Vowel harmony

From UniLang Wiki

Vowel harmony means that there are certain types of vowels that always go together in a word. Examples of languages with vowel harmony are Turkish and Finnish.

In Finnish for example the back vowels a/o/u (/a/,/o/,u/) always go together in a word, and so do the front vowels ä/ö/y (/æ/,/ø/,y/). The vowels e/i (/e/,/i/) can go with either group, but the other vowels don't mix. For example syödä (eat) only has front vowels and kuolla (die) only has back vowels.

Vowel harmony makes it a easier for the listener to split up continuous (spoken) language into words.

This also affects the endings in agglutinative languages, such as Turkish and Finnish.

So the Finnish word talo (house) would receive the ending -ssa, talossa (in the house), but with the word käde- (hand) the same grammatical ending would be written with -ssä, kädessä.

Examples from other languages:
Turkish:
ev (house) -> evler (houses)
kül (ash) -> küller (ashes)
kas (muscle) -> kaslar (muscles)
sandalye (chair) -> sandalyeye (doğru) ((towards) a chair)
kirpi (hedgehog) -> kirpiye (doğru) ((towards) a hedgehog)
araba (car) -> arabaya (doğru) ((towards) a car)

Hungarian:
ház (house) -> házhoz (towards a house)
szék (chair) -> székhez (towards a chair)
sün (hedgehog) -> sünhöz (towards a hedgehog)

Translations

Finnish: vokaaliharmonia
Hungarian: magánhangzó harmónia
Turkish: ünlü uyumu / sesli uyumu
German: Vokalharmonie f
Portuguese: harmonia vocálica m
Swedish: vokalharmoni c
Tatar: suzıq awazlar garmoniyәse

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