Open AccessVisualizing Vowel Harmony
Author(s) -
Thomas Mayer,
Christian Rohrdantz,
Miriam Butt,
Frans Plank,
Daniel A. Keim
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
linguistic issues in language technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1945-3590
pISSN - 1945-3604
DOI - 10.33011/lilt.v4i.1223
Subject(s) - vowel harmony , vowel , linguistics , mid vowel , turkish , computer science , harmony (color) , variety (cybernetics) , natural language processing , mathematics , speech recognition , artificial intelligence , physics , philosophy , formant , optics
This paper deals with vowel harmony from a cross-linguistic perspective, with the aim of visualizing the distribution of vowels in corpora so that languages with vowel harmony can be distinguished from those lacking it. For this purpose vowel successions within words are statistically analyzed and visualized in a quadratic matrix whose rows and columns are ordered according to their distribution in the text, with more similar vowels occurring closer together. The method has been tested on the basis of Bible corpora in a variety of languages including well-known harmonic languages such as Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish as well as non-harmonic languages.