have a word like "Peliu" and you lose the end vowels, you get "Peli". And if you add umlaut, that would eventually morph into something resembling "Pili", or possibly "Piliu" and then "Pili". (Take this with a lasts-multiple-months-and-herds-of-deer-sized salt lick)
It seems backwards to me that higher vowels are more likely to be transparent and low vowels are more likely to be opaque. I wonder if there is a phonetic reason for this. (It seems backwards to me because distinctions are much less common in low vowels than in high vowels, so an /a/ vowel could easily be considered both front and back due to a merging of it', already close, front and back versions.)
Thanks a lot for this video! It came at the perfect time! Question: My conlang has three back vowels and two front. Would backness-only vowel harmony work? If so, how would it fit in the basic-counterpart system?
Do labial or labio-dental consonants produce vowel fronting or high vowels, in same way that uvular/pharyngeal/glottal consonants produce vowel backing and low vowels? If so, then using such consonants in a proto-lang would be a useful way to facilitate the creation of harmony systems.
No, because the backing/lowering of vowels due to uvulars is because the tongue moves down and back to produce them. The pulling has to do with the direction the tongue, more specifically the dorsum (which is the part of the tongue where most vowels, palatals, velars, and uvulars are pronounced) and the root (where pharyngeals and low back vowels are pronounced), not how front in the mouth the place of articulation of the consonant is. Bilabial and labiodental consonants are not produced with the tongue at all, so they don't affect vowels in any way unless they are rounded, in which case they might round the vowels only.
Palatals are your go-to consonants for a fronting effect on vowels since your tongue is just below the hard palate when pronouncing front vowels. I am unsure if they cause raising though.
Tbh, I still don't get how to evolve vowel harmony systems. Is it enough to just add an umlaut sound change, or do you need to repeat it several times ? How does it become root controlled later down ? Also, what about affixes that aren't affected by vowel harmony ?
how do vowel harmony systems with backness harmony deal with central vowels? are they put into the front or back categories or are they given their own category?
It does exist, but it really rare cross-linguistically from what I understand. A low back vowel might sometimes drag high front vowels back a bit, but not much, for example: kim-a -> kema. I'm not sure if high back vowels can do this though, but might be fun to experiment with
Low front unrounded vowel is /a/ (as in bite), not /ae/ (as in bat). I understand you want to make it /ae/ because pure /a/ doesn't appear in English but pure /ae/ does, but this is an example and not a language that you want to speak. I know I wrote the letter ash with a and an e. Don't write that in the replies section.
It's usually said that doesn't exist, but recent findings in a language called Leggbó show that it may have vowel length harmony. If you want to evolve one, an easy way would be to start with a vowel system like [ɪ] [iː] [ɛ] [eː] [ɔ] [oː] [ʊ] [uː] [a] or something where length exists, but it isn't phonemic. Start with ATR harmony, and then lose the -ATR / +ATR distinction in a way that still leaves the length distinction, leaving you with [i] [iː], [e] [eː], [o] [oː], [u] [uː] [a]. In this example [a] would be a neutral vowel. Of course you could do this in another vowel system as well
I got a silly question: what happens with prefixes in a language with vowel harmony? Can the harmony be bidirectional? (both regressive and progressive)
Let me try this as a native Finnish speaker.... Epä-järjestys Epä-huomio Sounds like at least in my language it doesn't go backwards. But perhaps others are different.
Your backness harmony and roundness harmony examples were the exact same. Like I get they often come together but you could have thrown an /a/ in there.
Korean language has vowel harmony Positive: ㅏ a ㅐ ε ㅗ o Negative: ㅓ ʌ ㅔ e ㅜ u ㅡ ɯ Neutral(or Negative): ㅣ i Historically It was strictly kept but now It has declined and only left in onomatopoeia
Roundness harmony does not mean all of the letters in a word must be rounded. if a word takes a suffix with closed vowel (u,ü,i,ı), then it is 4 way vowel harmony after o,u, suffix must be u after ö, ü suffix must be - ü after a,ı suffix must be - ı after e,i suffix must be -i but then again this word can take a suffix with open vowel (a,e). then again this word take another suffix with closed vowel, then it will continue with ı,i Gördüklerimi anlattım = i told those that i saw. gör took suffix with closed vowel dük then suffix with open vowel is ler, then suffix with closed vowel im, again closed vowel suffix i gör-dük-ler-im-i
7:13 Edgar! I know where you can get that info. Look for Phonological Typology, by Matthew K. Gordon (2016). It's not an easy reading, but it has all you need in chapter 5. If you can't get it, send me a message.
