Consonant harmony

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Consonant harmony is a type of
"long-distance" phonological
assimilation akin to the similar
assimilatory process involving
vowels, i.e. vowel harmony.

Sound change and alternation

Metathesis (reordering)[show]

Contents
[hide]

Lenition (weakening)[show]

1 Examples
2 See also
3 Notes
4 Bibliography

[edit] Examples
A good discussion of consonant
harmony typology is found in Rose
and Walker's 2004 paper in the
journal Language. "A Typology of
Consonant Agreement as
Correspondence."
One of the more common harmony
processes is coronal harmony.
This type of harmony affects the
coronal fricatives, such as s and sh
in a word, requiring all the coronal
fricatives in the word to belong
either to the +anterior class (s-like
sounds) or the -anterior class (shlike sounds). Such patterns are
found in the Dene (Athabaskan)
languages such as Navajo (Young
and Morgan 1987, McDonough
2003), Tahltan (Shaw 1991),
Western Apache, and in Chumash
on the California coast (Applegate
1972, Campbell 1997), to name a
few examples. In Tahltan, Shaw
shows that the coronal harmony
affects three coronal fricatives, s,

Fortition (strengthening)

Elision (loss)[show]

Epenthesis (addition)[show]

Assimilation[show]

Dissimilation

Cheshirisation (trace remains)[show]

Sandhi (boundary change)[show]

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sh and the interdental th. The following examples are given by de Ruese: in Western
Apache, the verbal prefix si- is an alveolar fricative, as in the following forms:

sik "a container and its contents are in position"

sitd "mushy matter is in position"

siy "a load/pack/burden is in position"

sin "three or more flexible objects are in position"

si "a slender flexible object is in position"

si "a solid roundish object is in position"

sitsooz "a flat flexible object is in position"

siziid "liquid matter is in position"

However, when this prefix si- occurs before a verb stem that contains a post-alveolar
affricate, the si- surfaces as the post-alveolar shi-:

shijaa "three or more solid rigid inanimate objects are in position"

Thus all the sibilant obstruents (fricatives and affricates) in these languages are divided
into two groups, +anterior (s, ts, dz) and -anterior (sh, ch, j). In Navajo, as in most
languages with consonant harmony, there is a constraint on the shape of roots (a wellformedness constraint) that is identical to the harmony process. Thus all roots with
sibiliant affricates or fricatives have the same value for anteriority. Shaw (1991)
provides a phonological analysis of this process, using data from Tahltan.
There are two interesting aspects of this process in Navajo. First, morphemes that
participate are domain specific, only the two rightmost domains are affected (conjunct +
stem). Verbal morphemes from the outer or 'disjunct' domain are not affected by the
process; i.e. the process is morphologically conditioned. Second, the lateral affricate and
fricative (dl, t and ) appear with both values. Young and Morgan (1987) offer an
extensive sets of examples of this type of morpheme alternation in Navajo.
A different example of coronal harmony occurs in Sanskrit, where [n] is retroflexed to
[] if certain consonants precede it in the same word, even at a distance.
Various Austronesian languages exhibit consonant harmony among the liquid
consonants, with [r] assimilating at a distance to [l] or vice versa.
Guaran shows nasal harmony, by which certain affixes have alternative forms
according to whether the root includes a nasal (vowel or consonant) or not. For instance,
the reflexive prefix is realized as oral je- when preceding an oral stem like juka "kill",
but as nasal e- when preceding a nasal stem like nup "hit", where the makes the
stem nasal.
Some Finnish speakers find it hard to pronounce both 'b' and 'p' in foreign words (e.g.
pubi), so they voice (bubi) or devoice (pupi) the entire word. It should however be noted

that the distinction between these consonants is not native to Finnish.[1] Native Finnish
words do not use the letter 'b'.