unrounded vowels (front or back respectively); and -ün or -un after the corresponding rounded vowels. In this case, the shorthand notation -in4 is used. Practically, the twofold pattern (also referred to as the e-type vowel harmony) means that in the environment where the vowel in the word stem is formed in the front of the mouth, the suffix will take the e-form, while if it is formed in the back it will take the a-form. The fourfold pattern (also called the i-type) accounts for rounding as well as for front/back. The following examples, based on the copula -dir4 ("[it] is"), illustrate the principles of i-type vowel harmony in practice: Türkiye'dir ("it is Turkey"), kapıdır ("it is the door"), but gündür ("it is the day"), paltodur ("it is the coat"). Exceptions to vowel harmony These are four word-classes that are exceptions to the rules of vowel harmony: Native, non-compound words, e.g. "also," "light brown," "apple," "which," "where," "come on," "to believe," "brother," "fat," "mother" Native compound words, e.g. "today," "gossip" Foreign words, e.g. (< Farsi "command"), (< French "microbe"), (< Greek "bishop") Invariable suffixes: –daş (denoting common attachment to the concept expressed by the noun), –yor (denoting the present tense in the third person), –ane (turning adjectives or nouns into adverbs), –ken (meaning "while being"), –leyin (meaning "in/at/during"), (weakening an adjective of color or taste in a way similar to the English suffix –ish as in blueish), –ki (making a pronoun or adjective out of an adverb or a noun in the locative case), –gil (meaning "the house or family of"), –gen (referring to the name of plane figures) The road sign in the photograph above illustrates several of these features: a native compound which does not obey vowel harmony: Orta+köy ("middle village"—a place name) a loanword also violating vowel harmony: viyadük (< French viaduc "viaduct") the possessive suffix -i4 harmonizing with the final vowel (and softening the k by consonant alternation): viyadüğü The rules of vowel harmony may vary by regional dialect. The dialect of Turkish spoken in the Trabzon region of northeastern Turkey follows the reduced vowel harmony of Old Anatolian Turkish, with the additional complication of two missing vowels (ü and ı), thus there is no palatal harmony. It's likely that elün meant "your hand" in Old Anatolian. While the 2nd person singular possessive would vary between back and front vowel, -ün or -un, as in elün for