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From: kthier@festival.ed.ac.uk (K Thier)
Subject: Re: "consonant harmony" Does it exist?
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Organization: Edinburgh University
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 1995 15:44:32 GMT
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Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk) wrote:
: In article <3f6j6m$8ok@ss1.cam.nist.gov> koontz@cam.nist.gov (John E Koontz) writes:
: >By analogy with vowel harmony, consonant harmony would invoke
: >principles like "all consonants in a word must have the same point of
: >articulation" or "all consonants in a word must have the same voicing."

: I know for a fact that there is at least one example of consonant harmony,
: but I was loath to write about this, because I couldn't for the life of me
: recall the title or the author of the paper where I read it.  The language
: is the one spoken by the Karaim population of (if memory serves) Lithuania,
: and the general idea is that where in the other Turkic languages all vowels
: in the word are *front*, in that dialect all consonants are *palatalised*.
: So that's consonant harmony derived from vowel harmony, so to say.  I was
: hoping someone else would have come across this too and would post some
: more precise information.

Not a clue about any Turkic languages, but your post reminds me of
something:

The living q-Celtic languages (Irish, Scottish-Gaelic, Manx) have
grammatical (phonemic) palatalisatian of consonants as well as fixed
palatalisation in side words, where the consonant was influenced by
palatal vowels. This, as well as other consonant qualities is important
in metrics.
Is this what you are after?
Catriona

