Consonant harmony in Karaim
Andrew Ira Nevins, Bert Vaux
May 2003 

We analyze the system of consonantal harmony involving the feature [back] in the Northwest dialect of the Turkic language Karaim. Karaim (also sometimes called Karaite), is spoken by a small Crimean community whose religious beliefs are traced back to a branch of Judaism which, in the Vth century, rejected the Talmud and pursued a doctrine of sola scriptura. Located for more than six hundred years along the eastern border of the one-time Polish kingdom, due to extensive and prolonged contact with Slavic and Baltic languages, Karaim transphonologized the vowel harmony system to a consonant harmony system. We provide phonetic, diachronic, and phonological analysis of this relativized locality in harmony.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/000491 (please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000491)
Published in:	In Aniko Csirmaz, Youngjoo Lee & MaryAnn Walter (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Altaic in Formal Linguistics, pp. 175-194. MITWPL 46 (2004)
keywords:	relativized locality, karaim, palatalization, consonant harmony, phonology
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