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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: "consonant harmony" Does it exist?
Message-ID: <1995Jan20.035148.17183@midway.uchicago.edu>
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Organization: University of Chicago
References: <D2LuB3.4uv@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <D2nt29.M14@festival.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 1995 03:51:48 GMT
Lines: 38

In article <D2nt29.M14@festival.ed.ac.uk> kthier@festival.ed.ac.uk (K Thier) writes:

>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?

I know it's presumptuous of me to speak for the original poster, but
not *quite*.  What you have just described, i.e. the poetic use of 
similar-sounding consonants, is usually described as 'consonance' 
and is an important feature of traditional Welsh poetics as well.

'Consonant harmony', as the posters have been using it, refers to
a phonological rule by which all consonants in a word *must* share
a certain feature, like palatalisation, voicing, etc.  The term was
coined by analogy with 'vowel harmony', a common feature in languages
of the world.

The difference between this and what you described is that true
consonant harmony should be mandatory, just as true vowel harmony is.
That is, it's not just unpoetic to say *p"aiv"assa instead of 
'p"aiv"ass"a' ("within a day") in Finnish, it's an error.  The rule
is, is one starts out using '"a' (a-umlaut) in a word, one is not
allowed to use an 'a' in it (exceptions are made in the cases of
compound words and foreign borrowings).

Mr. Derzhanski was describing a language which once had vowel harmony,
but this mutated in consonant harmony.  As far as I know, vowel
harmony never existed in any of the Celtic languages and, therefore,
has nothing to do with Goidelic palatalisation.  


-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
