Author's Corner:
 Vowel harmony in Assamese – do we or should we all know about it?

In many languages it is commonly observed that a sound requires greater similarity to a neighbouring sound. This phenomenon is also widely observed in young children while they acquire a language. I will cite an example I recently heard from a young Assamese child : [namaru] ‘I won’t beat’ (Gloss) was articulated as [mamaru] - in this case, the following /m/ has influenced the preceding /n/ to change to /m/. Parents of young children must have heard plenty of such examples. This is of course child language, and it can be easily attributed to the immaturity of the articulatory system at such a young age (and it can also vary from child to child).

However, when such ‘changes’ are systematically observed in a language then it says something about the organisation of sounds in that language. And when such processes are repeatedly observed in the world’s languages, it says something about the process itself – it means that humans employ such techniques because of certain properties of the process involved – this is also the study of phonology, a field where we try to uncover ‘what lies beneath’ the properties of sounds that humans universally employ to express words and sentences. Another property of the study of phonology is showing how certain sounds form ‘meaningful units’. Note for example in Assamese the difference between /kola/ ‘black’ and /k?la/ ‘deaf’ lies in the difference between the two vowels /o/ and /?/ (/?/ is like the sound of the vowel in English ‘ball’) which alone signifies the difference in meaning between the two words, all other segments (individual sounds) in those two words being the same.

This is where I turn to the process of vowel harmony in Assamese. (However, a word of caution at the outset - I will exclusively discuss the Colloquial Assamese spoken in Eastern Assam, and there may be plenty of dialectal variation in these regions as well). As I have already mentioned /o/ and /?/ are two different sounds in Assamese. Under the influence of vowel harmony /?/ changes to or alters with /o/ (as also /?/ to /e/, but I will not present very complicated details here). Take for instance the verbal root ‘do’ in Assamese which will be represented in IPA as /k?r/. when the inflectional ending /i/ is added, the vowel of /k?r/ changes – it becomes /o/, and the result is the word /kori/ (as in /kam kori/ etc). In /kori/ the first vowel changes from /?/ to /o/. Interestingly, the result of the process produces the same vowel /o/ as in /kola/ ‘black’, instead of the vowel in /k?la/ ‘deaf’. If I have made myself clear, then it should be obvious that this change has been induced the addition of the vowel /i/ to /k?r/. Why does this happen? Phonologists worldwide have no quarrel in agreeing with the fact that /i/ influences the preceding vowel /?/ to change to /o/. This is possible by attributing one of the properties of /i/ to the preceding vowel /?/ (/i/ is a high vowel i.e. it is produced higher up in the vowel space. Consequently, by changing /?/ to /o/, it leads to a change in the height quality of the vowel).