Opacity in Crimean Tatar: The Interaction of Vowel Harmony and Syncope

Abstract

<p>The sociolinguistic history of CT is complex and tragic, and the dialectological research is rather difficult. In 1944, all Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea by the Soviet government, mainly to Uzbekistan, but also to other places in the former Soviet Union, including Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and several locations in Russia (Fisher 1978). During the exile, the speakers of CT did not generally live in communities corresponding to their dialects and were surrounded by other Turkic languages, e.g., Uzbek, as well as non-Turkic languages, e.g., Russian. Crimean Tatars were only allowed to return to Crimea at the beginning of the 90s. Former inhabitants of certain areas of Crimea attempted to resettle in their native villages, but they encountered great difficulties in doing so and were forced to settle far from their original homes. All these factors contributed to the dialect mixture. The dialectological distinctions are clear only in the speech of those consultants who were born and preferably reached their teens before the time of the deportation. The data collected from these older speakers of CT form the basis for the investigation presented in this paper.</p>

Labial Harmonic Shift in Kazakh: Mapping the Pathways and Motivations for Decay

“…Even more recently, Kara writes that in western Kazakh dialects labialization affects only the second vowel of a word while in eastern Kazakh dialects all subsequent vowels are affected (2002:12). Contraction of the harmonic domain has been noted for dialects of Crimean Tatar (Kavitskaya 2010(Kavitskaya :26-27, 2013, Karakalpak (Menges 1947:60), and outside the Turkic family, as well (McPherson and Hayes forthcoming).…”

“…Rather than arguing for the relative proximity of any particular morpheme or stratum of morphemes, I only note that the harmonic domain is defined in morphological rather than phonological terms. In contrast to the Central dialect of Crimean Tatar (Kavitskaya 2010(Kavitskaya , 2013 and Karakalpak (Menges 1947), where the labial harmonic domain is two syllables, Kazakh defines the domain of harmony in a more restrictive way. In the Central dialect of Crimean Tatar and Karakalpak, rounding obtains for all eligible targets 10 within the two-syllable domain regardless of morphological constituency, as in (7) below.…”

“…Despite the amount of ink spilt on vowel harmony there is surprisingly little written about the decay of harmony systems (Greenberg 1990;Binnick 1991;Nevins & Vaux 2003;Svantesson 2005;Kavitskaya 2013; see also McPherson & Hayes forthcoming).…”

On the status of non-iterativity in feature spreading

“…Unlike the deviation from predictions just discussed for initial syllables, this does not fall out from any pattern of /y/ backing. Rather, the decrease in ΔF2 for third-syllable /i-y/ is due to centralization of /i/ to a vowel quality much closer to [ɨ] or [ə], as described in Kavitskaya (2010;. To see this, compare the distributions for /i/ (red) in all three syllables in Figure 8.…”

“…Crimean Tatar (iso: crh) is a Turkic language spoken primarily on the Crimean Peninsula, and by diaspora speakers in Central Asia, Turkey, Eastern Europe, and North America. Southern Crimean Tatar has an inventory of eight contrastive vowels, /i y e ø a o ɯ u/, while the Central and Northern dialects possess an additional vowel /ɨ/ (Berta 1998;Kavitskaya 2010;.…”