Re: THEORY: more questions

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 09:26:41AM -0500, John Cowan wrote:

> There are three types of umlaut recognized in Germanistics:  i-umlaut,
> or fronting, which is the type you describe; u-umlaut, or rounding;
> a-umlaut, or lowering.
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?

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 11:58:48AM -0500, Roger Mills wrote:

> "eu, äu" = [oj] is interesting, an example of what's known as "misphasing of
> roundness".  It's fairly rare. You have an original  sequence of
>
> [low front unround V] [high back round vowel/glide]
>
> changing to:
>
> [low back round V] [high front unr. V/glide]-- you can see which features
> have switched places.
And is this any more likely than the reverse - oj going to ew?  I have
the impression that oj is a lot more common in the world than ew, but is
that just my English bias?

Thanks!

Amanda
Interested in phonology for the moment

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