, or . 8 When the next consonant in the word was . 9 When the preceding consonant was , , , or , or when the next consonant was . 10 Before , , or any vowel followed by . 11 Before , or and then another vowel. 12 When preceded by a vowel preceded by . 13 Before . 14 Starostin et al. (2003) follow a minority opinion (Vovin 1993) in interpreting the sound of the Middle Korean letter ᅀ as or rather than . (Dybo & Starostin 2008:footnote 50) 15 Before . 16 Before , , or . Vowels Vowel harmony is pervasive in the languages attributed to Altaic: most Turkic and Mongolic as well as some Tungusic languages have it, Korean is arguably in the process of losing its traces, and it is controversially hypothesized for Old Japanese. (Vowel harmony is also typical of the neighboring Uralic languages and was often counted among the arguments for the Ural–Altaic hypotheses.) Nevertheless, Starostin et al. (2003) reconstruct Proto-Altaic as lacking vowel harmony. Instead, according to them, vowel harmony originated in each daughter branch as assimilation of the vowel in the first syllable to the vowel in the second syllable (which was usually modified or lost later). "The situation therefore is very close, e.g. to Germanic [see Germanic umlaut] or to the Nakh languages in the Eastern Caucasus, where the quality of non-initial vowels can now only be recovered on the basis of umlaut processes in the first syllable." (Starostin et al. 2003:91) The table below is taken from Starostin et al. (2003): 1 When preceded by a bilabial consonant. 2 When followed by a trill, , or . 3 When preceded or followed by a bilabial consonant. 4 When preceded by a fricative (). Prosody Length and pitch in the first syllable evolved as follows according to Starostin et al. (2003), with the caveat that it is not clear which pitch was high and which was low in Proto-Altaic (Starostin et al. 2003:135). For simplicity of input and display every syllable is symbolized as "a" here: ¹ "Proto-Mongolian has lost all traces of the original prosody except for voicing *p > *b in syllables with original high pitch" (Starostin et al. 2003:135). ² "[...] several secondary metatonic processes happened [...] in Korean, basically in the verb subsystem: all verbs have a strong tendency towards low pitch on the