User:40bus/SoundSpel

Vowel harmony
Like other Turkic languages, a characteristic feature of Yakut is progressive vowel harmony. Most root words obey vowel harmony, for example in кэлин (kelin) 'back', all the vowels are front and unrounded. Yakut's vowel harmony in suffixes is the most complex system in the Turkic family. Vowel harmony is an assimilation process where vowels in one syllable take on certain features of vowels in the preceding syllable. In Yakut, subsequent vowels all take on frontness and all non-low vowels take on lip rounding of preceding syllables' vowels. There are two main rules of vowel harmony:


 * 1) Frontness/backness harmony:
 * 2)  Front vowels are always followed by front vowels.
 * 3)  Back vowels are always followed by back vowels.
 * 4) Rounding harmony:
 * 5) Unrounded vowels are always followed by unrounded vowels.
 * 6) Close rounded vowels always occur after close rounded vowels.
 * 7) Open unrounded vowels do not assimilate in rounding with close rounded vowels.

The quality of the diphthongs /ie, ïa, uo, üö/ for the purposes of vowel harmony is determined by the first segment in the diphthong. Taken together, these rules mean that the pattern of subsequent syllables in Yakut is entirely predictable, and all words will follow the following pattern: Like the consonant assimilation rules above, suffixes display numerous allomorphs determined by the stem they attach to. There are two archiphoneme vowels I (an underlyingly high vowel) and A (an underlyingly low vowel).

Examples of I can be seen in the first-person singular possessive agreement suffix -(I)m: as in (a):

The underlyingly low vowel phoneme A is represented through the third-person singular agreement suffix -(t)A in (b):