Vowel Harmony Uralic Languages Finnish Hungarian Altaic

In linguistics, a language exhibiting vowel harmony has a phonological rule that requires all vowels in a word to belong to a single class of vowels. The most common types of vowel harmony rules are rules requiring all vowels to be either rounded or unrounded, or requiring all vowels to be either front or back vowels, but not both.

Linguists typically distinguish vowel harmony from umlaut, a similar phenomenon that also adjusts the front or back status of words and affixes. In umlaut, at least historically, the front or back position of a vowel in an affix used in inflection alters the vowels in the root it is attached to. In vowel harmony, the position of the vowel of the root requires that the vowel of the affix be adjusted to match it.

Vowel harmony appears in almost all Uralic and Altaic languages. Some have speculated that the vowel harmony of the northwestern Finno-Ugric languages influenced the phonological phenomenon of umlaut that most of the living Germanic languages display.

1 Uralic languages

1.1 Finnish

Front	ä	ö	y
Back	a	o	u
Neutral	e	i

In the Finnish language, there are three classes of vowels -- front, back, and neutral. Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels, but neutral vowels may be combined with either group. For example, aaltoileva contains only neutral vowels and back vowels, while äidillä contains only front vowels and neutral vowels.

As a consequence, Finns often have trouble pronouncing foreign words which do not contain vowel harmony.

Compound words often violate this rule, such as the Finnish month name syyskuu ( September, literally "autumn-month"). In such words suffixes agree with the vowels in the last part: syys·kuu·ta.

1.2 Hungarian

Front, unrounded (= the neutral ones)	e	é	i	í
Front, rounded	ö	o	ü	u
Back	a	á	o	ó	u	ú

2 Altaic languages

2.1 Mongolian

Feminine (front)	e	ö	ü
Masculine (back)	a	o	u
Neutral	i

MongolianThe Mongolic languages are group of languages spoken in Central Asia. Some linguists propose the grouping of Mongolian languages with Turkic (of which Turkish is a member) and Tungusic as Altaic languages, but this is not universally agreed upon. The best is similar. Front vowels in Mongolian are considered feminine, while back vowels are considered masculine.

2.2 Tatar

Front	ä	e	i	ö	ü
Back	a	i	í	o	u	é

TatarTatar language Tatar tele Tatarca is a very ancient Turkic language belonging to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages. It is the official language of the Republic of Tatarstan, and is also spoken in European part of Russia, Siberia as has no neutral vowels. The vowel é is found only in loanwordA loanword (or a borrowing is a word taken in by one language from another. The word loanword itself is a calque of the German Lehnwort''. A calque or loan translation is a related process whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather the lexs.

2.3 Turkish

Front	e	i	ö	ü
Back	a	i	o	u

TurkishTurkish is a Turkic language, spoken by about 70 million speakers in Turkey and over 85 million speakers world-wide. The Turkish name for the language is Turkce''. Classification Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Balka has two classes of vowels -- front and back. Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels.

Compound words often violate this rule. In such words suffixes agree with the vowels in the last part. Also the rule does not hold applicable for loan words, one-syllable words and some suffixes (such as -iyor).

3 Other languages

Other languages, such as Middle KoreanThe Korean language is the most widely used language in Korea, and is the official language of both South and North Korea. The language is also spoken widely in neighbouring Yanbian, China. Worldwide, there are around 78 million Korean speakers, including, have more arbitrary class-membership rules. (In Modern Korean, vowel harmony is no longer strictly observed except in a few special cases.)

This phenomenon has been documented in TeluguTelugu belongs to the family of Dravidian languages and is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. It is also one among the 22 official national languages of India. In India, Telugu is the most spoken mother tongue after Hindi. 19th c and several Bantu languagesBantu is a language family that belongs to the Niger-Congo group. Bantu languages are spoken in South Cameroon, in Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namib.

4 Consonant harmony

The counterpart of vowel harmony, consonant harmony, is less widespread. Most commonly, consonant harmony requires all the sibilants of the word to belong either to the anterior class (s-like sounds) or the nonanterior class (sh-like sounds). Such patterns are found in Navajo, Kinyarwanda, and elsewhere. Various Austronesian languages exhibit consonant harmony among the liquid consonants, with [r] assimilating at a distance to [l] or vice versa. Likewise, in Sanskrit, [n] is retroflexed to [ṇ] if certain consonants precede it in the same word, even at a distance.

It is to be mentioned that the opposite of consonant harmony, ie., dissimilation , is much more widespread among languages. For example, in Latin, from medidies (the middle of the day, ie. noon) became meridies, so the consonants should differ and thus the word can be pronounced more easily.

5 See also

Phonology

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		-kor (at, for time)	-ban/-ben (in)	-hoz/-hez/-höz (to)
Back	hat (6), nyolc (8), három (3)	-kor	-ban	-hoz
Front, unrounded (that is, the neutral ones)	egy (1), négy (4), kilenc (9)	-kor	-ben	-hez
Front, rounded	öt (5), ketto (2)	-kor	-ben	-höz

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