Phonologia & Morphologia [antikvár]

Daniel Abondolo LondonProto-Uralic Vocalism Revisited: Evidence from Centre and Circumference0. Background. This paper is an interim report on work in progress. The woric is an attempt at reconstructing and accounting for synchronic inventories of earlier stages of Khanty and Mansi (hereafter: Ostyak and Vogul). The immediate goal is the clarification of the cladistic status of these languages and of their putatively closest congener, Hungarian. (These three branches, together with Permian, may be seen as forming the innovative centre of the Uralic explosion.) A ftirther goal is the re-examination of some of the assumptions which underlie the mainstream (UEW) and more recent (Sammallahti, Janhunen; Tálos) reconstructions of proto-Uralic.My method's focus is on the vocalism. I assume that vowel rotation (see below at 1) has operated repeatedly in the prehistories of (a) Ostyak and Vogul and (b) their subsequent dialectal breakup and, in some cases, convergence.Full supportive material and detailed discussion will follow in a separate publication. Here there is room for no more than a telegrammatic presentation.1.0Vowel rotation. The leitmotiv of the work summarized here is the assumption that, ceteris paribus, stressed vowels change not at random, but according to a hierarchy of tendencies such that (a) short low vowels lengthen, (b) long low vowels rise, (c) long high vowels shorten, and (d) short high vowels fall. Expressed iconically: -L > =L >=|=>-p> 1 For a concise exposition see Tálos 1983; greater detail, with full argumentation, may be found in Donegan 1978.1.1Vowel colour. I follow Donegan 1978 in her phonetically crude but phonologically compelling classification of vowels according to their 'colour' as follows. Chromatic vowels, i.e., those possessing a colour, are classified as (a) palatal (e.g., i e a), (b) lip-rounded (e.g., u o a), or (c) both (e.g., ü ö o). The remaining vowel-types are achromatic, i.e., they are neither palatal nor lip-rounded (I ë a). The primary divide is thus between the achromatics (i ë a) versus all the rest; note the independent support of the evidence and arguments presented by Tálos 1983.410 and 1984.93, and see below at 3.2 for relevance to the present topic.2.0 Proto-inventories. I follow Honti 1982, 26 for the inventory, but not the origins, of a vowel system with only two phonological tongue-heights in p[roto-]V[ogul]:(H)''ii *aa(Hü)m^aa^uu/ /1 ik iitd^