NATLANG: Humagrian glossary

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 14:10:55 "Trebor Jung" <treborjung@...> wrote:
> Jó napot kívánok!
  Bon jour, Monsieur.     (If I may reply in the same style :))

> Köszönöm szépen!
  Je vous en prie!  (I hope this is the correct answer in French.)

> This is a good ready-made list of
> concepts which you might be interested in:
> http://www.umsl.edu/~cph9fa/chelume/vocab/archive/Uld.txt
[...]
> You can go to the "Edit this page" page (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:Trebor1990/Hungarian&action=edit)
  I will see them in a few days.

> I saw a root somewhere which differed from en-.
  The "enni" 'to eat' belongs to a special [small and improductive]
verbal group called "sz-stem" verbs. Etymologically these roots had
the pattern of V or CV. But these patterns were ruled out by the
phonotactics. Therefore the root was extended by various elements.
In present tense, it was the "sz" consonant, thus the lexematic
form is: "eszik" 'he/she eats' (in addition, it's an "ik"-type
verb).

  Note that this "sz" is supposed to be a cognate of the IE
sigmatic aoristos marker, and the finnougrists think that it was an
imperfective suffix in Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU). [The reconstructed
PFU has no tenses at all.] This PFU suffix became a limited present
tense marker in Hungarian in the above verb group, and on the
contrary, became an imperfect (or past tense) marker in various
other Finno-Ugric languages.

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