However, the basic idea is that people tend keep the shape of their mouths after emitting a sound, even with a consonant in between, so the next generation is confused and assumes that blending of sounds is part of the language. So, actually, your idea was right. For linguistics, vowel harmony and umlauts are exactly the same, just more frequent.
I watched the intro to hopefully get an idea of what it is, but in fact, I have no idea what it means for a vowel to be high or rounded or unrounded or why they're called that.
vowels are called according to where your tongue is in your mouth when you say them high, mid, low front, central, back and then each vowel can be further modified by rounding your lips or not
Some languages don't have vowel harmony. English, Chinese (sort of a cheat - it is a monosyllabic language), Japanese, Finnish, Spanish, Polish - none of these languages implement vowel harmony and they work just fine. One could be tempted to say the absence of vowel harmony is the product of creolization (I'm looking at you, English), but Japanese did NOT go through that process. Long and short: not every conlang needs vowel harmony.
I think you've hallucinated someone saying conlangs must have vowel harmony. The video is just an explanation of how it works if you _want_ to include it. > One could be tempted to say the absence of vowel harmony is the product of creolization (I'm looking at you, English) One would be kind of ridiculous to say something like that since English is not a creole.
i genuinely love and use 'ki' a lot when asking questions bcos it reminds me of the Japanese "ka"! When asking questions you usually add ka in Japanese. In Turkish you don't have to add "ki" when asking questions but i add it bcos it sounds cute. Such as; "O ne ki?" instead of "O ne?" Also i feel like the Japanese "a" had turned into "i" in Turkish such as; "Mashta ---> Mishti/Mushtu/Müshtü Ta ----> Ti/Tu/Di/Du/Dü Ka ---> Ki" Mashta and Ta are the past tenses, Mishti and Ti are also past tenses. Ka is used when asking questions, Ki is used when asking questions :) And the reason why there are "mushtu/müshtü/du/dü" etc is bcos of the vowel harmony, which this video talks about :) Note: ş is pronounced as sh so i wrote like that
@@abbeyrhapsody3205 This "ki" comes from the word "erki" in old Turkic. Thats why it does not obey the vovel harmony. İt means like "acaba"(I wonder) in Turkish (An Arabic word) And there are 2 more "ki"s. One from persian (ki) and one suffix (+ki) 😔, they don't care the harmony either.
In the Conlang I've been Working named Novezgo has a special type of harmony it had roundness harmony but vowels shited and caused a special kind of harmony. I call the two types of Vowels Hard/xʲe.ru.fu/ and Soft/ha.nɯ/ and there are also neutals/moi̯/: Soft: a i u e o Hard: ə y ɯ ɜ ɔ neutal: ɨ In Novezgo. Harmony only matters to a single vowel like /ma.kɯ/ is possible but /mu.kɯ/ isn't /mɯ.kɯ/ is also possible
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Thia could not have been released at a better time. This whole week I was puzzling over how to put vowel harmony into my conlang.
same here
@@orion410 Me with a native language that already has vowel (frontness + rounding) harmony: I'm going to steal it for a conlang
Then my conlang became Thandian 2 (this is unrelated to the vowel harmony, I just included so many phonemes and it had an unnaturalistic orthography where every phoneme corresponds to a letter and vice versa and I made a new one preserving the grammar and only grammar)
Nice video! However, a couple of comments:
You miss out nasal harmony, as attested in Guaraní. It's one of my favourite harmony types, and a really good example of how vowel harmony systems interact with consonant harmony systems. Quoting Wikipedia on this: Guarani displays an unusual degree of nasal harmony. A nasal syllable consists of a nasal vowel, and if the consonant is voiced, it takes its nasal allophone. If a stressed syllable is nasal, the nasality spreads in both directions until it bumps up against a stressed syllable that is oral. This includes affixes, postpositions, and compounding. Voiceless consonants do not have nasal allophones, but they do not interrupt the spread of nasality.
You don't really talk about suffix-controlled harmony, which is a shame given how common it has been in the development of most Western European languages. The classic example is, I guess, Germanic umlaut, which you kind of refer to in passing but don't highlight as itself being a species of vowel harmony, but it's also been a key stage in the Brythonic Celtic languages (and the Romance languages) as well. It's also really cool for its after-effects, when the triggering suffix is lost through sound-change leaving only vowel alternations behind.
Tangentially, it's also worth mentioning that the harmonic pairs don't always have to be monophongs: there are systems in which one of a pair is a diphthong and one is a vowel: so /i/ could harmonise with /əi/. It's rare, but an interesting consequence of some sound changes and seems to be particularly congruent with -ATR systems: compare vowel breaking.
This is awesome to know
In Spanish, there is still the breaking from "o" to "ue" in verbs, and in German, umlaut in also done with diphthongs, like "au" and "äu".
Edit: "ue"
@@markschultz2897 doesn't Spanish do "ue" instead of "uo?"
@@ec1480 Oh, right
Although, at a previous stage, it would have been "uo"
@Some Kind of Master Ah, but there's the difficulty. Is, for example, the interchange between /p/ adjacent to oral vowels and /mb/ adjacent to nasal vowels simply an allophonic effect of the vowel upon the consonant; or is the interchange between /ã/ adjacent to prenasal stops and /a/ adjacent to non-nasal stops an allophonic effect of the consonant upon the vowel?
It's difficult to say, therefore in my opinion it's best to see the Guaraní system as not being a species of vowel harmony or consonant harmony, but rather simply a harmony system. My point in raising this being that I don't believe it is possible (or helpful from the point of conlang creation) to see "vowel harmony" and "consonant harmony" as two totally different things, and never the twain shall meet.
If you consider the two as separate phenomena rather than holistically: you could end up with a system with (for example), dorsal harmony affecting consonants so that uvulars and velars cannot co-occur within the same domain, and a system of frontness harmony in vowels such that /ɢiqy/ could potentially contrast with /gɯku/, which violates about three fairly basic Greenbergian universals.
Just a quick note that [+ATR] and [-ATR] aren't inherent features of vowels, some languages will pronounce a vowel as [+ATR] and another language will pronounce it as [-ATR] with or without harmony as well; although his classification is common.
It's probably a good way for people who're not used to speaking languages with tongue-root harmony to get a feel for it. Tho /a̘ a̙/ can also sometimes be more similar to [æ ɑ] than [ə a]
For you naturalists: vowel harmony can also be grammaticalized. E.g. in earlier forms of German, the plural of some nouns was marked be a suffix containing [i]. Because of backness vowel harmony, vowel within (monosyllabic) stems became umlauts. (This is a form of vowel harmony in the sense of general metaphony/assimilation of vowels. Sometimes the term "vowel harmony" is used only for progressive vowel harmony (suffixes are changed by the stem), not for regressive vowel harmony (stems are changed by suffixes), which is an umlaut; be careful with the terminology.)
Even though suffixes with [i] disappeared in German entirely since then, the umlauts remained and were grammaticalized for plural (and some other stuff), also for nouns which didn't ever had an [i]-suffix.
Examples: Haus:Häuser, Baum:Bäume, Apfel:Äpfel, Hut:Hüte.
Like man/men?
@@gunjfur8633 yes, if you extended the rule also to can/*cen and fan/*fen
@@gunjfur8633 This might also be a product of vowel harmony. In German it's Mann/Männer.
This isnt vowel harmony. The same process happened in Brythonic languages (known as "affection" rather than "umlaut") giving plurals like car~ceir, cyllell~cyllyll, castell~cestyll, and even mab~meibion. Vowel harmony is like in Finnish where a suffix's vowel will change (i.e. harmonise) with the vowels in the word to which it is suffixed. For example, the -llA suffix can be -lla or -llä: kaura begins with back vowel → kauralla, but käyrä begins without back vowels →käyrällä, but it is the same suffix.
Germanic umlaut and Brythonic affection are not "harmony" because 1. the suffix which caused the change is often absent in modern forms; 2. umlaut/affection works from the end of the word backwards through the word (harmony usually goes from start to the end); 3. the suffix which caused the umlaut/affection didn't change to match any feature of the word's root-vowel.
@@entwistlefromthewho I see that there is no vowel harmony in modern German, but the umlauts arose as a grammatical marker because of (backness) vowel harmony (or vowel assimilation) in earlier forms of German. Since many people watching Artifexian's conlanging videos are interested in naturalistic conlanging, I thought they could get inspiration from it; they could develop a protolang with vowel harmony which evolves into a language with grammatical umlauts (or another vowel change).
