Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 2: Evolving Vowel Harmony in Language 1b

(Yes, I know, I’m explaining Language 1b before I explain Language 1a. But I’d already decided on the naming convention, and this one makes more sense to introduce first.)

In Language 1b, emphasis harmony causes vowels to back. The emphatic vowel [iˤ] goes to [ɯˤ], and the emphatic vowel [aˤ] goes to [ɑˤ]. [a] also changes when not emphatic, going to [ɜ]. (I was initially skeptical of the realism of this last change, but a similar thing happens in Arabic. Many dialects of Arabic have non-emphatic [a] going to [æ] in most environments, and in Tunisian Arabic, it shifts all the way to [ɛ].) None of the vowel changes in Language 1b are affected by stress.

This leaves us with a paradigm that looks like this:

*opaque progressively

†sometimes transparent bidirectionally