Re: Marked and Unmarked

On Sun, 8 Apr 2001 11:13:19 -0700, jesse stephen bangs
<jaspax@...> wrote:

>Hmmm.  I can't remember which languages you mentioned, but I've heard
>that rounded front vowels are virtually unknown outside of the
>"Franco-Germanic language area," where they can be seen as a
>Sprachbund.  I suppose that
>should be expanded to include Hungarian and Turkish (and other
>Finno-Ugric languages), < ... >
Add Mongolic, Chinese (including most 'dialects'), a portion of Iranian...
and you get most of Eurasia.

>As for unrounded *non-low* back vowels ([A] is pretty common), English has
>them, and I hear that they also occur in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean
>(?), which suggests that they may be a Sprachbund of East Asia.  At any
>rate, in my experience they're even more rare than rounded front vowels.
Again: add Turkic, most of Uralic and Mongolic, virtually all Daic
(including Standard Thai), Chinese (including most 'dialects'), Mon-Khmer;
if you don't mind *central* non-low non-rounded, also a considerable
portion of Austronesian, a few Slavic... nearly all of Eurasia, again.

IIRC, not uncommon in Africa, either. Can't say for the Americas.

Worse, it *must* be so. First, you simply can't do without one of these
categories (front rounded, non-front non-rounded) if you have to
distinguish more than 7 vowel qualities (in fact, you can, but that's
really exotic). So, the presence of [y], [}], etc. is partly a function
of vowel differentiation.

It's the other way round when you consider limited vowel inventories.
Systems of less than 3 vowels seem to be really rare; with 3 vowels,
you'll mostly see the same a-i-u triangle (the farthest points in the
map of available articulations - therefore, best opposed to each other);
other variants are quite exotic, again. But with 4 vowels, the inventory
including a-i-u-@ or somesuch is probably the commonest (IIRC, Javanese,
Malagasy and a lot of other Austronesian langs). OTOH with 5 qualities
the standard a-o-u-e-i is much more common than some A-&-@-u-i or
a-i-y-I-u - perhaps 'cause it's easier to distinguish openness and to
strengthen the non-front quality by combining it with roundedness.
But as soon as you pass the threshold of 6, you have a dilemma: either
you have to deal with minute differences in aperture, or to allow for freer
combination of the row-labialization features. The second looks more
natural.

IMO the only reason why each of the two categories (front rounded,
non-front non-rounded) is *less mandatory* is that normally vowel
inventories incorporate the 'cardinal' triangle a-i-u and tend to be
symmetrical (for a lot of functional reasons).


Basilius

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