Vowel harmony in Yamba

Abstract

Traditionally, when one speaks of Vowel Harmony, one thinks of, for example, Hungarian or Turkish. In such 'traditional' languages, all suffixes harmonize to the root of the word; that is, the vowels of one morpheme are more important than those of the other morphemes and they affect one (or all) of the features of all the other vowels in the word. But in Yamba, the process is somewhat different. Two clitics, one that occurs in noun phrases and one in verb phrases, undergo harmony based on the stem vowel of the head of the phrase. No other clitics or affixes follow this pattern of harmony.