Opaque vowels can also behave in a way where they don't start their own harmony, but instead just act as to split the domain in two, in case anyone is wondering.
Alright, as a Turk I guess I can understand this one better than the other videos lmao
Yea same in Hungary
cool
As a Turk I think he could have done slightly better with the pronunciation but it wasn't the worst…
pıska
@@josefwolanczyk4866 I don’t blame the guy, he doesn’t have to learn the phonology of every language he wants to give an example in
It's worth noting that even Hungarians cannot always agree on vowel harmony for certain words, especially in cases of LOAN words. You see, most old or long ago incorporated roots in Hungarian are in harmony themselves. However, loan words such as Fotel (which comes from French fauteuil (I guess)) are often not in harmony on the root level and this interfere with the Hungarians' learned intuition regarding vowel harmony between roots and suffixes.
So it's not that Hungarian vowel harmony is complicated but incorporating foreign words into the language sometimes is.
Finnish too - mostly. For anything Olympic -- tends to go to back-harmony and change y for u. Many loan-words ending with -ääri, -iikka, or -logia tend to be considered compound-like and we already give leave to compounds anyway so no problem there...
Finnish has backness harmony, but it's a bit different than illustrated, in that i and e are considered neutral and can mix with both back and front vowels. The front counterparts of the vowels a, o and u are ä, ö, and y.
Turkish also has height harmony elements- suffixes with high vowels have a quatrigrade harmony. Suffixes with low vowels have a bigrade harmony.
I thought ä, ö and y were just longer versions of the other vowels?
like ā, ō, ū?
Ie: *Minä* olen
@@k.umquat8604No, I'm a Turkish NATIVE speaker and Turkish only has Frontness Harmony:
Aa vs Ee
Iı vs İi
Oo vs Öö
Uu vs Üü
and Roundness harmony only for high vowels, I think this is what made you think that Turkish has height harmony:
İi vs Üü
Iı vs Uu
@@ZaftrabudaYou have to be really dumb for that
@@mertatakan7591 that's what bro was saying
Then there's Khalkha Mongolian, which I have heard described as a front+atr system, from a pure front system, with the old u>ʊ and ø>ɔ (with the pair ɛ and ɑ staying the same and /i/ being neutral) or analyzing the "-ATR" vowels as being centered, so y>ʉ ø>ɞ, again with with the pair ɛ and ɑ staying the same and /i/ being neutral.
I used the second interpretation to create one with rounding harmony, too, so old i>ɨ, and I justified the presence of neutral /i/ by saying the original neutral was /ə/, but before the i>ɨ change, /ə/ became a vowel that's somewhere between [ɪ] and [ɘ], and once the i>ɨ change happaned the ɪ~ɘ vowel chainshifted to /i/.
Vowel harmony: exists
Uralic and Turkic languages: Is for me?
Estonian decided to drop it though.
Savage Opaque Vowel: "I reject your harmony and substitute my own"
This isn't really relevant to vowel harmony but it is extremely cool:
If you do take a high vowel or semivowel and make it -ATR (which can take some practice) then you get overtones rather than normal formants. These appear in numerous musical traditions around the world, such as in Northern Canada, Mongolia, Turkey, and Tibet.
This may not be attested in any natlangs, but I know my own conlang isn't the only one to use overtones as the basis of syllable nuclei, and it's a very fun and rich concept to explore.
Excellent video, as usual! I think a good watch after this video would be Joseph Windsor’s talk at the LCC8 (last talk of the first day, available on TH-cam) on feature trees which could help a lot with all this. I believe it could help better visualize the opposition of two sets of vowels, plus it could also introduce some nifty features on top of vowel harmony
Found the link: th-cam.com/video/6aaJa__U0wc/w-d-xo.html
There's also something called parasitic harmony, where whether or not a segment can be the target of a harmony depends on the similarity of the target and the trigger before the assimilation.
9:04
He actually pronounced ipa u correctly 🤯
Very few English speakers seem to be able to
He's good is he? :D i find the correct pronunciation of [y] way more impressive. my language has it and its usually what brakes people :D
@@carlstein9278 that is also impressive
I hate the fact that English is missing the regular “u” vowel in favor of that stupid “eewww” sound.
Being able to speak German probably helps.
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 Even though Germans only know the long version.
(2:30) I believe tounge root + rounding is also attested to some extent in Kazakh, which is not in your list of attested harmony pairings.
