Can anybody explain to me the reason behind vowel harmony.
I have read about whispery and unwhispery voices.
I can't see the difference or better hear the difference.

Especially constant harmany confuses me alot!

Thanks,

Hi Philio, are you asking what the vowel harmony rules are, or what the resoning behind these rules is? Vowel harmony rules (and also consonant harmony rules) make speech more fluent and easy once you learn them fully. There is some explanation on what these rules are in the grammar lessons section of the site:

Grammar lessons

I still don't understand the practical why behind these rules.
I'm guessing that it has to do with prenouncation ?

I'am non-turkish speaker, the sound difference isn't that obvious.

Or they just meaningless grammatical rules to obey.

> I still don't understand the practical why behind these rules.
> I'm guessing that it has to do with prenouncation?

Yes, the practical why is all about pronounciation. For example, major vowel harmony in a way enforces that only hard vowels or only soft vowels are used together in the same word. Hard vowels are pronounced from the back of the mouth, close to the throat while soft vowels are more from the front. Vowel harmony makes it in a way more comfortable to pronounce a word with all same type of vowels. This may be very difficult to recognise for a new learner since you may not be familiar with how exactly sounds in Turkish are pronounced.

There are similar things about minor vowel harmony and consonant harmony. I think consonant harmony has a bigger impact on the ease of pronounciation compared to vowel harmony rules. From the very little Polish I know, I can say that there is a similar thing in Polish about sounding consonants and non-sounding consonants. They don't change the way words are written, but they change the way they are pronounced based on rules similar to the consonant harmony rules of Turkish.

> I'am non-turkish speaker, the sound difference isn't that obvious.

That is understandable, they may not be that obvious even for some native speakers.

> Or they just meaningless grammatical rules to obey.

I think it makes sense for a starter to accept these rules as meaningless grammatical rules because it might be hard to justify the need for such rules without knowing the exact way of pronouncing sounds in Turkish.

I hope this helps clarify some of your confusion aobut the harmony rules, or at least doesn't cause even more confusions

Well Admin, I don't know about Philio, but these explanations certainly helped me. Its true about the pronunciation actually, although my turkish knowledge is not that wonderful, my pronunciation is ok, and your explanations have helped me realise that you don't need to really 'know' the rules at all because when you pronounce a word, it is really obvious which vowels should come together. Thanks for the question Philio and for the answer admin.

I'm a dutch speaker myself, in dutch (flemmish) back or front throat speech is interchangable. We would call that accent.

Thank you very much.