Why is there no labial harmony in long vowelled suffixes?

Abstract

In present-day Hungarian, labial harmony applies only to short mid vowels. In contrast, Late Old Hungarian permitted certain long-vowel suffixes to undergo labial harmony. This paper focuses on three such case markers: the ablative (-tól, -től), the delative (-ról, -ről), and the elative (-ból, -ből). All three developed through the grammaticalization of nouns with case endings, and their participation in both palatovelar and labial harmony followed their integration into the morphological structure of the host word. Their capacity for labial harmony was subsequently lost. We argue that this loss can be explained by the interaction of two factors: (i) phonological variation characteristic of Late Old Hungarian and (ii) homophony avoidance within the shifting paradigmatic structure of the case system.