The standard view is that Proto-Mongolic had '. According to this view, ' and ' were pharyngealized to and , then ' and ' were velarized to and . Thus, the vowel harmony shifted from a velar to a pharyngeal paradigm. ' in the first syllable of back-vocalic words was assimilated to the following vowel; in word-initial position it became . ' was rounded to when followed by '. VhV and VjV sequences where the second vowel was any vowel but "" were monophthongized. In noninitial syllables, short vowels were deleted from the phonetic representation of the word and long vowels became short.