Vowels

Vowel Harmony

With exceptions, native Saakviü words follow a system of vowel harmony, where in, for the most part, roots exclusively choose either of two (or arguably three( sets of vowels.

• High-class vowels: /i y ɨ u iː yː ɨː uː/ and diphthongs /iu iy ui yi/;

• Middle-class vowels: /ə/ and diphthongs /eu ou øu øi/;

• Low-class vowels: /a e ø o aː eː øː oː/ and diphthongs /ai ei oi au/.

Though largely not considered to be a separate class, middle-class vowels can go with either high- or low-class vowels and largely apply harmony rules to the final mora of the vowel nucleus itself (e.g. /eu/ might warrant high-class due to /-u/).

Harmonic Correspondence

Harmonic Correspondence is the morphological process by which a morpheme is transformed from one harmonic series into the other. Each vowel nucleus (monophthong, long vowel, or diphthong) has a unique corresponding partner in the opposite series.

With some exceptions, most Saakviü words can either be classified, under harmonic correspondence, as either high-class (H) or low-class (L). Under this classification it is therefore defined that for every H-vowel, a corresponding L-vowel (and vice versa) will replace it based on HC rules below:

HC-1: derivational or declension morphemes undergo harmonic correspondence according to the lexical harmony class of the noun.

HC-2: derivational suffixes marked [+HC] undergo harmonic correspondence.

HC-3: morphemes marked [–HC] are invariant.

Harmonic correspondence as a morphological aspect ignores middle-class vowels (M) as a category, hence /ə eu ou øu øi/ remaining invariant.

The correspondence between H-Lvowels is, respectively: