Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 103. kötet (2006)
Tanulmányok - Tamás Ildikó: The Lule Saami vocalism 7
phenomenon1 in a synchronic description, either. The literature does not list the Saami language among languages with vowel harmony, which is quite justified in the case of most dialects (cf. Bátori 1976: 276, 178-280). In Lule Saami, however, I believe that the existence of two types of vowel harmony can be proved: a limited progressive a-harmony,2 and another, more wide-spread, regressive one according to vowel height. In the final part of this paper I demonstrate a vowel alternation pattern that was previously not very much taken into account, together with my tentative description of the background of this phenomenon. 1. Lule Saami vowels Lule Saami vowels can be classified in terms of four different tongue heights and two places of articulation. The inventory of Lule Saami vowels contains eight vowels and three diphthongs (completed by two further diphthongs with a weaker status, which, however, are not regarded as independent vowels but as variant pronunciations of the mid vowels3 ). The orthography established in 1982 is phonematic, so one does not always get a real notion of the precise phonetic values of the individual phones. Furthermore, the fact that there are phonetic and phonological differences across Lule Saami subdialects has the result that not all graphemes have the same sound value over the whole dialect area.4 (One has to reckon with similar problems in every Saami dialect, cf. Lakó 1986, 28.) 1 In ancient Lappish there used to be palatovelar harmony as well, which was gradually replaced by height harmony that became dominant in forming first syllable vocalism. In most dialects both types of harmony have disappeared. In the history of the Lappish language, first and second syllable vocalism has a well-known correlation, the first syllable vowel fitting into the vocalism of the second syllable in terms of height, e.g., о > uo in the case of -e stems and о > oa in the case of -a stems, cf. Finnish lohi (lohe-) ~ (Northern) Lappish luossa 'salmon' and Finnish oksa > (Northern) Lappish oakse 'branch'. 2 My own term. 3 In this case, the use of the term 'diphthongoid' (as opposed to 'diphthong') has a theoretical rather than practical reason. The aim is a clearer and easier separation of diphthongs appearing in first and second syllables that behave in totally different ways. 4 The Lule Saami dialect can be divided into four subdialects: Northern (N), Central (C), Southern (S) and Western (W). The major differences among the vowel inventories of the subdialects are as follows (Sammallahti 1998: 21-22): - N-C: á in the second syllable, due to ä in the first syllable (because of rounding and height harmony) undergoes an á > á change: N-C jähttät ~ S-W jáhttát С [e:] and [o:] (long monophthongs) - in N oa and ea diphthongs: С ähpav [o:hpav] ~ N oahpav, С kehkat [ke:hkat] ~ N keahkat
