Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 103. kötet (2006)

Tanulmányok - Tamás Ildikó: The Lule Saami vocalism 7

The Lule Saami vocalism "Why there is no vowel harmony in Lappish" was the title of a 1976 paper by István Bátori. His opinion - that there is no vowel harmony in the Saami (Lappish) language - is widely accepted among Finno-Ugrists even today. In this paper I will try to prove that there is vowel harmony (at least) in the Lule Saami-dialect. I think that in the Lule dialect of the Saami language the vowels of the first syllable are conditioned by the vowels of the second syllablle - not only historically, but by means of two different kinds of vowel harmony processes in present-day Lule Saami, too: (a) a very limited progressive á-harmony, and (b) a general regressive height harmony. Among the Saami dialects, Lule Saami is in an endangered position, with less than two thousand speakers. In spite of this, research on this dialect is not very intensive and no detailed description of Lule Saami phonology has been provided to date (as opposed to most of the other Saami dialects). Certainly, this study can only be the starting point of this work. In this paper I will make an attempt to present the paradigmatic vowel alternations observable in the first and second syllables in Lule Saami that may seem to be chaotic at first sight. Phonological descriptions of the vowel system have already been made in the case of most Saami dialects; however, Lule has been left out so far (Itkonen, E. - Itkonen, T. - Korhonen - Sammallahti 1971, Sammallahti 1998). Therefore, the description of the Lule Saami vocalism cannot simply be regarded as something imperfect, but rather as something totally missing. From the literature which formed the basis of this research I can only mention three works - a descriptive grammar, a practice book and a monograph giving a general introduction to Saami dialects - that tangentially deal with vowel alternations in Lule Saami, but the background of this phenomenon is not mentioned at all in any of them (Spiik 1977, Nyst0 - Johnsen 2001, Sammallahti 1998). For establishing the sound values of phonemes, I used some tape recordings and was helped by two Lule Saami informants, one of whom is a co-author of the practice book referred to above (Nysto - Johnsen 2001). In this paper I attempt to prove that it is not just historically the case that the quality of the vowel in the second syllable has influenced that of the vowel in the first syllable - similarly to Permian languages - but we cannot ignore this Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 103: 7-25.