vocaliche

Vocaliche is a hypothetical linguistic feature describing a system in which vowels carry grammatical information that is usually expressed by affixes or consonant changes. In a vocaliche system, vowel quality, height, backness, rounding, and patterns of vowel harmony can signal tense, aspect, mood, number, or person, reducing reliance on consonants or morphology.

Origin and usage: The term vocaliche combines "vocal" with an -iche ending used in speculative linguistics. It is a theoretical construct, mainly discussed in thought experiments and some constructed-language grammars, and is not widely attested as a feature of natural languages.

Mechanisms and typology: In a vocaliche system, vowel contrasts within a stem or across inflectional vowels encode grammatical category. Vowel harmony or vowel inventory constraints can govern how vowels vary with context. Some variants rely on small sets of contrastive vowels, whose distribution patterns mirror those of consonant-based morphemes in ordinary languages, while others combine vocaliche with other phonological processes.

Example (fictional): A verb root kan- meaning "to run" might take internal vowels to indicate tense: kan-a (present), kan-e (past), kan-i (future). Noun forms could likewise reflect number through vowel patterns. The exact rules depend on the imagined language's phonology and word formation.

Status and use: As a concept, vocaliche helps explore how vowel systems could bear morphosyntactic weight. It remains speculative and is primarily of interest to linguistic theory and constructed-language design rather than a documented feature of natural languages.

See also: vowel harmony, morphophonology, ablaut, constructed languages.