Uighur Voice Harmony Laws Of Processing And Its Software Design

Up to the now, the information processing technology of Uyghur has been still processing single words and dealing with scripture identification and constructing of the language resources (corpus construction). This kind of study never engaged with phrases and sentences. That is because Uyhgur has rich morphological suffixes and the phrases are formed by the means of adding these suffixes. According to the phonetic harmony rules, every suffix has two or more variants. So it is not possible to deal with a phrase before dealing with the suffixes. Therefore it is very important to deal with the combining process of a root with a suffix according to Uyghur phonetic harmony rules.Uyghur belongs to agglutinative language type. There are great amount of morphological and syntactic suffixes in Uyghur. Except some suffixes have only one form (for example, the imperative suffix for the third, -sun), others have more than one forms acco rding to vowel or consonant harmony requirement. Some of them have two variants (can be called double-variant suffixes),for example the plural suffix -lar～-l(a|¨)r and ablative marker -din～-tin; some of them have four variants(can be called four-variant suffixes),for example the dative case suffix -γa～-qa～-g(a|¨)～-k(a|¨); some of them have eight variants (can be called eight-variant suffixes), for example the derivational suffix -q～-k～-(?)q～-ik～-aq～-(a|¨)k～-uq～-(u|¨)k which derives a noun from a verb. Vowels may play a decisive role while forming two variants, for example, the plural suffix variants -lar～-l(a|¨)r are formed by the vowel harmony requirement. But in some cases one which plays the decisive rule is maybe the consonant, not a vowel. For example, the locative case suffix -diki～-tiki are formed by the consonant harmony requirement while stem and suffix are combined together according to the voiced or unvoiced harmony requirement of the last phonetic feature of the stem. In other cases a vowel and a consonant may play a decisive role at the same time, resulting in four variants or eight variants suffixes. For example, the dative case suffix -γa～-qa～-g(a|¨)～-k(a|¨) not only show the [+back] and [-back] feature of a vowel, but also show the voiced and voiceless features of it's consonant. It is generally believed that when a stem or root combines with a suffix, there will happen so-called vowel harmony in articulating position and the consonants will be voiced or voiceless and it is convenient to speak. This phenomenon is called phonetic harmony. There are two kinds of phonetic harmony in Uyghur, one is called consonant harmony and the other is called vowel harmony.This phenomenon is very regular in Uyghur and it can be dealt with in computer. Dealing with this kind of harmony rule is a decisive step in developing the software which deals with the phonetic harmony in Uyhgur corpus construction, and it will be very helpful in developing a multi-language translation software. This paper discusses phonetic harmony in Uyghur and exceptions, and also puts forward the reason of such phenomena. At the same time, it discusses the process of the development of Uyghur phonetic harmony software, and assumes its general plan andexplains its codes etc. At last it points out the flaws of this software and brings forward the methods of improvement.