Phonetics and Phonology of Transparent Vowels in Hungarian

1. Introduction Vowel harmony is a requirement by which vowels in a certain domain agree in one or more phonetic features. 1 In Hungarian, the feature subject to harmony is the horizontal position of the tongue ([±back]). In many Hungarian roots, vowels in a word are either all front or all back, as in öröm 'joy', város 'city' (umlaut denotes front round vowels, and acute accent denotes length). In such roots, the backness of the suffix vowel is determined by the backness of the root vowels, e.g. öröm-nek 'joy'(dative), város-nak 'city'(dative). In the so-called disharmonic roots, front vowels can combine with back vowels. In these roots, the quality of the root-final vowel determines the quality of the suffix vowel as in parfüm-nek 'perfume'(dative), nüansz-nak 'nuance'(dative). Vowels such as /ü/, /a/ are called opaque, because they block agreement between the initial and the suffix vowels. Certain vowels, however, do not block such agreement: papír-nak 'paper'(dative), kávé-nak 'coffee'(dative). Vowels like /í/ and /é/ are called transparent (henceforth TV)., surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the phonetics of TVs. In line with the current research program on the role of phonetics in phonology (e.g. Steriade 1997), we believe that in order to understand the nature of transparency, both phonetic and phonological data should be studied. In this paper, we report preliminary results from such a study. At a broad level, we argue that phonetic details play a crucial role in determining the nature of transparency as well as the phonological pattern of suffix selection.