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

On Fri, 20 Nov 1998, JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:

> 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?
> Do you mean that all verbs in Hungarian can be used either transitively
> or intransitively?
>
Yes!  Thank you!  This is it!

> 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...
Futom a versenyt.  = I run the race.

It works fine.

-------ferke
Ferenc Gy. Valoczy

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