- R. Jakobson, G. Pant, and M. Halle, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (Cambridge, 1952), p. 42.
- Thus, e.g., the regularity of vowel harmony in Turkish is obscured by the presence of a large number of Arabic and Persian loan words which do not show vowel harmony. R. Lees, The Phonology of Modern Standard Turkish (Indiana University Publications, Vol. 6 of the Ural and Altaic Series, The Hague, 1961), p. 14, is certainly correct in requiring a “diacritic” to distinguish native from borrowed morphemes. In Finnish, the harmony is obscured not only by foreign loans but also by certain suffixes which must be specially treated; cf., e.g., the suffix -lainen with grave a in both tuollainen ‘that kind of’ and tuollinen (sub-standard tälläineri) ‘this kind of’.
- In this article phonological representations are given in terms of feature complexes. For discussion of the feature theory used here, see Jakobson, “Observations sur le classement phonologique des consonnes,” Selected Writings (The Hague, 1962), I, pp. 272–279; Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, Preliminaries-, Jakobson and Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956); N. Chomsky, “Review of Fundamentals of Language,” International Journal of American Linguistics XXII (1957), 234–242. The letter symbols used throughout this article have no status in themselves and are to be considered abbreviations for distinctive feature complexes; thus a is an abbreviation for
- This method of describing vowel harmony is used in standard works on Classical Mongolian; see, e.g., N. Poppe, Grammar of Written Mongolian (Wiesbaden, 1954), K. Grønbech and J. Krueger, An Introduction to Classical (Literary) Mongolian (Wiesbaden, 1955). N. Trubetzkoy, Grundzüge der Phonologie (Göttingen, 1958) used this method to describe vowel harmony in Mongolian (p. 104), in Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages (pp. 88, 93, 95), and in other languages such as Ibo, Lambda, etc. (pp. 250–251).
- In formulating rule (1) we have followed the conventions outlined by M. Halle, “Phonology in Generative Grammar,” Word XVIII (1962), pp. 54–72. For discussion of the use of variables in phonological rules, see M. Halle, “A Descriptive Convention for Treating Assimilation and Dissimilation,” Quarterly Progress Report No. 66 (Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT), July, 1962, pp. 295–296, and T. Bever, “Formal Justification of Variables in Phonemic Cross-classifying Systems,” Quarterly Progress Report No. 69 (Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT), April, 1963, pp. 200–202.
- Although the description given here is synchronic, it is interesting that Proto- Mongolian contained two diffuse, non-flat (unrounded) vowels—grave i which occurred only in words with grave vowels, and acute i which occurred only in words with acute vowels. See Poppe, Grammar, p. 11, and Grønbech and Krueger, An Introduction, p. 18. For further discussion of the vowel f in Proto-Mongolian, see §2 below.
- F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris, 1960), p. 315, used this description of vowel harmony in Ural-Altaic languages.
- A variant of the method given below may be found in Z. Harris, “Phonemic Long Components,” Structural Linguistics (Chicago, 1951), pp. 125–149. 3-w.
- In a formal description, rules (la) and (lb) will be somewhat differently stated. We assume as a fact about language that each phonological segment of a word is associated with the abstract markers of the root. Since this is a general statement about language, independent of any one individual language, it may be stated once in the meta-theory of grammar and need not be stated in the individual grammars of each language. Given this, rules (la) and (lb) assume the following form:
- A formal statement of rules of this type for Turkish is given in Lees, The Phonology, pp. 53–54.
- M. Halle, “Questions of Linguistics,” Nuovo cimento, N. 2 del Supple mento al Vol. 13, Serie X, 1959, p. 514.
- Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, Preliminaries, p. 41.
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