Hmm I have a doubt... Zsanna, do you use “high” and “low” referring to vowels as translations of “magas” and “mély” respectively? This is NOT their meaning!
I'm not very familiar with these categories in other terms (than in Hungarian and in French, never had the chance to have a look at REG mentioned above, either) so it is important to decide what we mean by what term. (I did English phonetics in English but it doesn't help much here.)
So I use the Hungarian terms translated (well or badly) into English...(I can't help feeling though that another meaning to "low and high vowels" would be very confusing to me in this context.) But obviously, in this case one should know the book in question to be able to judge.
It'd be interesting to know if a speaker who makes this distinction pronounces térdet with the more open kind of e – this was the original question's sense.
There again, "the more open kind of e" puzzles me a bit. Do you mean the
ë? (It is
closed as far as I know, at least more than the
e sound.) I was thinking of it because in the Szeged dialect you could say
térdök, maybe even
helyök (however, not really
mellök as far as I can tell) and our ö-s are said to come (often) from this ë. I hope this helps...
But again, I still don't see the point about the a/e and o/e/ö type distinction. There are so many complications possible with the choice of the linking vowels... Does this distinction help e.g. in deciding when to use e.g. okos
ok and okos
ak? (To mention a fairly easy case.)
SOS. I cannot even decide whether my question is off topic or not.

