Harmonia Altaica

The other day (well, a while ago now), I was reading about the Altaic hypothesis and examining a chart of sound changes that included the changes from Altaic to Old Japonic (the ancestor of Japanese, the languages of the Ryukyu islands, and possibly the extinct Gaya language of South Korea). The Altaic hypothesis is that a large variety of language families, of which the most famous is the Turkic and the most vicious is Mongolic, are the descendants of a theoretical language, Altaic, which did not have vowel harmony, but did have features that created vowel harmony in the descendant languages. Vowel harmony, the process by which only certain vowels may appear together in a single word, implies a reduction in the numbers of vowels (since most vowels in a vowel harmony language “pair up”), and the pattern proposed for the creation of Old Japonic halves the numbers of vowels to one low, one mid, one back, and one front. Both the back and the front are intrinsically high. A separate common phenomenon, discouraged and disparaged in that oddball language English, is onomatopoeia, the imitation of the sounds of creatures and phenomena in the words that mean those creatures and phenomena – a good example is Bahasa Indonesia 'susu' 'milk', from the suckling sound of babes.

If Old Japonic had both onomatopoeia and vowel harmony, the extremely high proportion of like vowels in sequence in current Japanese would seem less strange, as would the inability of the earliest phonetic scripts to recognize the true differences in the eight-vowel system of Old Japanese. The Turkic runes, the oldest form of native Turkic writing, incorporate the vowel harmony system into the structure of the mixed alphabet/syllabary, but do so awkwardly and incompletely.