| víz | | 'water' |- | | sör | | 'beer' |- | | bőr | | 'skin' |- | | üt | | 'hit' |- | | tűz | | 'fire' |} Vowel harmony As in Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian, vowel harmony plays an important part in determining the distribution of vowels in a word. Hungarian vowel harmony classifies the vowels according to front vs. back assonance and rounded vs unrounded for the front vowels. Excluding recent loanwords, Hungarian words have either only back vowels or front vowels due to these vowel harmony rules. {| class="wikitable" style=text-align:center |+ Hungarian vowel harmony |- ! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2" | Front ! colspan="2" rowspan="2" | Back |- ! unrounded ! rounded |- ! Close | | | |- ! Mid | | | |- ! Open | | | |} While , , , and are all front unrounded vowels, they are considered to be "neutral vowels" in Hungarian vowel harmony. Therefore, if a word contains back vowels, neutral vowels may appear alongside them. However, if only neutral vowels appear in a stem, the stem is treated as though it is of front vowel assonance and all suffixes must contain front vowels. Vowel harmony in Hungarian is most notable when observing suffixation. Vowel harmony must be maintained throughout the entire word, meaning that most suffixes have variants. For example, the dative case marker vs. . Stems that contain back vowels affix back vowel suffixes, and stems that contain only front vowels affix front vowel suffixes. However, the front vowel stems distinguish rounded vs. unroundedness based on the last vowel in the stem. If the last vowel is front and rounded, it takes a suffix with a front rounded vowel; otherwise it follows the standard rules. While suffixes for most words have front/back vowel variants, there are not many that have rounded/unrounded variants, indicating that this is a rarer occurrence. One is able to observe the distinction when looking at the plural affix, either (back), (front unrounded), or (front rounded). {|class=wikitable style=text-align:center |+ Hungarian vowel harmony and suffixation ! Stem ! Gloss ! Description of stem ! Plural |- | asztal | table | Only back vowels | asztal-ok |- | gyerek | child | Only neutral (front) vowels, last vowel unrounded. | gyerek-ek |- | füzet | notebook | Only front vowels, last vowel unrounded. | füzet-ek |- | ismerős