Early Evidence for Vowel Harmony in Tibetan

Abstract

It is to Yuen Ren Chao that we are indebted—among so many other things—for the first modern phonetic description and phonological analysis of a spoken Tibetan dialect; in this pioneering work of his with a Lhasa speaker he noted a number of alternations in vowel quality that seemed to run counter to the generally regular one-to-one correlation to be observed between the vowels of the Tibetan written language and the vocalization of the modern dialects. Chao's work on that occasion was by and large limited to a description of the reading pronunciation for a text in the written language, and hence it then appeared to him possible to treat these alternations as the result of differences in tempo or even as simply fortuitous; but subsequent work with speakers of the same language, involving living speech rather than the reading of literary texts, has shown that the phenomenon which Chao noticed and so meticulously recorded in his early publication is instead part of a widespread process of vowel assimilations which at least in Lhasa Tibetan operates in certain morphemes in a fashion regular enough to merit the designation ‘vowel harmony’.

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