This was actually really useful for analyzing my conlang's tone sandhi! It's lost all but two tones from the root lang, a neutral and a fry tone, and I didn't have the vocabulary yet to explain how it worked, since I was doing it entirely by speaking gibberish until it sounded right (the remaining fry vowels are all back, but I actually accidentally evolved a fried front ø, I'm going to make that a regionalism).
So now I know how to actually explain it - forward tone harmony, clausal (isolating lang), schwas are transparent, front vowels are opaque. You're a godsend.
Finnish vowel harmony is front vs back, but the i and e are both middle vowels and they can occur with either front (a, o, or u) or back (ä, ö, or y)
Consider the name of Finland in Finnish: Suomi
One of my future conlangs will have vowel harmony, so this comes quite handy!
I really like the graphics at 5:55, honestly made my day.
I’m an English native speaker but I grew up speaking Hungarian with my family and I’m obviously interested in language. I tried to learn the proper vowel harmony rules (I intuitively know them but I couldn’t explain it) but I always ended up frustrated because the rigid rules just kind of felt wrong and for me producing the harmony just kind of feels like something that happens without rules (I honestly still don’t know which vowels trigger the harmony and which vowels go together). The explanation of Trojan and Hybrid vowels might explain some of my frustration.
The example he gave “fotel” is interesting I seem to favor different harmonies for different noun cases, I think with a preference for a over e, ő over ó, e over o, and á over é, but I think some of those depend on context and tone of voice.
Hungarian vowel harmony is great because you have suffixes like _-kor_ that ignore all harmony, suffixes like _-ban/-ben_ that follow frontness harmony but not rounding harmony, suffixes like _-hoz/-hez/-höz_ that follow all harmony, and then there's _-at/-ot/-et/-öt_ which follows all harmony but also does something wonky with back vowel roots that I can't quite figure out.
Nem tudom, ez mennyire releváns, de tudod, hogy egyes magánhangzók miért kötőhangok és nem a toldalék részei? Mert nem következetesek.
_köd - ködöt - ködös; föld - földet - földes_ (nem _földös); örömet/örömöt_ (mindkét verziót hallottam már)
_ház - házat - házak - házas,_ de _gáz - gázt - gázok - gázos_
Az olyan toldalékok, mint a _-ban, -ben_ vagy a _-hoz, -hez, -höz_ mindig következetesek _(házban, gázban; házhoz, gázhoz)._
Thank goodness I've been stressing over this for ages
Great and very intuitive explanations and examples! It really helped me with my conlang
Turkish harmony classifies itself as Great Vowel Harmony and Little Vowel Harmony.
Great Vowel Harmany says that:
a, ı, o, u -> a, ı, o, u
e, i, ö, u -> e, i, ö, ü
And Little Vowel Harmony says that:
a, e, ı, i -> a, e, ı, i
o, ö, u, ü -> u, ü
Combining then gives:
a, ı -> a, ı
e, i -> e, i
o, u -> u
ö, ü -> ü
Note: this means that o and ö can only exist in the first syllable.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA TELL MEMEMEMEMEMEMEM A
> Note: this means that o and ö can only exist in the first syllable.
Nobody tell the word palto "coat" about this.
9:23 Literally the best conlanging advice ever
Aw yeah, been waiting for this one.
Wondering how to do this mere hours ago. Thank you Edgar!
two vowels walk into a baaar
did you just...
@@БранимирНиколов-ж7ф Macedonia?
@@wtc5198 Bulgaria
@@БранимирНиколов-ж7ф Cool. Serbia Here
@@wtc5198 cool
Harmony sounds nice.
Amazing video, thank you for this one.
3:36
What determines whether a vowel is dominant or recessive in a dominant-recessive harmony system?
It sounds like quite an interesting type of system!
Como quisiera que alguien de habla hispana pudiera hacer videos como estos... Entiendo algo, pero de lingüística a ingles, de ingles a español, de español a lo que entiendo... :'(
How I wish someone Spanish-speaking could make videos like these ... I understand something, but from linguistics to English, from English to Spanish, from Spanish to what I understand ...
Gracias por el video!
Hay subtítulos en español si lo necesitas.
Image not necessarily a harmony system, but a system where both vowels and consonants change to signify meaning. For instance, maybe 'rock' would be 'kapi', where /k/ signifies naturally occurring, /a/ signifies a large amount of it, /p/ signals it is inanimate, and /i/ signals it is neither (generally) good or (generally) bad. This could be a really cool system. Not very naturalistic, but still very cool, like a highly simplified version of Ithkuil.
