Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

On 25 May 2004 Trebor Jung <treborjung@FR...> wrote:

> Hungarian has lots of affixes (mostly suffixes) added to root
> words to give them a more complex meaning, e.g. kéz 'hand' ~ kezem
> 'my hand' ~ kezemben 'in my hand'. [Tamás and others: Why the vowel
> shortening?]
  The short vowel is the etymologically original one: the loss of
the word-final vowel caused the lengthening of the preceding vowel
in the 11-12th century.

> a /O/ (for some reason I think it's something different...for me it
> seems somewhere between [O] and [V]...but I'm not too good at
> transcribing my pronunciation in X-Sampa, so I'm prob'ly wrong
> here...maybe it's [Q]?),
  It could be rather [Q_x]. I don't know if there were any
phonetical reasons for choosing /O/. I suppose that the reason is
due to phonemic and "symmetrical" considerations.

  The present Hungarian orthography is based on the NE dialects of
the 18-19th centuries. This orthography is highly morphophonemic
but it differs in two important points from the spoken standard:
- one <e> grapheme is used for sounds [e] and [E]* (NE dialects
  know only one mid front unrounded sound; Hungarian dialectology
  uses <ë> {<e> with diaeresis} to distinguish close variant [e]);
- there's a superfluous grapheme <ly> for [j] (NE dialects use(d) a
  special phoneme [L]).

  The problem of <e> seems to be connected with the problem of
notation /O/. There're suffixes where the back linking vowel is <a>
and there're others where it's <o>, cf. lát.o.k 'I see' ~
lát.t.a.m 'I saw'. The front counterpart of these linking vowels is
written <e> but actually it sounds different (in spoken standard):
<a> alternates always with open-mid [E] and <o> with close-mid [e].

  "We" like symmetric solutions, therefore, on the basis of the
above phenomenon, it can be supposed that <a> has phonemically the
same level of opening than [E], i.e. it's a mid-open /O/.

  * A curiosity is that the string "mentek" merges four different
words (variant #1 used only in the literary language):
1. ment.ek [mEntEk]  - (we/you/they are) free/exempt from...
2. ment.ëk [mEntek]  - I save
3. mën.tëk [mentek]  - you (2pl.) go
4. mën.t.ek [mentEk] - they went

> ö /9/
  I'd prefer /2/ for <ö>. Sound <ö> alternates dialectically (and
sometimes in literary language) with close-mid [e] and never with
open-mid [E], cf. the above examples in the regional language of
the area where I live now: 2. mentök, 3. möntök, 4. möntek.

  The same is true for the morphemes affected by labial harmony:
their vowels are close-mid: áll.o.k /a:l:ok/ 'I stand', néz.ë.k
/ne:zek/ 'I see', ül.ö.k /yl2k/ 'I sit'.

> s /S/ (an oddity of Hungarian orthography [... Why does Hungarian
> use <s> as /S/ - any reason?])
  It comes from the early Hungarian Latinism: we pronounce latin
borrowings with /S/ instead of /s/ (except modern loanwords). This
particularity is due to the Latin pronunciation of the early
medieval German church and universities where Hungarians studied.
This is the origin of the German "scharfes S" (es-zet), too: it's
originally a ligature of "esh" (long <s>) and "ezh" (descender
Fraktur <z>) to denote the pronunciation /s/ in contrast with /S/.
Its modernized equivalent <sz> is used in Hungarian for /s/. And
this is why German spells <sp>, "st" for syllable-initial /St/,
/Sp/ etc.
  (Strictly speaking the reason is opposite: the Old Low German /s/
> /S/ sound change was not reflected by the ortography, therefore
grapheme <s> denoted also /S/.)

> do any other languages use unadorned <s> for /S/?
  Vietnamese: probably as an influence of the Portuguese
missionaries. Portuguese also uses partly <s> for /S/. It's not a
language, though, IPA uses "long <s>" for /S/.