The present study comprehensively analyzes vowel harmony as an important phonetic rule in Turkic languages. Recent changes in the vowel harmony potential of Turkic sounds caused by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors were described. Vowels in the Kazakh, Turkish, and Uzbek language were compared. The way this or that phoneme sounded in the Proto-Turkic language and the way it sounds now in each specific language was investigated. The common and distinguishing features of phonemes were specified based on concrete facts. The specificity of sounding of key vowel phonemes was analyzed with regard to the findings of prominent phoneticians. It was found that of the compared languages, only the Turkish and the Kazakh language preserved the classic eight ProtoTurkic vowels. Certain signs of vowel harmony were characterized – tree types of vowel opposition: by backness – front, back, central, by labialization – unlablialized-labialized, by roundness – narrow, wide, and medium. Thus, it i...

The goal of this article is to discuss various approaches to the rendering of vowels in Arabo-Persian loanwords in Karakhanid, Khwarezmian Turkic and Chaghatay. There are two major schools. One is based on the Turkish tradition of a nonharmonic, phonetic reading of Arabic and Persian words well established in high-status Ottoman, the other is based on the Western tradition of phonemic rendering of vowels which in most cases does not make difference between a and ä (e). The Turkish way of rendering is practised by the overwhelming majority of Turkish researchers and some researchers in the West, while the Western approach is followed by European, American and some Russian scholars. The Western tradition is only seemingly harmonic, since – especially in Chaghatay – most suffixes have back vowels. There are also local Turkic schools of reading Chaghatay, such as Uzbek, Tatar, Uyghur, Kazakh and Kirghiz. Of these, it is Kazakh and Kirghiz that are most harmonic, while Tatar resembles Turkish, and present-day Uzbek is based on the current Cyrillic and Roman alphabets which in the rendering of vowels are principally identical and like the Western system do not distinguish the allophones of /a/.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the phonology of Sorani Kurdish which is spoken by the Iranian Kurds and to compare it with English phonology. Here the attention is on Sorani dialect of Kurdish which is spoken at least by 8 million people in Iran and Iraq. Sorani is considered to be written, literal and better to say the standard dialect of Kurdish. Regarding to many problems for Kurdish learners we choose phonological system to be compared with English system because it is more basic and more finite than grammar or lexical systems and therefore more amenable to exhaustive description. The result of our study will help those who are dealing with pedagogical problems, as ELT. The Kurdish phonological description is based on existing data, which are collected and analyzed through some Kurdish native speakers (some high school students, some graduate students in education and elderly people).

The purpose of this paper is to describe the vowel harmony system of the Azeri Spoken in Iran. In order to meet this end, 6 male native speakers of this language were recorded. The speakers spoke four different dialects of this language: Tabriz, Urmia, Ardebil, and Maragheh. Overall, 2262 tokens were elicited, 377 utterances for each of the speakers, 42 of which were excluded due to speech errors. The sound files were annotated manually for the utterance boundaries as well as the trigger and target vowels using PRAAT, and then first and second formant frequencies of the vowels were extracted using a PRAAT script. Next, the acoustic data were analyzed in R. The results yield that there is a backness harmony in all of the four dialects. However, there are significant differences with respect to vowel qualities across the dialects. Moreover, it is revealed that there is a roundedness harmony in all the dialects, yet there are variations depending on the target vowel syllable type and position. More specifically, when the target vowel is in a closed syllable, the vowels [ɯ, u, i, y] alternate depending on the backness and roundness of the trigger vowel. However, the analyses reveal that, in final open syllables, the Ardebil dialect has lost roundness distinction, while in Tabriz and Urmia dialects, only the underlying form of the suffix, i.e. /i/, appears in the surface form. Further analyses show significant differences between final and non-final open syllables in Tabriz dialect, but not for the other three. Based on the results of this study, I argue that prosodic finality plays an important role in the vowel harmony system of three of the four dialects. Finally, I propose a hypothesis to explain a possible process of sound change to account for these dialectal variations.

This study aims to explore the nature of consonant-final Turkish roots that select suffixes with front vowels despite having a back vowel in their final syllable, thus seemingly violating palatal harmony. While there is little controversy that final laterals in such roots are palatalized, opinions vary about the phonetic and phonological nature of the other final consonants. We want to argue that all wordfinal (or occasionally penultimate) consonants of these roots are palatalized, and that this palatalization is the underlying cause of ‘disharmony’. The phonetic evidence supporting our claims comes from an experiment in which we matched 12 irregular roots with their regular counterparts and asked 10 native speakers of Turkish to read these words. We found that, compared to ‘regular’ roots ending with a plain consonant, the final consonants of ‘irregular’ roots have a significantly higher F2. The last vowels of ‘irregular’ roots were also found to have a somewhat higher F2 than the ...