I've been working on an Elvish language for some time, and I thought it might be cool if it featured some sort of vowel harmony. Problem is, I really dislike [ø], and I also wanted the language to be front-vowel heavy, so most of the 'classic' systems (Turkish, Finnish etc.) were kinda out of the question. I think I've finally arrived at something I like:
So the proto-language had an ATR harmony system with four vowels in each set.
+ATR: i, e, æ, o
-ATR: ɪ, ɛ, a, ɔ
First, i and ɪ merge, resulting in a neutral, transparent vowel. Later on, o raises to u, and later still, gets fronted to y in some contexts. Finally, ɛ and æ merge.
As a result, you have one set consisting of e and y/u vs. a and o. The neutral vowel i can occur with either set. Roots containing only i will trigger harmony with the first set (e, y/u).
Finally, ɛ does double duty. So there are some affixes with an e/ɛ alternation and some with an ɛ/a alternation. For instance:
-le/-lɛ
syndele, koralɛ
-hɛl/-hal
erihɛl, visahal
I'm not sure yet what to do with roots containing only ɛ.
just use [œ]
Your vids are really interesting and helpful
Very good video, a while back I made my harmony system but as it has atr and roundedness harmony without backness harmony and restrictions (on just the roundedness) based on backness instead of height it doesn't quite fit to the guiding principles you established, but I think I'll just justify that as naturalistic by saying the roundedness harmony arose real recently and hasn't had much time to round (pun not intended) itself out!
Forgive me if I’m mistaken but I believe ATR + rounding has been attested in some form in Kazakh, so it shouldn’t be a complete crime.
@@gdzephyriac2766 I think kazakh also has backness harmony though, doesn't it?
You could make a video about cross serial dependencies. I‘ve read through the wikipedia article, but I don‘t quite understand it.
5:00 Turkish suffix "-ki" has an opaque "i" vowel. Ex.: aşağı-da-ki-ler-den [a.ʃa.ɯ.da.k̟ʰi.lɛɾ.dɛn]
Besides umlaut, how can you create harmony? Would you want to break the vowels?
Biblidarion goes into some detail on this and Artifexian mentions it. Dipthongs. Because people are lazy, sounds either merge, or often in the case of end-of-syllable/word vowels, lost. It's typically the first part of a dipthong that sticks around; eg "iu" would eventually turn into "i" whether through merging, or losing the "u" if it's at the end of a syllable/word. So if you have a word like "Peliu" and you lose the end vowels, you get "Peli". And if you add umlaut, that would eventually morph into something resembling "Pili", or possibly "Piliu" and then "Pili". (Take this with a lasts-multiple-months-and-herds-of-deer-sized salt lick)
It seems backwards to me that higher vowels are more likely to be transparent and low vowels are more likely to be opaque. I wonder if there is a phonetic reason for this. (It seems backwards to me because distinctions are much less common in low vowels than in high vowels, so an /a/ vowel could easily be considered both front and back due to a merging of it', already close, front and back versions.)
Thanks a lot for this video! It came at the perfect time!
Question: My conlang has three back vowels and two front. Would backness-only vowel harmony work? If so, how would it fit in the basic-counterpart system?
There'd be three more front vowels and two neutral vowels. If you're fronting them, that is
Do labial or labio-dental consonants produce vowel fronting or high vowels, in same way that uvular/pharyngeal/glottal consonants produce vowel backing and low vowels? If so, then using such consonants in a proto-lang would be a useful way to facilitate the creation of harmony systems.
No, because the backing/lowering of vowels due to uvulars is because the tongue moves down and back to produce them. The pulling has to do with the direction the tongue, more specifically the dorsum (which is the part of the tongue where most vowels, palatals, velars, and uvulars are pronounced) and the root (where pharyngeals and low back vowels are pronounced), not how front in the mouth the place of articulation of the consonant is. Bilabial and labiodental consonants are not produced with the tongue at all, so they don't affect vowels in any way unless they are rounded, in which case they might round the vowels only.
Palatals are your go-to consonants for a fronting effect on vowels since your tongue is just below the hard palate when pronouncing front vowels. I am unsure if they cause raising though.
I would expect labials to affect rounding instead,
Thank you this is so helpful!!!!
