Re: Umlaut (was: More questions)

On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 07:13:07PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
> On Tuesday, November 25, 2003, at 09:06 PM, Amanda Babcock wrote:
>
> >Is there a general tendency toward fronting, rounding, and lowering,
> >as opposed to backing, unrounding, and raising, or are these just the
> >three orthogonal operations Germanic languages chose to use?
>
> The tendency, if there is a shifting, seems to be towards one of the
> apexes of the 'vocalic triangle' as, I think, John's email implies.
> AFAIK i-umlaut is the most common variety, a-umlaut second most and
> u-umlaut least frequent.
Yes, I can certainly see how that would be the case.  But what is it that
makes u-umlaut perform rounding instead of "backing", and i-umlaut perform
fronting instead of unrounding?

Thanks,
Amanda