Re: And how's about "periphony"? (was: Apophony?)

At 4:38 pm -0500 29/4/99, Tom Wier wrote:
>"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
>
>> At 2:30 am -0500 29/4/99, Tom Wier wrote:
>> >"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
>> >
>> >> But if the German word is being discarded for an 'internationally'
>> >> Greek-formed calque, has the same happened to that other vowel
>>modification
[snip]

>> ..and I've discovered why - the Greek term this time is not an exact calque
>> of the German, but uses a rather more meaningful prefix.  I've been told by
>> a privare email that it's "metaphony".
>>
>> That IMO is a sensible term since not only does meta- imply change but it
>> is derived from the ancient Greek 'meta' = "after".  And umlaut, of course,
>> is a change of vowel caused by a (usually) lost vowel that came in the
>> syllable _after_ the affected vowel.
>
>Right, but then, that's just because that's by a process of anticipatory
>assimilation (via vowel harmony), which though the more common form
>of assimilation does not mean that all umlauting is anticipatory -- it could
>be regressive, too (and therefore "around" IMO works fine too).
I've not come across 'regressive umlaut' - Does it occur?

And I've always understood "vowel harmony" and "umlaut" to be two different
phenomena (Wasn't there a thread on this not so long ago?)

By vowel harmony I've understood the phenomenon where by the vowel(s) in
the root morpheme (or base morpheme) determine the vocalization of its
affixes.  The classic examples are languages like Finnish, Magyar & Turkish
where vowel harmony occurs in the suffixes.  But another type of vowel
harmony is found among some African languages where prefixes are affected
as well as suffixes.

But umlaut I've understood to be the opposite: the vocalization of the
_root_ morpheme is change as the result of anticipating the vocalization of
a suffix which then, usually, disappears.

But on checking "metaphony", which I discover is in one of my reference
books, I see it covers both what I understand by umlaut & by vowel harmony.

Ray.