Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 1: Proto-phonology, and a Discussion of Emphasis Harmony
Hello! Let’s start this off by looking at the phonology of Language 1-proto:
Phonotactics:
(C)V(C)
permits vowel hiatus up to a sequence of VV
permits word-initial sP sequences, where P is a voiceless plosive
A lot of this is pretty standard: a classic three-vowel system with a length distinction, full series of voiceless and voiced plosives at the three major places of articulation, plus a fourth palatalized place of articulation (though note the alveolopalatal obstruents instead of the more common palatoalveolars). However, you’ve probably noticed the “emphatic” category. Some Afroasiatic languages, such as Arabic, have a series of consonants with a pharyngeal secondary articulation. These consonants are referred to as emphatic consonants, and they derive from a series of obstruents in Proto-Afroasiatic that contrasted with separate voiced and voiceless series, much like the one you see here.
These pharyngealized consonants often have the interesting property of spreading their emphasis to nearby sounds. In some dialects, this may only affect adjacent consonants – in others, it can affect the entire word, in a process called “emphasis harmony”. Even more intriguingly, vowels affected this way tend to change their quality. Sometimes vowels affected this way will back, sometimes they will lower, sometimes they do both. This starts to create something that looks like vowel harmony.
However, there’s nothing happening at the phonemic level. These vowel shifts are purely allophonic, still being determined by the presence of an emphatic consonant. However, if the emphasis distinction were to be lost after emphasis harmony has taken effect, we might end up with a system of actual vowel harmony. In fact, we could end up with several different systems in different descendant languages, depending on how emphasis harmony affected the vowels. The two descendant languages that I’m creating differ in how they handle emphatic vowels, resulting in two very different harmony systems.
In these systems, vowel harmony will spread like emphasis harmony did in the protolanguage, resulting in some unusual properties. Emphasis harmony tends to spread bidirectionally. When it spreads regressively, it is most often unimpeded, but when it spreads progressively, it often is blocked by high front segments. This includes the vowel [i], but also consonants like [j] and even [ʒ]. For this protolang, I’ll follow this pattern. Emphasis harmony isn’t blockable regressively, but is blocked progressively by [iː], [ɕ], [ʑ], [tɕ], and [dʑ]. These patterns will persist into the descendant languages, meaning they’ll end up with vowel harmony being blocked by consonants!
In the next installment of this, I’ll be getting into the actual languages, evolving out vowel harmony systems for two descendent languages. Future posts on this won’t be nearly as research-heavy. Emphasis harmony is a niche enough feature that I thought it merited a fair bit of explanation; most of the other changes won’t have a whole blog post of background.
