Re: vowel harmony

Tristan Mc Leay wrote:


> (PS: Is Uzbek presently losing its vowel harmony, or is it something
> that has happened while Uzbek has been a written language or something?)
From the information I saw on Lingvoforum.net (in Russian), standard
literary Uzbek is indeed based on non-harmonizing dialects. Those are
dialects of large cities (Tashkent, Samarkand), that were under strong
influence of Tajik/Farsi, that has only 6 vowels. So they merged /o/~/2/,
/u/~/y/ and /i/~/M/. Some people even say, that urban Uzbeks are in fact
Tajiks that started speaking a Turkic language. Most village dialects are
still harmonizing.

-- Yitzik