Doctoral Dissertation Research: Vowel Harmony in Maasai

这篇论文的研究项目将调查马赛语的元音和谐，马赛语是一种东尼罗河语言，在肯尼亚南部和坦桑尼亚北部有100万使用者。在元音和谐的语言中，一个单词中的一些或所有元音必须有一个共同的特征，所以某些类型的元音可能不会在同一个单词中同时出现。在马赛语中，大多数单词的发音要么是所有元音的舌根都向前，要么是所有元音的舌根都向后。元音和谐存在于许多语言中，包括土耳其语、匈牙利语、芬兰语、伊博语和蒙古语。研究马赛语的元音和谐很重要，原因有几个。首先，在马赛人身上做的工作很少；目前所有对马赛元音和谐的分析都依赖于20世纪50年代的同一组数据。其次，马赛语的元音和谐极其复杂，包括任何其他语言中都没有的复杂性。以前的描述是不充分的，没有一个数据是基于声学分析的。这个项目将填补这一空白。学生研究员将记录坦桑尼亚的马赛语使用者，以检查文献中报告的数据的准确性，提供新数据，对数据进行声学分析，对数据进行音系分析，并将数据提供给更广泛的语言社区进行进一步研究。对如此复杂的语音系统进行仔细的分析，使语言学家对人类能够学习的复杂语音系统的可能类型有了深入的了解。

This dissertation research project will investigate vowel harmony in Maasai, an Eastern Nilotic language with a million speakers in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. In a language with vowel harmony, some or all vowels in a word must share a particular characteristic, so certain types of vowels may not occur together in the same word. In Maasai, most words are pronounced either with the tongue root advanced for all vowels or retracted for all vowels. Vowel harmony is found in many languages, including Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Igbo, and Mongolian.Studying vowel harmony in Maasai is important for several reasons. First, little work has been done on Maasai; all of the current analyses of Maasai vowel harmony depend on the same set of data from the 1950s. Second, vowel harmony in Maasai is extremely complex, and includes intricacies not found in any other language. Previous descriptions are inadequate, and none of the data are based on acoustic analysis. This project will fill that gap. The student investigator will record Maasai speakers in Tanzania in order to check the accuracy of data that have been reported in the literature, to provide new data, to perform acoustic analysis of the data, to present a phonological analysis of the data, and to make the data available to the wider linguistic community for further research. Careful analysis of such a complicated phonological system provides linguists with insights about the possible types of complex sound systems that humans are capable of learning.