>Lastly, when
Germanic and especially Celtic venture further west, they
finally come
across some truely exotic substrate languages beyond the blazé
Tyrrhenian
fringe, like Vasconic, Iberian and Tartessian languages. These
quite
different substrate
languages help to alter these IE languages in unique
ways, thus explaining
EVERYthing!
Glen
Glen, do you think some peculiarities of Germanic (initial stress,
ü, ö...?)
could be explained by a Finnish-Estonian or so speaking people
adopting an
IE language?
I know, I'm not Glen; I'll answer
anyway.
The emergence of fronted vowels or
Umlaut in Germanic may have been *influenced* by Uralic and Altaic vowel
harmony. However, Umlaut and vowel harmony are not related.
Umlaut results from the loss of
final vowels in Proto-Germanic, leaving behind a shift in the initial
vowel. The rules for Old Norse (using Danish-Norwegian vowel
letters):
1) a-Umlaut and
a-"breaking"
CeCa >
CjaC
CiCa >
CeC
CuCa >
CoC
2) i-Umlaut
CaCi > CeC or
CæC
CoCi >
CøC
CuCi >
CyC
CauCi >
CøyC
3) u-Umlaut and
u-"breaking"
CaCu >
CåC
CeCu > CøC
(Umlaut)
CeCu > CjoC
(breaking)
(both case in
Old Icelandic: CjøC)
CiCu >
CyC
Vowel harmony, on the other hand,
affects the non-initial and suffixal vowels mostly. Uralic languages
classify front, back and neutral vowels. In Finnish, if the stem
has a front vowel and the suffix has a back vowel, the back vowel is fronted:
i-a > i-ä, i-o > i-ö, i-u > i-ü. Turkic has backing of the
vowel /i/ with back vowels, so where e-i remains e-i, a-i becomes a-I (dotless
i). There are some more rules related to rounding of vowels, but I forgot
what they are exactly.
~DaW~ (it's pronounced Throat
Warbler Mangrove)