Editing Vowel harmony (section)

===Sumerian===
There is some evidence for vowel harmony according to [[vowel height]] or [[Advanced tongue root|ATR]] in the prefix i<sub>3</sub>/e- in inscriptions from pre-[[Sargon the Great|Sargonic]] [[Lagash]] (the specifics of the pattern have led a handful of scholars to postulate not only an {{IPA|/o/}} phoneme, but even an {{IPA|/ɛ/}} and, most recently, an {{IPA|/ɔ/}})<ref>{{cite journal| last=Smith| first=Eric J M| year=2007| title=Harmony and the Vowel Inventory of Sumerian| journal=Journal of Cuneiform Studies| volume=57}}</ref> Many cases of partial or complete [[Assimilation (linguistics)|assimilation]] of the vowel of certain prefixes and suffixes to one in the adjacent syllable are reflected in writing in some of the later periods, and there is a noticeable though not absolute tendency for disyllabic stems to have the same vowel in both syllables.<ref>{{cite book| author1-last=Michalowski| author1-first=Piotr| year=2008| chapter=Sumerian| editor1-last=Woodard| editor1-first=Roger D| title=The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum| publisher=Cambridge University Press| page=17}}</ref> What appears to be [[Contraction (phonology)|vowel contraction]] in [[Hiatus (linguistics)|hiatus]] (*/aa/, */ia/, */ua/ > a, */ae/ > a, */ue/ > u, etc.) is also very common.