Ser wrote: ↑08 Oct 2019 07:40The Halkomelem schwa has a very wide range, both in terms of its conditional environments and also simply as free variation.
Thanks! That's exactly what I wondered about existing, good to know that it's a real thing.
Ser wrote: ↑08 Oct 2019 07:40The researcher published what contained a complaint at some point about the high free variation of the Halkomelem schwa. His consultants apparently would happily pronounce the same word with [ɪ] or [ə] or [ʊ], even repeatedly in a sequence, explaining that the exact vowel sound "didn't matter much"...
Heh, that does sound like a pretty confusing and interesting situation. I kind of wonder how that influences their accents in English... although due to colonialism, there probably aren't any kids growing up monolingual until an old enough age where their accent in English wouldn't be indistinguishable from monolingual English-speakers?
Xonen wrote: ↑08 Oct 2019 12:40Yeah okay, but a lot of this stuff (such as those outdated dialect area maps and the idea of Nordic cooperation) is quite well established and has been in use since Hitler was nothing but a failed artist, so broadly painting it as Neo-Nazi propaganda because... what, some tiny little Neo-Nazi club has recently also started using it in their propaganda?... is still not exactly cool.
I guess, but many of the alt-right types I used to talk to (online, during a period when I was paranoid about radical Islamism, before I realised they don't actually care about freedom of speech, LGBT and women's rights, etc.) were regurgitating it and other shit that painted Finland as Nazi utopia, mostly Swedish-speaking Finns and Swedes who considered Finland identical to Sweden but "pure" or whatever. I know it's just bias from a small sample size and they're not representative of all Swedish-speakers, and there have been Swedes from Sweden I've talked to who haven't been anything like that... and that statistically it'd probably be true that just as many Finnish-speakers are like that... but...
Xonen wrote: ↑08 Oct 2019 12:40Well, Inari Saami has developed a kind of partial harmony, especially between /a/ and /A/, which has nothing to do with any earlier Finno-Ugric harmony - and yes, this applies to any words acquired during the Proto-Saamic period. I can't immediately think of examples with a more well-developed harmony, though.
Interesting, and it being something with just one or two harmonic vowels is actually more like what I was wondering about than whether a more extensive system had redeveloped. For some reason I expected a more limited type of harmony redeveloping to be less likely than full-blown reharmonisation.
Xonen wrote: ↑08 Oct 2019 12:40However, I would note that in, say, Finnic, vowel harmony systems are considerably more extensive than in earlier stages of Finno-Ugric, which tended to have highly limited vowel inventories in unstressed syllables. They're also highly varied; no two Finnic languages, with the possible exception of Finnish and Karelian, seem to have exactly the same system.
Mmh, that's definitely something to consider while conlanging... the problem is that every agglutinative conlang I start making ends up having a vowel harmony system very similar to Finnish and Turkish, and part of the reason I decided the one I'm currently working on should only have /ɑ e i o u/ in the first place was to prevent that; I'm deriving a lot of vocabulary from Proto-Uralic and Proto-Altaic, so not having /ø y/ has had some nice results (and tbh at times I've discarded regular sound changes in favour of cuteness and/or "commonism", if that's a word), but the "NEEDS FRONT ROUNDED VOWELS"-itch is starting again because the homophones are starting to pile up.
One of the reasons I'd like to add /ə/ with extensive allophony, or /*ə/ that phonemically merged into every other vowel under different circumstances but remained /ə/ under very limited conditions is that it could be used as a loophole to allow disharmony even in ancient words before the main disharmonisation and in spite of possible reharmonisation (by being perceived as distinct until then?), but if I added /ø y/, that would amost certainly be highly unrealistic no matter what justification I tried to come up with... eh.
Xonen wrote: ↑08 Oct 2019 12:40Vowels in general tend to change quite a lot, so I would sort of expect that any changes radical enough to first erase and then redevelop vowel harmony would also pretty much harmonize any words acquired in the interim - but the new system of harmony is unlikely to be exactly identical to the old one.
Hmm, maybe "the new system is different from the old one" could be exactly the "justification" needed for the conlang, if I end up adding /ø y/ after all; even though I really like them, it'd make the phonology less similar to Japanese, and even more importantly more like the SAUAL (Standard Average Ural-Altaic language) which would be pretty boring... not that it's not a boring SAUAL anyway, but... I guess I'll just keep resisting the urge to add /ø y/ for as long as I can, haha.
And now it's entirely off-topic, because the implied follow-up questions that I don't even want to ask are all about conlanging... not that this is the first time in this thread's history that that has happened by any means, but well.