I've been wondering what this is called in english for a while now
Tbh, I still don't get how to evolve vowel harmony systems. Is it enough to just add an umlaut sound change, or do you need to repeat it several times ? How does it become root controlled later down ? Also, what about affixes that aren't affected by vowel harmony ?
Awesome stuff! Keep it up
how do vowel harmony systems with backness harmony deal with central vowels? are they put into the front or back categories or are they given their own category?
Nice
Does umlaut for the other way around exist? For example, [bu.din] > [bu.dɯn].
That's just backness vowel harmony
It does exist, but it really rare cross-linguistically from what I understand. A low back vowel might sometimes drag high front vowels back a bit, but not much, for example: kim-a -> kema. I'm not sure if high back vowels can do this though, but might be fun to experiment with
would I rather watch the Eurovision or the vowel harmony episode? they both air at the same time
I hope you took the right decision that day
@@justafeather4630 I watched the Eurovision and got very drunk. I'm sorry.
@@siarhian10 besides the drinking part, this is actually what I wanted to hear XD
Just finished my conlang this should’ve been out earlier 😂
ooof :((
This’ll be fun
Edit:this was, indeed, fun
Did the neutral vowel in Finnish and Hungarian appear at a later time?
Low front unrounded vowel is /a/ (as in bite), not /ae/ (as in bat). I understand you want to make it /ae/ because pure /a/ doesn't appear in English but pure /ae/ does, but this is an example and not a language that you want to speak.
I know I wrote the letter ash with a and an e. Don't write that in the replies section.
He is probably using /a/ as [ä], which is pretty common
When will you bring back WorldBuilding????
Great video.
backness harmony is the best flavour
So Good
Vowel harmony?
Mixed!
**smiling in turkish**
I was wondering how to properly remove it from the language.
Vowel length harmony?
It's usually said that doesn't exist, but recent findings in a language called Leggbó show that it may have vowel length harmony. If you want to evolve one, an easy way would be to start with a vowel system like
[ɪ] [iː] [ɛ] [eː] [ɔ] [oː] [ʊ] [uː] [a] or something where length exists, but it isn't phonemic. Start with ATR harmony, and then lose the -ATR / +ATR distinction in a way that still leaves the length distinction, leaving you with [i] [iː], [e] [eː], [o] [oː], [u] [uː] [a]. In this example [a] would be a neutral vowel.
Of course you could do this in another vowel system as well
I got a silly question: what happens with prefixes in a language with vowel harmony? Can the harmony be bidirectional? (both regressive and progressive)
With opaque vowel in the middle - why not?
Let me try this as a native Finnish speaker....
Epä-järjestys
Epä-huomio
Sounds like at least in my language it doesn't go backwards. But perhaps others are different.
The middle a of your "Sahara" is different from the a in your letter "ar"
Your backness harmony and roundness harmony examples were the exact same.
Like I get they often come together but you could have thrown an /a/ in there.
a o u BACK
æ e i FRONT
my conlang
Korean language has vowel harmony
Positive: ㅏ a ㅐ ε ㅗ o
Negative: ㅓ ʌ ㅔ e ㅜ u ㅡ ɯ
Neutral(or Negative): ㅣ i
Historically It was strictly kept but now It has declined and only left in onomatopoeia
I’ve just realized Fenonien apparently has vowel harmony
Ooh tell us!
@@caenieve i ü e ö can not go after o ä ÿ and vice versa...however, u ë a can go after any of em
Roundness harmony does not mean all of the letters in a word must be rounded.
if a word takes a suffix with closed vowel (u,ü,i,ı), then it is 4 way vowel harmony
after o,u, suffix must be u
after ö, ü suffix must be - ü
after a,ı suffix must be - ı
after e,i suffix must be -i
but then again this word can take a suffix with open vowel (a,e).
then again this word take another suffix with closed vowel, then it will continue with ı,i
Gördüklerimi anlattım = i told those that i saw.
gör took suffix with closed vowel dük then suffix with open vowel is ler, then suffix with closed vowel im, again closed vowel suffix i
gör-dük-ler-im-i
A and á aren't the same vowel in Hungarian, á is /a/
oh boy my brain hurts
7:13 Edgar! I know where you can get that info. Look for Phonological Typology, by Matthew K. Gordon (2016). It's not an easy reading, but it has all you need in chapter 5. If you can't get it, send me a message.
