Re: Quryak (Was:Re: Another Orthography Question)

On Fri, 20 Nov 1998, Frank George Valoczy wrote:

> > >The direct object is in the nominative, and verbs are like in Hungarian,
> > >no distinction is made btw. transitive and intransitive.
> >
> > I don't understand what you mean here...
>
> Hungarian has only one class of verbs; ie. no distinction is made btw.
> transitive and intransitive verbs.  I don't know how to explain it; maybe
> if you'd specify what you don't understand?
What do you mean by "class"?  Morphological class?  Syntactic class?
Semantic class?

What do you mean by "no distinction"?  No morphological distinction?
No syntactic distinction?  No semantic distinction?

Do you mean that transitive and intransitive verbs are inflected the
same way for tense/aspect/whatever?  Do you mean that the transitive-
intransitive distinction is not marked by means of special morphology?
Do you mean that all verbs in Hungarian can be used either transitively
or intransitively?

I was given to understand that the transitive/intransitive distinction
was actually quite important in Hungarian grammar.  For example, only
transitive verbs distinguish definite/indefinite object agreement,
as in the following examples from a paper by Anna Szabolcsi:

        Eltitkol-om          a    tala'lkoza'st
        keep secret-1sg+Def  the  meeting-Acc
        "I kept the meeting secret"

        Eltitkol-ok            ha'rom  tala'lkoza'st
        keep secret-1sg+Indef  three   meeting-Acc
        "I kept three meetings secret"

So there are two 1st person singular agreement suffixes:  Roughly
speaking, "-om" is when the direct object is definite and "-ok" is used
when the direct object is indefinite.  Intransitive verbs only allow the
"-ok" form:

        Fut-ok
        run-1sg
        "I run"

"Futom" is no good.  Do I have my facts correct here?  I don't really
know much about Hungarian, other than what I've read in linguistics
articles...

Matt.