Guest Talk at Syntax Group: Daniel Harbour (CNRS, Paris 8)

Prof. Daniel Harbour (CNRS, Paris 8) will be giving a guest talk at Syntax Group on Friday, February 27, 2026, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm in Sidney Smith Hall room 560A. 

Title: "Allography/allomorphy parallels and writing systems as Autonomous Language-Like Objects: An Ethiopic case study". 

Abstract: Psycholinguistic experiments within the artificial language learning paradigm show that peopleextrapolate data away from languages they know to converge on patterns attested other languages.Increasingly, research suggests that writing systems are natural versions of such experiments. Writing systems exhibit deep, detailed homologies to natural language grammar. This language-likeness frequently arises where writing systems diverge from the languages they are used to write. Such divergences converge on grammatical patterns of other natural languages. Writing systems thus have autonomy from specific spoken languages but remain language-like, shaped by the same forces asmould natural languages.

The hypothesis that writing systems are autonomous language-like objects (ALLO) is still young and requires foundational support from basic case studies. Here, I analyse the Ethiopic script. This abugida writes vowels (except the ‘inherent vowel’ /ɛ/) as consonant-fused diacritics; e.g., from ወ /wɛ/ derive ዋ /wa/, ው /wɨ/. The combinatorial rules display intricacies wholly reminiscent of naturallanguage morphology/phonology.

• Vowel allography exists and can, like allomorphy, be low-level—ዓ /ʕa/, ፃ /ś’a/—or wholesale—ል /lɨ/, ው /wɨ/ (cp, ለ /lɛ/, ወ /wɛ/).
• Some allography follows natural classes of consonant shape—‘bipeds’ indicate /a/ by right legelongation (ሳ/sa/,ዛ/za/); ‘unipeds’, via a leftwards tail (ቃ/k’a/,ታ/ta/).
• Allograph values can be context dependent—ው /wɨ/, ዑ /ʕu/—necessitating ‘homograph-avoidant’allographs elsewhere—ዕ /ʕɨ/.
• Consonants contract ‘prosodically’ to accommodate vowel and consonant diacritics—compare ሰ /sɛ/, ሳ /sa/; ገ /gɛ/, ጘ /ŋɛ/, respectively.
• Mimicking a ‘Priscianic derivation’, some vowels attach to already affixed forms of the consonant, not to the consonant itself—ዊ /wi/ ,ዌ /we/ formed from uniped ዋ /wa/, not basic (‘sineped’) ወ /wɛ/.

Allography thus recapitulates allomorphy. But these examples are independent of actual allomorphy of languages written in the Ethiopic script. Rather, they converge on morphological patternswell attested across the globe.