Vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian

Vowel harmony involves the systematic correspondence between vowels in some domain for some phonological feature. Though harmony represents one of the most natural and diachronically robust phonological phenomena that occurs in human language, how and why harmony systems emerge and decay over time remains unclear. Specifically, what motivates harmony decay and the pathways by which harmony languages lose harmony remains poorly understood since no consistent historical record in any single language has yet been identified which displays the full progression of this rare sound change (McCollum 2015, 2020; Kavitskaya 2013, Bobaljik 2018). In this paper, I explore the progression and causation of vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian (c 1100–1350). Using a grapho‐phonologically tagged database of a sample of 13th‐ to 14th‐century manuscripts, I present novel corpus methods for tracking and visualising changes to vowel co‐occurrence patterns in historical records, demonstrating that the Old Norwegian corpus provides a consistent and coherent record of harmony decay. The corpus distinguishes categorical pre‐decay harmony, probabilistic intermediate stages, and post‐decay non‐harmony. Across the Old Norwegian manuscripts, we observe a variety of pathways of harmony decay, including increasing harmony variability via the collapse of harmony classes introduced by vowel mergers, the lexicalisation of historically harmonising morphemes, and trisyllabic vowel reductions which limit harmony iterativity. This paper provides the first detailed corpus study of the full spectrum and causation of this rare sound change in progress and provides valuable empirical diagnostics for identifying and analysing harmony change in contemporary languages

Historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence test the phylogenetic inference of Viking-Age plant use

In this paper, past plant knowledge serves as a case study to highlight the promise and challenges of interdisciplinary data collection and interpretation in cultural evolution. Plants are central to human life and yet, apart from the role of major crops, people–plant relations have been marginal to the study of culture. Archaeological, linguistic, and historical evidence are often limited when it comes to studying the past role of plants. This is the case in the Nordic countries, where extensive collections of various plant use records are absent until the 1700s. Here, we test if relatively recent ethnobotanical data can be used to trace back ancient plant knowledge in the Nordic countries. Phylogenetic inferences of ancestral states are evaluated against historical, linguistic, and archaeobotanical evidence. The exercise allows us to discuss the opportunities and shortcomings of using phylogenetic comparative methods to study past botanical knowledge. We propose a ‘triangulation method’ that not only combines multiple lines of evidence, but also quantitative and qualitative approaches. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’

A reanalysis of abstract contrasts and opacity in Bondu-so tongue root harmony

This paper explores a number of controversial consequences of previous abstract analyses of Bondu-so (Dogon) vowels and vowel harmony, particularly for the explanation of phonological opacity. Bondu-so has been characterised as displaying asymmetrically-patterning bidirectional harmony, a four-way [ATR] contrast on mid-vowel suffixes, and abstract [±ATR] contrasts on high and low vowels which display distinct phonological behaviours but which never surface, being absolutely neutralised (Hantgan & Davis 2012). I show that each of these unusual generalisations stems from the crucial mischaracterisation of underlying vowel contrasts and the direction of harmony in surface-ambiguous data. With a re-classification of the data, Bondu-so harmony patterns are characterisable as regular, derivationally transparent leftwards [RTR]-harmony with harmonically neutral non-contrastive high and low vowels – requiring no abstract contrasts, directional harmony asymmetries, or opacity of any kind. Following this non-abstract reanalysis, Bondu-so is revealed to be typologically and theoretically fully consistent with other harmony languages. This review of Bondu-so vowel patterns represents therefore an important contribution to the “abstractness controversy” – revealing important analytical and methodological issues in abstract approaches to phonological opacity