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Vowel harmony affects inflectional suffixes and derivational suffixes, which have two forms, one for use with back vowels, and the other with front vowels. Compare, for example, the following pair of abstract nouns: hallit u s 'government' (from hallita , 'to reign') versus terve y s 'health' (from terve , healthy).
A vowel sound that is nonexistent in Lojban (usually /ɪ/ as in ' hit ') is added between two consonants to make the word easier to pronounce. Despite altering the phonetics of a word, the use of buffering is completely ignored by grammar. Also, the vowel sound used must not be confused with any existing Lojban vowel.
Not all suffixes obey vowel harmony perfectly. In the suffix -(i)yor, the o is invariant, while the i changes according to the preceding vowel; for example sönüyor – "he/she/it fades". Likewise, in the suffix -(y)ken, the e is invariant: Roma'dayken – "When in Rome"; and so is the i in the suffix -(y)ebil: inanılabilir – "credible".
This specific form of nonconcatenative morphology is known as base modification or ablaut, a form in which part of the root undergoes a phonological change without necessarily adding new phonological material. In traditional Indo-Europeanist usage, these changes are termed ablaut only when they result from vowel gradations in Proto-Indo-European.
OE y and ý (short and long high front rounded vowels) fell together with i and í via a simple phonetic unrounding: OE hypp, cynn, cyssan, brycg, fyllan, fýr, mýs, brýd became modern hip, kin, kiss, bridge, fill, fire, mice, bride. There is no way to tell by inspection whether a modern /i ay/ goes back to a rounded or an unrounded vowel.
The formation of the causative is highly variable, and may involve replacement of the stem final vowel with short or long i or ī, palatalization of the final consonant of the stem (whereby c/z, t, tz become x, ch, ch, respectively), the loss of a stem final vowel, the addition of the suffix -l-, a number of minor strategies, or a combination ...
Stems ending in *i or *u such as *men-ti-are consonantic (i.e. athematic) because the *i is just the vocalic form of the glide *y, the full grade of the suffix being *-tey-. [note 2] Post-PIE ā was actually *eh₂ in PIE. Among the most common athematic stems are root stems, i-stems, u-stems, eh₂-stems, n-stems, nt-stems, r-stems and s-stems ...
Another example involves the vowel differences (with accompanying stress pattern changes) in several related words. For instance, photographer is derived from photograph by adding the derivational suffix - er . When this suffix is added, the vowel pronunciations change largely owing to the moveable stress: