Features of Vowel Harmony
Vowel harmony often involves dimensions such as
- Vowel height (i.e. high, mid, or low vowels)
- Vowel backness (i.e. front, central, or back vowels)
- Vowel roundedness (i.e. rounded or unrounded)
- Tongue root position (i.e. advanced or retracted tongue root, abbrev.: ±ATR)
- Nasalization (i.e. oral or nasal) (in this case, a nasal consonant is usually the trigger)
In many languages, vowels can be said to belong to particular sets or classes, such as back vowels or rounded vowels. Some languages have more than one system of harmony. For instance, Altaic languages have a rounding harmony superimposed over a backness harmony.
Even amongst languages with vowel harmony, not all vowels need participate in the vowel conversions; these vowels are termed neutral. Neutral vowels may be opaque and block harmonic processes or they may be transparent and not affect them. Intervening consonants are also often transparent.
Finally, languages that do have vowel harmony often allow for lexical disharmony, or words with mixed sets of vowels even when an opaque neutral vowel is not involved. van der Hulst & van de Weijer (1995) point to two such situations: polysyllabic trigger morphemes may contain non-neutral vowels from opposite harmonic sets and certain target morphemes simply fail to harmonize. Many loanwords exhibit disharmony. For example, Turkish vakit, ('time' ); *vakıt would have been expected.
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