>
> The rules of vowel harmony are triggered by the first vowel. There
> is no backwards vowel harmony.
>
> I think you would like to make the case that u/y umlaut is rare and
> possibly predates FU in Northern Europe.
Yes.
OE does have umlauted ymb, ymbe (cf. OHG umbi), but nothing more complicated (eg. with suffixes), it seems
http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ cybalist/ message/63807
> I can't think of another
> example at a beginning of a word. There aren't that many words
> that begin with /y/ in Finnish /ü/ in Estonian anyway.
My little Estonian-Danish dictionary says
umbes "approximately"
umbne "enclosure"
ümber "around, about"
ümbrus "surrounding"
which sounds native enough. Of course you never know what the language purists might have come up with.
> So what's needed is evidence. If it were easy to come by the
> authors of etymological dictionaries could take a less conservative
> stance in classifying the 5 words you identified. None seem to
> have a clear
> etymology.
>
> Peter P
>
Now, in what other Uralic languages do we see congeners to ymbe-, umbe-? What does Hungarian have? How about Samoyedic? Anything in Paleo-Siberian? In Eskimo-Aleut?