Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

This durational skewing effect allows us to understand why, stronger direction of
coarticulation aside, Vowel 1 of a Turkic word might still be less likely to assimilate to
Vowel 2 than vice-versa.
All the foregoing, however, buys us no more than a single sound change: Vowel 2
assimilates to Vowel 1 in frontness/backness in Pre-Proto-Turkic. But this alone cannot
be the full story. I am also less than sanguine about the plausibility of an analysis in
which word-domain harmony is brought about gradually by the methodical creep of
palatality across from left margin to right in the word. Rather, the sound change described
here must account for only the first step in the rise of Turkic vowel harmony. The
remainder of the process would then have to be analogical in nature.
This idea receives support from the fact that the overwhelming majority of roots
reconstructed for Proto-Turkic are either one or two syllables in length. Trisyllabic roots
are shadily attested at best (Johanson 1998) 130 . Assuming also the possibility of the
addition of suffixes to the root in questions, we must bear in mind crucially the following
word-forms in any discussion of the emergence of vowel harmony:
(49) Some Crucial Proto-Turkic Word Shapes 131
a. [[CV.CV] root]
b [[CV] root[CV] suffix]
c. [[CV.CV] root[CV] suffix]
130 Calculations done by Kemal Oflazer in fact suggest that the mean number of syllables per word in
running text in Modern Turkish may not be any greater than this (Sharon Inkelas, p.c.).
131 These representations are highly schematic and not meant to imply consideration of open syllables only.
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