Vowel Harmony - "Long-distance"

"Long-distance"

Harmony processes are "long-distance" in the sense that the assimilation involves sounds that are separated by intervening segments (usually consonant segments). In other words, harmony refers to the assimilation of sounds that are not adjacent to each other. For example, a vowel at the beginning of a word can trigger assimilation in a vowel at the end of a word. The assimilation occurs across the entire word in many languages. This is represented schematically in the following diagram:

before assimilation		after assimilation
VaCVbCVbC	→	VaCVaCVaC

In the diagram above, the V_a (type-a vowel) causes the following V_b (type-b vowel) to assimilate and become the same type of vowel (and thus they become, metaphorically, "in harmony").

The vowel that causes the vowel assimilation is frequently termed the trigger while the vowels that assimilate (or harmonize) are termed targets. When the vowel triggers lie within the root or stem of a word and the affixes contain the targets, this is called stem-controlled vowel harmony (the opposite situation is called dominant). This is fairly common amongst languages with vowel harmony and may be seen in the Hungarian dative suffix:

Root	Dative	Gloss
város	város-nak	'city'
öröm	öröm-nek	'joy'

The dative suffix has two different forms -nak/-nek. The -nak form appears after the root with back vowels (a and o are both back vowels). The -nek form appears after the root with front vowels (ö and e are front vowels).