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

On 11 May 2004 Rob Haden <magwich78@...> wrote:

> Are there historical attestations of original *uta and *sivä?
  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.

  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/.

> What causes the rounding when open vowels become close?
  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]

> So acc. sg. of 'road' is utat.  Is the nominative plural of szív
> 'heart' szivek, acc. sg. szivet?
  Yes.

> Is the nom. pl. of nyíl 'arrow' nyilek?
  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.)']

> Is the dat. sg. for 'road' utnak or utunak?  Inessive utban or
> utuban?
  Dat. sg. is útnak /ut:nOk/, inessive is útban /u:tbOn/.

> However, the reverse process can also happen.  For example, in
> Latin, word-final /i/ became /e/: active infinitive *legesi 'to
> read' > legere, *animali 'animal' > animal(e).
  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.

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/

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.

> On another note, I have read a book by a Dr. Marcantonio that
> posits that Magyar is not actually a Uralic language, but an
> Altaic one.  However, in our discussions, it seems that Magyar is
> indeed Uralic, although its lexicon is borrowed heavily from
> Turkic (and other Altaic?) languages.
  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).

> You appear to be correct, Racsko
  [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.]