vowelssuggests

Vowelssuggests is a term used in linguistics to describe systematic correlations between vowels in a word's stem and the vowels that appear in its affixes or neighboring morphemes. It is not a standardized label, but a way to refer to a family of patterns in which vowel choices in one position seem to influence or constrain vowel choices in another.

The concept is related to, and often overlaps with, vowel harmony, allomorphy, and morphophonemic alternations. In practice, researchers use vowelssuggests to describe instances where the presence or quality of a stem vowel biases or dictates the vowel of a related element, suggesting an underlying phonological or morphological dependency across the word.

In research, vowelssuggests is typically operationalized by measuring conditional probabilities P(suffix_vowel | stem_vowel, context) or by computing mutual information between stem vowels and suffix vowels. These metrics help quantify how strongly stem vowels predict suffix vowels, beyond random chance, and can guide the construction of predictive models for phonology and orthography.

Applications of the idea include analyzing historical sound changes, building predictive models for spelling and pronunciation, and aiding orthography design. In natural language processing, vowelssuggests concepts can improve tools such as spell checkers, OCR post-processing, and text-to-speech alignment by incorporating vowel-to-vowel compatibility cues in inflectional morphology.

Example: in a hypothetical language with two suffix vowels, i and a, stems ending in i tend to take suffix i and stems ending in a tend to take suffix a; such a pattern would be reflected by a high vowelssuggests score. Limitations include that not all languages show strong vowel-to-suffix correlations, and other factors such as consonant context, syllable structure, and stress can influence vowel choices. Related concepts include vowel harmony, morphophonology, allomorphy, and phonotactics.