However, the basic idea is that people tend keep the shape of their mouths after emitting a sound, even with a consonant in between, so the next generation is confused and assumes that blending of sounds is part of the language.
So, actually, your idea was right. For linguistics, vowel harmony and umlauts are exactly the same, just more frequent.
I watched the intro to hopefully get an idea of what it is, but in fact, I have no idea what it means for a vowel to be high or rounded or unrounded or why they're called that.
vowels are called according to where your tongue is in your mouth when you say them
high, mid, low
front, central, back
and then each vowel can be further modified by rounding your lips or not
Some languages don't have vowel harmony. English, Chinese (sort of a cheat - it is a monosyllabic language), Japanese, Finnish, Spanish, Polish - none of these languages implement vowel harmony and they work just fine. One could be tempted to say the absence of vowel harmony is the product of creolization (I'm looking at you, English), but Japanese did NOT go through that process. Long and short: not every conlang needs vowel harmony.
finnish?
I think you've hallucinated someone saying conlangs must have vowel harmony. The video is just an explanation of how it works if you _want_ to include it.
> One could be tempted to say the absence of vowel harmony is the product of creolization (I'm looking at you, English)
One would be kind of ridiculous to say something like that since English is not a creole.
Yea vowels
3:07 lmao "don't ask" yeah, no need confuse non-Turks with "ki"s," de" s and "mi"s
i genuinely love and use 'ki' a lot when asking questions bcos it reminds me of the Japanese "ka"! When asking questions you usually add ka in Japanese. In Turkish you don't have to add "ki" when asking questions but i add it bcos it sounds cute. Such as;
"O ne ki?" instead of "O ne?"
Also i feel like the Japanese "a" had turned into "i" in Turkish such as;
"Mashta ---> Mishti/Mushtu/Müshtü
Ta ----> Ti/Tu/Di/Du/Dü
Ka ---> Ki"
Mashta and Ta are the past tenses, Mishti and Ti are also past tenses. Ka is used when asking questions, Ki is used when asking questions :)
And the reason why there are "mushtu/müshtü/du/dü" etc is bcos of the vowel harmony, which this video talks about :)
Note: ş is pronounced as sh so i wrote like that
@@abbeyrhapsody3205 i know, im turkish
@@abbeyrhapsody3205 "Ki" being cute is new to me. It's usually an expression of confusion and surprise in questions, or politeness.
@@k.umquat8604 yes i know but i add it if i want to add cuteness :)
@@abbeyrhapsody3205 This "ki" comes from the word "erki" in old Turkic. Thats why it does not obey the vovel harmony. İt means like "acaba"(I wonder) in Turkish (An Arabic word)
And there are 2 more "ki"s. One from persian (ki) and one suffix (+ki) 😔, they don't care the harmony either.
Hungary team let's gooo
🙃
The Turks here just watching this whilst sipping their Çay
ÇAY FOR DE ÇAY GOD
Finnish vowel harmony is indeed a bit confusing
Me sitting here knowing damn well I did not understood anything: ☺️
Wha? 6 hours?
ay 3 hours :)
When the vowels is harmony
200th comment
Pharyngeals actually often front vowels, not back them.
you have an Irish accent
So?
@@Jonas_Marshall nothing just recognised immediately somehow quite like that
@@hexiangwu4571 oh ok 👌🏼
yeeeaahhhh..... Would have to watch that at least another 20+ times to understand half of it.... (fking conlangers!) :-P
Uh-huh, naruhodo. I get it
ohioan gyatt
The "before premiere starts" gang is free to reply to me without consequences
walter
@@siarhian10 true
Europe isn't a proper continent
@@yerdasellsavon9232 Finland does not exist
Before premiere gang! Joined 23 minutes before premier
Uunrounded
I am totally sure that in Polish there is no vovel harmony at all.
`
V
ag
@@siarhian10 I know what I have to do, but I do not know if I have the strength to do it.
In the Conlang I've been Working named Novezgo has a special type of harmony it had roundness harmony but vowels shited and caused a special kind of harmony. I call the two types of Vowels Hard/xʲe.ru.fu/ and Soft/ha.nɯ/ and there are also neutals/moi̯/:
Soft: a i u e o
Hard: ə y ɯ ɜ ɔ
neutal: ɨ
In Novezgo. Harmony only matters to a single vowel like /ma.kɯ/ is possible but /mu.kɯ/ isn't /mɯ.kɯ/ is also possible