Examples of Diachronic Decay of Vowel Harmony

要旨

Abstract This chapter is concerned with specific cases of diachronical decay of vowel harmony. In total, 18 varieties belonging to 7 language families (Indo-European, Turkic, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Uralic, Japonic, Kawapanan, and Sumerian) are surveyed. In each case, vowel harmony is shown to have been diachronically affected by processes such as sound change involving trigger vowels, sound change involving target vowels, reduction of harmony domain, analogical generalization of counter-harmonic allomorphs of affixes, and language contact (by means of horizontal transmission of disharmonic vocabulary). In some cases, this results in a complete loss of vowel harmony, while in others harmony survives only in a very restricted set of items, or persists in a different form—for example, as a static condition on morpheme structure.

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