探析蒙古语和朝鲜语的umlaut

Umlaut in Mongolian and Korean languages

This article mainly conducted a comparative study on the umlaut phenomenon within a word, and combination of stems and suffixes in Mongolian and Korean languages. The term “umlaut” was initially put forward by German linguists Jacob Grimm during the researches on Germanic languages referring to one kind of vowel assimilation. Umlaut is a rule in which a non-initial i or y changes a preceding back vowel to its front counterpart. In Mongolian and Korean languages, the vowel in the former syllable is affected by i or y of the latter syllable. This phenomenon is roughly equivalent to the concept of umlaut; therefore, in this article cited the term ‘umlaut’. This phenomenon is generally indicated as ‘vowel-fronting’ in Mongolian language, while in general the terms ‘umlaut, i-umlaut’ and ‘i-regressive assimilation’ are adopted in Korean language. The reason for choosing the phenomenon of umlaut in these two languages is that vowel fronting is very active in these two languages. In most dialects of Mongolian and Korean umlaut is observed. But the type and extend of umlaut differ from one dialect to another. The most active dialect of umlaut phenomenon in Mongolian and Korean are Baγarin dialect and Chung-nam dialect. Some umlaut examples of two languages shown below: There are many historical comparative or synchronic contrastive studies on Mongolian and Korean languages, whereas, these studies mainly involved in fields of vocabulary and grammar. There are few studies concerning the phonological rule. Moreover, the genetic relatedness of Korean to Altai language family is still not solved although most scholars believe that the Korean kinship with the Altai language family, however, there are still many problems unsolved. It is universally acknowledged that there are many phonological similarities in the languages of kinship relationships. As a consequence, this paper, on the one hand, revealed the similarities and differences between Mongolian and Korean umlaut phenomena and induced the detailed variation rules of the umlaut phenomena in the two languages and on the other hand, focused on the differences and explained the irregular changes.