Perhaps I'm not educated in this subject, but if vowel harmony means "all the vowels in a word to be members of the same subclass" then does this mean that English has vowel harmony too? For instance, words like lambaste, parka, almost, also, dollar/scholar/colour (AUS/UK English), eerie, collage/montage, follow/swallow/hollow, finish, folklore, borrow, moron, ardor, although, diminish, etc....use the same vowel class in their pronunciation or spelling. Isn't that a "vowel harmony", in a way? Or am I missing something?
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13No, English doesn't have vowel harmony. Vowel harmony isn't some words happening to only have vowels of one class, but a requirement that all words must have vowels of only one class. Most commonly, this requirement is only strictly enforced in inflectional endings, while roots can sometimes break it; for instance, loanwords in Finnish often break vowel harmony (like miljonääri ‘millionaire’, which has the back vowel o in an otherwise front-vowel-only word, etc.).– Janus Bahs JacquetCommented Dec 20, 2016 at 8:11
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6No, they're just an incidental case of words only containing front or back vowels. Vowel harmony refers to the requirement that all words in a language must only contain one class, not incidental cases where individual words do.– Janus Bahs JacquetCommented Dec 20, 2016 at 8:20
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5You may find it helpful to take a look at Turkish, which does have vowel harmony. Turkish has 'back' vowels and 'front' vowels and if the vowel of the first syllable of a word is a back vowel, so too are the vowels of subsequent syllables. And if the vowel of the first syllable is a front vowel, so too are the following ones. link– BillJCommented Dec 20, 2016 at 10:26
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5Interesting question, even if the answer is "No."– MickCommented Dec 20, 2016 at 11:53
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1A subtle form of vowel harmony might exist, for example to explain why certain diphthongs (au) are allowed and others (ao) are not. (It might be overly harsh to say that ao is not allowed; it simply doesn't appear to exist, or is at least extremely rare or restricted to loan words.)– chepnerCommented Dec 20, 2016 at 15:30
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3 Answers
We do have incidents of vowel harmony, although it is not so developed as to be a part of our actual formal grammar or phonology. I.e., there are no rules dictating it, but it does exist as a phenomenon.
One example that came up for me recently was when I did a reading for some people in Turkey of all places. :-) There was a sentence that ended, “…the importance that owning a vehicle plays at every stage of life.” Somebody there objected to my reading of “at” as “et”. Yet this is what most speakers of American English would do except when reading very slowly and distinctly for a non-native speaker.
On the other hand, if the word “at” came after a low back vowel like “row,” we’d pronounce it closer to “at.”
Contrast:
There’s a row at the back. There’s a tree at the end of the street.
Most speakers will pronounce something closer to “tree it the end of the street.”
Because nobody does it deliberately, we rarely even think about it, but actually pronouncing “the tree at…” feels odd in exactly the same way as “Izmir’a” would feel in Turkish. (The correct form would be “İzmir’e” (“to Izmir”).
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Very interesting answer. Who knew after 7 years the right answer will come by. I think this is called vowel assimilation? Or, rather, stress timing (vowel reduction). But this suggestion of yours does have a sense of "vowel harmony".– E.GroegCommented May 9 at 11:45
English doesn't have vowel harmony.
"Vowel harmony" refers to situations where there is some process that changes vowels to be in the same class as other vowels in the word, and/or there is a constraint against having vowels of different classes in a word.
You can see examples of vowel harmony processes in Turkish on e.g. this web page: Vowel Harmony (some examples: the plural of kedi is kediler, the plural of kuş is kuşlar).
Processes like this may be explained in terms of a "constraint"; vowel harmony constraints often also seem to show up separately in base vocabulary e.g. there are few native Finnish roots that contain both front and back vowels. In many (perhaps most? I don't know) languages with vowel harmony, this constraint is violable and "disharmonic" words with vowels from conflicting classes do exist. In particular, it seems compound words are rarely subject to vowel harmony constraints (they aren't in Finnish or in Turkish), and loanwords may not be subject to vowel harmony constraints. But there's a difference between having a violable constraint, and not having any apparent constraint at all.
This is just a general summary. I am not an expert, and even experts still have much to learn about the specifics of what vowel harmony is. Here are some more detailed explanations and discussions:
"Vowel Harmony: Statistical Methods for Linguistic Analysis", Rebecca Knowles
Formal and Cognitive Restrictions on Vowel Harmony, Sara Finley (Google Books)
Effects of contrast recoverability on the typology of harmony systems, Gunnar Ólafur Hansson
English doesn't have any processes or constraints like this (as far as I know) so it does not have vowel harmony.
There aren't any English suffixes that use different vowels depending on the vowels in preceding syllables, and there aren't any general restrictions based on vowel class of which vowels can co-exist in an English word.
The suffix -y found in messy is pronounced the same in the words foamy, woody, warty, hearty which all have different vowels.
The English language doesn't have vowel harmony. If it did, pronunciations of many words would be different.
You would still bequeath, but probably botrothe yourself rather than betrothe, and while a lioness would remain a lioness, a goddess would perhaps be a goddoss. (Source)
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