Front rounded vowel question

[Johanna Laakso]

Just to add to Pekka Sammallahti's comment:

The loss of ü and ö in Livonian was a fairly recent contact-induced substitution (in the early 20th century, old speakers had [ü] and [ö], and they were used in the orthography of the Livonian literary language between the two world wars). That is, it seems to be a sudden adaptation into the phonetics of Latvian, which does not have front rounded vowels. Thus, the loss of front rounded vowels in Livonian is perhaps not so very different from the contact-induced substitutions (ö > e, ü > i) which seem to have taken place in some Baltic German varieties (spoken by Latvians) and in the traditional Bohemian variety of German ("behmakeln" or the "Czech accent" in German; Czech also lacks front rounded vowels).

Best
JL
--
Univ.Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Universität Wien, Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (EVSL)
Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
Campus AAKH Spitalgasse 2-4 Hof 7
A-1090 Wien
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at • http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/
Project ELDIA: http://www.eldia-project.org/ 




E-Ching Ng kirjoitti 25.3.2011 kello 6.01:

> Dear all,
> 
> I'm looking for languages which lost front rounded vowels, e.g. German /y/ > Yiddish /i/. So far I've got Old > Middle English, OHG > Yiddish, French > creoles. If you know of other languages with front rounded vowels and descendants, I would be very grateful. I will of course post a summary to the list.
> 
> Hopefully,
> E-Ching
> 
> ___________________________________
> 
> E-Ching Ng
> Department of Linguistics, Yale University
> http://pantheon.yale.edu/~en27/
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