Sentence examples for vowel harmony from inspiring English sources
noun
A phonological process involving vowels in some languages, setting constraints on what vowels (e.g. front/back vowels only) may be found near each other and sometimes in the entire word.
Characteristic of its sound system is vowel harmony.
First, those languages that show productive or active vowel harmony, with the exception of Baltic-Finnic, have had recent Turkic neighbours whose languages exhibited vowel harmony.
Palatal vowel harmony has been lost or weakened in many languages of all three branches.
Vowel harmony is among the more familiar traits of the modern Uralic languages.
Labial (rounding) vowel harmony is a later development and differs in Turkic and Mongolian.
Considered from an areal viewpoint, two aspects of Uralic vowel harmony must be considered.
Hungarian has essentially the same system, differing only in certain minor details (short e is the front vowel counterpart of a)—e.g., asztal 'table,' asztalok 'tables,' asztalokban 'in the tables,' but föld 'land,' földök 'lands,' földökben 'in the lands.' Similar though less general front-back vowel-harmony systems are found in given dialects of Mordvin, Mari, Mansi, Khanty, and Kamas.
However, for modern Mongolian phonology, it seems more appropriate to instead characterize the two vowel-harmony groups by the dimension of tongue root position.
The Mongolian vowel system also has rounding harmony.
The Altaic languages exhibit two kinds of sound harmony affecting the vowels and velar stops.
The Manchu-Tungus languages have merged certain pairs of corresponding front and back vowels, and thus have compromised palatal harmony in roots, but retain the distinction in suffixes.
