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

On 7 May 2004 Trebor Jung <treborjung@...> wrote:

> Hmm. Interesting question. Where could long vowels come from? What
> phonological processes could trigger the creation of phonemic vocalic
> length?
  We don't find evidences of long vowels on the line of Ugric
languages. Their development is clearly traceable in Hungarian, the
main processes are:

1. Disappearance of intervocalic consonants followed by the fusion
of successive vowels, e.g. a'cs /a:tS/ 'carpenter' < */aatSi_x/ <
*/aGatSi/ < Turkic aghach1; I have Finnish examples too, e.g. ja:a:
'ice' < PFU /jENe/ > Hungarian je'g

2. Compensatory lengthening due to the disappearence of the vowel
of the next syllable. Two main types in Hungarian:
a) Disappearance of word-final vocals: e.g. (11th century) utu
   /utu_x/ > (modern) u't /u:t/ 'way, road', but also above je'g <
  *jegi 'ice'. (N.B. These lemmas have a vocalic stem, cf. uta.k
  'ways', jege.s 'icy')
b) Disappearence of a medial vowel due to the "double open syllable
   rule", e.g. Slavic malina 'raspberry' > Hungarian ma'lna

3. Monophtongization: with the exception of a very few (mainly one-
syllable) words, every diphtongue changed into long vowel in (which
maybe became short later); there was plenty of examples in previous
Hungarian threads

4. Effect of the subsequent consonant: there are meny examples of
the vowel lengthening before r, l, j and nasals, see (literary)
fonal 'thread, yarn' ~ (colloquial) fona'l

5. Effect of the long vowel in the subsequent syllable: the short
stressed vowels tend to lengthen if the next syllable has a long
vowel, e.g. Turkic sharqan > (rule #4) Hungarian *sarka'ny > (rule
#5) > sa'rka'ny

6. Occasionally stressed vowels became long (even if the next
syllable was short)

7. Morphophonological restructuring, e.g. VCC > VVC, e.g. (modern)
szo"lo" /s2:l2:/ 'grape(vine)' < (archaic, dialectal) szo:llo" <
Western Turkic /s'iGlEk/ > Chuvash /s'1rla/

8. Systemic changes: (1) In Eastern dialects close vowels /i, u, y/
are long (somewhere in every position, somewhere only in stressed
syllables); (2) A common Hungarian rule is that word-final /o/ is
always long (except two interjections: no, nono), this is true even
from recent borrowing and foreign proper names.