2149: Celtic Mutation, & Vowel Harmony Nov 2, 2020

Learning a language and its irregularities can be a real frustration, but some languages make this harder than others. Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish feature so-called vowel-harmony, where the vowels near each other change regularly depending on the how affixes are attached (and there are a lot). For instance in Hungarian, -nek/-nak are the same dative suffix, but change depending on the vowel in the root word.

város város-nak 'city'

öröm öröm-nek 'joy'

On the opposite conceptual end, Celtic languages have mutations, meaning—as in the chart below—that based off of the surrounding words there is consonant mutation. For example

coeden goeden nghoeden choeden

meaning 'tree' in Welsh are all different forms of the same word, depending on what comes before it, and this process is how words are formed normally.

Celtic Vowel Mutations (imagine: public domain)