Re: Questions about Hungarian

On 3 May 2004 vehke <vaksje@...> wrote:

> As the exact semantics are unknown, neither PU partitive nor ablative
> do justice as case names. My sources probably chose 'partitive' to
> refer to the same case.
  Your're probably right but the term "partitive" still makes me
trouble speaking about PFU.

  Of course, we don't know the exact semantics but we have some
knowledge of laguage universal. Do you know languages that don't have
ablative case (or its equivalent [e.g. elative, delative]) but have
partitive? IMHO when naming grammatical entity it's worth sticking to
the more fundamental cathegories that to the more specialized ones...

> Eastern Sámi languages, such as Inari, still have the partitive -d.
  I see. (I have only Norwegial Lappish resources.)

> which is said to come from PU *-ti, PFV (Finno-Volgaic) *-tA.
  My questions: Do you know other inharmonic morphemes that became
harmonic in PFV? And not just in PFV but in Proto-Ugric and in Proto-
Permic because the latter two branch have continuants of a PU/PFU
harmonic ablative *-tA (e.g. Erza Mordvin ablative -To/Te, elative
-sto/ste [T = assimilated as t/t'/d/d']? Etc.

  I think ther're much less questions if we reconstruct PU *-tA. E.g.
there're examples of the change -A > -i in Finnic branch.

  Are there any explanations in your sources what were the reasons of
reconstruction of *-ti with a vocalic quality of *-i?

> What are, by the way, PU's vowel harmony rules?
  According to the my sources, the morpheme chain was harmonic. The PFU
had a different set of vowels in the first syllable and in the non-
first ones. (Similarly -- but not identically -- like in Lappish
dialects). The first syllable may contain "velar" (back and central)
vowels (/a/, /o/, /u/, /3/) or "palatal" (front) ones (/a/, /E/, /i/,
or maybe /y/). If the first syllable was velar, the following syllables
contained velar /a/ or neutral /e/; if the "head" was palatal, the rest
were palatal /E/ or neutral /e/.

  The case suffix *-ti breakes the above rule in two points. (1) A case
suffix can't be the first syllable in a morpheme chain, therefore its
vowel should have been /a/, /E/ or /e/. (2) It shows palatal
homomorphism, i.e. it doesn't have a velar variant for velar noun
stems.

  /i/ can be neutral only in a few FU languages and these are proved to
be relatively late developments, cf. Finnish sika, Estonian siga 'pig'
but Erza Mordvin tuvo (due to a /u/ > /1/ > /i/ change) or Finnish
kaksi < PF *kakta.

  Of course we could re-design PFU vowel harmony rules in order to cram
*-ti into it. But in this case it wouldn't be a coherent system longer.

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