Hungarian Phonology - Vowel Harmony

Vowel Harmony

As in Finnish and Turkish, vowel harmony plays an important part in determining the distribution of vowels in a word. The primary division is between front and back vowels.

The following vowels are considered front vowels:

e

é

i

í

ö

ő

ü

ű

The following vowels are considered back vowels:

a

á

o

ó

u

ú

For the most part, a word will contain vowels of only one of the two types (a phonological process called vowel harmony). Mixed category words are uncommon, but do exist, even in native words (e.g. "derekas"). Most mixed type words are either of foreign origin (e.g. "telefon") or are compound words (e.g. "pénz|tárca" ). As a consequence of vowel harmony, suffixes usually have two forms, one for each class of vowels. Words normally take suffixes that are of the same class as their last syllable. However, /i/, /eː/ and sometimes /e/, while being nominally "front" vowels, are "transparent"; i.e. if they are preceded by back vowels, the word is considered a back-vowel word. As a result, some loanwords can be conjugated according to both classes (e.g. farmerben = farmerban).

A few words which contain /i/, /iː/ and, rarely, /eː/ are counted as back-vowel words because in Old Hungarian, the words contained the /ɨ/ phoneme in their place. This sound is smilar to Polish y, Russian yery, Romanian â and î, and bears some resemblance to the sound of the "e" in "roses" in some dialects of English (in those dialects where "Rosa's" and "roses" don't sound alike). In today spoken Hungarian dialects, this vowel has merged with /i/, /iː/, and, rarely, /eː/ or even /u/.

Additionally, there is another set of criteria based on vowel roundedness for mid-high front vowels.

Most of Hungarian's multitude of suffixes have multiple forms for use depending on the vowel class predominating in the stem.

Most types are:

As can be seen, the phoneme /e/ is found both in the low vowel series (/a/ - /e/), and in the mid vowel series (/o/ - /e/ - /ö/). This odd feature is solved in the old language and in dialects: there was/is an eighth short phoneme /ë/, which is just like the /e/ but it is mid, and its pronunciation is, in contrast with /e/ being . In dialects, this phoneme is found in the mid series, and the low /e/ in the low series.

Many suffixes have only one form. These are usually new-born suffixes (-kor "at the time of ...": hatkor "at 6 o'clock", hétkor "at 7 o'clock", ötkor "at 5 o'clock"), or they contain /i/ or /eː/ (-i "universal noun → adjective suffix": budai "somebody from Buda", pesti "somebody from Pest"; -ért "for ...": aranyért "for gold", ezüstért "for silver").