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225 LANGUAGE FILE
Marked vowel types
Marked vowel types were front rounded vowels and back non-low unrounded
vowels. Central vowels were not listed where it was stated that they were
central.
Tone
Different sources give different amounts of information about tone, using
different terminologies. The distinction used here is basically that between register
tone languages and contour tone languages, with tonal accent languages
noted as a third option. ‘None’ is a default marking here.
Rhythm
Very few sources give information on rhythm type, partly because the whole
area is extremely controversial. However, some sources do distinguish
between stress-timed, syllable-timed and mora-timed languages, and the
information has been added where available. The default here is ‘No information’.
Vowel harmony
It is not always clear from descriptions exactly what is involved in vowel harmonic
patterns, some of which are in any case much more pervasive than
others. Any relevant information has been included, though occasionally this
is no more than that there is some vowel harmony operating.
Morphology
Four possible morphological types are marked: isolating, agglutinative,
fusional and polysynthetic (or, of course, some combination of these). Since
a polysynthetic language may be agglutinative or fusional, the label ‘polysynthetic’
may not be maximally clear. In addition, an attempt has been made to
note whether the morphology is word-based or stem-based (Bloomfield
1935); that is, whether there is a form of the word which has no affixes
attached to it, or whether every noun or verb must have at least one affix (e.g.
the case/number suffix on Latin nouns). This was often one of the hardest
questions to answer, not only because the answer is sometimes different for
nouns and verbs, but also because it is often not clear that an affixless form of
some word exists at some point in the paradigm where it is not the citation
form.