Hi!
"Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> writes:
> Quick terminology question:
>
> I thought umlaut was a specific variety of ablaut - a consistent featural
> change.
Hmm, ablaut is a quite arbitrary shift of the stem vowel (at least
today). I don't know what motivated it, but probably very ancient
phonology rules that inserted two different parenthetic vowels like in
Old Greek (e vs. o vs. consonantal stem variants).
Umlaut is newer. Some kind of phonological harmony. E.g. the German
umlaut is an i-umlaut technically as it shifted all preceding vowels
of the word to the front in front of an /i/ in an appended ending.
> But it doesn't seem to be; in German, for instance, while umlaut
> does always move a vowel from back to front,
Right. In ancient times this happend because there was an /i/
following the umlauted vowels.
> it has an inconsistent effect on the height: