Re: Phonemic vocalic length in PU/PFU (was Re: Questions about Hungarian)

On Wed, 12 May 2004 19:38:37 +0100, Tamas Racsko <tracsko@...>
wrote:

>  Of course, there's no historical attestations. The very first
>written Uralic word appear in the work "De Administrando Imperiae"
>of Byzantine Emperor Constantinos Porphyrogenetos (about 950 A.D.)
>in form of Hungarian proper names. These names contain already
>close word-final vowels.
Okay.  Yes, I have heard of that work -- it's (one of) the first source(s)
to have the name "Magyar" in it (although I believe it is written "Mogeri"
or "Megeri").

>  However, we have the tools of the comparatistics: the Finnish
>cognate of *sivä is sydän: it has open vowel, too.  Moreover,
>Hungarian has two "e"-sounds, they are not phonological in the
>literary language but they are separate phonemes /E/ and /e/ in the
>majority of the dialects. The open /E/ is related to the proto-
>phoneme *ä, the close /e/ is to the *e: and the long stem of this
>word is open szive- /sivE/.
I'm not sure if 'sydän' is an exact cognate to *sivä.  The open /E/ is most
certainly descended from earlier /{/.  If *ä > /E/ and *e: > /e/, then what
did *e become?

>  In Hungarian there was no illabial back close vowel in the time
>of the reduction process, therefore there was only possible word-
>ending for the back words: /u/. For front word, the word-ending
>vowel was /i/ or /y/. In the majority of the data, we find /y/, the
>possible reasons could be the following:
>- analogy: all back word ended in labial vowel, the front-word
>  was adapted according to this;
>- assimilation: in case of *sivä, the /v/ was pronounced bilabial
>  [B], this bilabial consonant assimilated the vowels, too [N.B. we
>  have also modern dialectal variants /sy:v/ as a result of
>  regressive assimilation]
I have read that Hungarian exibits both palatal and labial harmony, as
Altaic languages do.  Is this true?

>  The proto-form of the word nyíl was /J1la/, i.e. it had an
>illabial back (central) close vowel. This sound changed to /i/ in
>an early period of Hungarian, but the word preserved the back-
>harmony until now. Therefore the nom. pl. of nyíl is nyilak. [The
>majority of the one-syllable words with /i/ has back-harmony,
>however, not all, cf. nyír 'birch' > nyírek 'birch-trees' but nyír
>'he/she cuts, clips (indef.)' > nyírja 'he/she cuts, clips [it]
>(def.)']
Hungarian nyíl, earlier *n'ïlä, and Finnish nuoli, earlier *no:li, agree on
the consonants but not the vowels -- *n'V(:)lV.  Is it possible that
Hungarian (or its ancestor) de-rounded vowels next to palatal consonants?

>  It's a good argument. I'm not literate in pre-classical latin,
>therefore I can't criticize your examples (e.g. to mention other
>processes, analogies that would have caused this change), but I
>have some objections:
>
>1) Your examples demonstrate that the word-ending vowels are much
>  more exposed to the changes than medial one, cf. *animali > not
>  +anemal(e). This is also counter-argument of the supposed opening
>  of then Finnish stem-vowels and their preservation in word-final
>  position.
I don't think this is always necessarily the case.  I think it is as easy
for vowels to become more open as it is for them to be closed.

>2) My textbok says that the first syllable was stressed in Latin
>  before 3 century B.C. This caused the characteristic a, e > i
>  change in the posttonic, second open syllable, e.g. fació >
>  ínficií, legó > colligó, as well as the a > e change in closed
>  syllables, e.g. arceó > coerceó, capere > prínceps.
>  This is similar to the Hungarian (and supposed Finnish) process,
>  moreover Latin has a relative languages where these "weakened"
>  vowels disappeared, just like Finnish has Estonian, e.g. Proto-
>  Italic *agetód > latin agitó ~ Oscan actud.
>  N.B. In words like *tälv? the vowel in places of ? was bote word-
>  final position (case #1) and posttonic (case #2). This means
>  double "willingness" to change. Moreover, we find it in zero-
>  grade in Estonian, therefore, a continious "weakening" process
>  is the most likely, PFU *tälvä > Finnish *talvi > Estonian *talv.
>  Hungarian also demonstrates open /E/ in this etimon, cf. nom. sg.
>  tél ~ acc. sg. tele.t /tElE.t/
Again, if that was the case from PFU to Finnish, then why does Finnish
preserve final -A in other words, such as kala 'fish'?  Shouldn't that have
become *kali?

>3) The above difference between change a > i in open syllable and
>  change a > e in closed syllable raise the possiblity (for me)
>  that a similar process caused the changes you mentioned. But
>  I couldn't find this kind of processes in Uralic languages.
Unfortunately I do not currently have the resources (money) to look for it
on my own.

>  I think that it would be difficult to prove Marcantonio's
>opinion. Hungarian lived a long time on the steppe as a member of
>various Turkic-led tribe alliances (e.g. in the Onogurs that is the
>origin of the etymon "Hungar[ian]"). It assimilated great Turkic
>groups as Kabars (rebellious Khazars), Pechenegs, Cumanians etc.
>This caused that the Hungarian vocabulary has a strong Turkic
>layer. But this layer is not greater that the non-Indo-European
>part of the Germanic vocabulary. A recent statistics on literary
>texts shows that the word frequency in the modern (Finno-)Ugric
>according to the origin are the following: more than 50% Hungarian,
>2% Old Turkic, 3% Slavic, 1% Latin, 2% German, 5% onomatope, 18%
>uncertain or debated, 15% unknown. (Compare Japanese and Korean:
>they are not Sino-Tibetian, although, they have more Chinese
>elements than Turkic ones in Hungarian.)
>  But the grammatical structure is typical Uralic (with a small
>amount of Turkic and European areal influences).
Okay.

>  [It has no significance for me but I think that it's worth
>clarifying the following. In the latest postings, then my name
>appeared in Hungarian order in the e-mail header, this means that
>Racskó is my family name and Tamás is my personal name. Tamás is
>the Hungarian equivalent of Thomas.]
Sorry, I knew that.  My mistake :)

- Rob