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The basic rule is that words including at least one back vowel get back vowel suffixes (karba – in(to) the arm), while words excluding back vowels get front vowel suffixes (kézbe – in(to) the hand). Single-vowel words which have only the neutral vowels (i, í or é) are unpredictable, but e takes a front-vowel suffix.
First, prefixes and suffixes, most of which are derived from ancient Greek or classical Latin, have a droppable vowel, usually -o-. As a general rule, this vowel almost always acts as a joint-stem to connect two consonantal roots (e.g. arthr-+ -o-+ -logy = arthrology), but generally, the -o-is dropped when connecting to a vowel-stem (e.g. arthr ...
Examples of well-accepted medical words that do mix lingual roots are neonatology and quadriplegia. Prefixes do not normally require further modification to be added to a word root because the prefix normally ends in a vowel or vowel sound, although in some cases they may assimilate slightly and an in-may change to im-or syn-to sym-.
However, just like in Norwegian, not all compound words are written with an interfix. For example stenålder, which consists of sten ("stone") and ålder ("age"). Some words ending in a vowel lose the last letter. For example arbetarklass ("working class") consists of arbetare ("worker") and klass ("class").
Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish): [15]: 9 the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.
For example, a reduced vowel /ɪ/ or /ə/ (here abbreviated as /ᵻ/) is inserted before the English plural suffix -/z/ and the past tense suffix -/d/ when the root ends in a similar consonant: glass → glasses /ˈɡlæsᵻz/ or /ˈɡlɑːsᵻz/; bat → batted /ˈbætᵻd/.
The Middle English sound change occurred before the Great Vowel Shift and other changes to the nature of vowels. As a result of the changes, the pairs of vowels related by trisyllabic laxing often bear little resemblance to one another in Modern English; however, originally they always bore a consistent relationship.
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...