Re: Hungarian tense, aspect, mood...

On Thu, 29 Apr 2004 12:01:15 +0200, Racsko Tamas <tracsko@...>
wrote:

>  From the Proto-Finno-Ugrian (PFU). It had the form of diphtongue
>*-ai/äi/ei, where a/ä/e was the ending vowel of the verbal stem,
>and *-i was a PFU marker that survived as a past tense marker in
>many FU languages, cf. Finnish puhu.n 'I speak' vs. puhu.i.n 'I
>spoke'.
I suspected that was the case.  Did Hungarian (or its ancestor) have a
medio-passive -u suffix?

>  In the Old Hungarian nearly every closing diphtongues became a
>simple long vowel, in this case -ai/äi/ei > -á/é. There was a later
>process that shortened the long á's and é's in word-final positions
>(see present day alternations as singular "fa" 'tree' vs. plural
>"fák" 'trees'). The definite paradigm began to develop just in the
>time of this shortening process, thus the older long formant was
>allocated as a definite suffix and the newer shorter variant as an
>indefinite one.
What caused the older long formant to be treated as the definite suffix,
and the short variant as the indefinite one?  Or was it simply ad hoc?

>  Notes: The PFU *-i (that is sometimes referred as a glide *-j) is
>supposed to be a derivative suffix to form perfect verbs.
>Originally PFU had no tenses but perfect - imperfect contrast. The
>past tense began to develop only at the time of the disgregation of
>PFU. This is why another common FU past marker *-s' /s"/ is
>actually a present marker in Hungarian in words like tesz, eszik,
>látszik etc.
Is that opinion shared by Sammallahti et al.?  I've read elsewhere that
there was only a perfect-imperfect distinction in PFU, and it seems
reasonable to me.  Why is the "common FU past marker *-s' /s"/" a present
marker in Hungarian?  Is this suffix the origin of the Finnish conditional
suffix -i.si?  (Note: I assume here that the initial i of the suffix is the
past (< perfect) marker, and with Germanic influence on the Finnish
language (formation of auxiliary perfect tense, etc.), modality came to
conform more with the Germanic model (i.e. modal + perfect = past modal,
such as English "I would have gone").)

>  PFU knew the definite-indefinite contrast only in case of 3rd
>person subjects. The extension of this system to another persons
>(or its complete disappearance) was a language-specific post-PFU
>process.
Perhaps PFU did not have personal endings yet, but rather had verbs that
inflected for definiteness of subjects.  Since first and second persons are
normally treated as always definite, there would be no need to have
indefinite inflections with those pronouns.

>  I will call the "original" past here as _preterite_, while the
>"present-day" past as _past_.
>
>> What does the "vala" particle mean?
>
>  It's simply the 3rd person of the preterite of the copula. But in
>the composite past constructions it behaved like a particle because
>it was invariable: the person was marked by adding possessive
>personal suffixes to the participle, e.g. láttam vala 'I had seen',
>láttad vala 'thou had seen' etc.
It seems that a more literal and original translation would be "it was seen
by me," "it was seen by thee," etc.

>  A similar development had the present-day particle "volna" of the
>past conditional: láttam volna 'I would have seen', láttad volna
>'thou would have seen'. It's the same as the 3rd person of present
>conditional of the copula.
Is the -na conditional suffix related to the potential suffix -ne of
Finnish?

>  Notes: This participle with personal possessive suffix (without
>copula) became later the "present-day" past. This is why there's
>still no separate suffix for the 1st person singular past in
>indefinite and definite paradigm. (In these forms the separation of
>the two paradigms was [is?] a quite modern process.)
Whereabouts did the process begin?

>> Where did the -va suffix come from?
>
>  This developed from a PFU *-ma/mä suffix that formed "verbal
>nominal" (verbal nominal is a common term form participles,
>infinitives, gerunds and supines). This *-ma/mä continues also in
>Hungarian deverbal noun-forming compound suffixes -mány/mány ~
>-vény/vény (meaning the patient of an action: olvasmány '(piece of)
>reading; e.t. somthing that is read'), as well as in Estonian "ma"-
>type infinitive and in Finnish 3rd person plural marker -vat/vät
>(and etymologically also in 3rd person singular marker *-va/vä).
>  The intervovalic PFU *-m- could remain unchanged or result in a
>bilabial fricative *-B- that laterv disappeared or changed to
>labiodental fricative -v-.
I have not heard of this interpretation.  From what I know, the Finnish
participle suffix -vA comes from earlier *-pA via consonant gradation.  Cf.
Estonian 3sg -b, Old Finnish 3sg -pi.

>  The suffix -va/ve has a half-archaized variant -ván/vén. The
>latter comes from -va/ve plus superessive ("on the surface of")
>case marker.
So the original form was then -vá/vé, from even earlier *-vA:.

- Rob