Re: Questions about Hungarian

On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 07:15:23PM +0100, Racsko Tamas wrote:
> On 2 May 2004 vehke <vaksje@...> wrote:
>
> > *-ti is actually mentioned as PU's partitive suffix
>
>   I think that partitive is not a common cathegory in FU languages, it
> can be found only in Baltic-Finnic branch (I think it's missing even in
> Lappish).
In North Sámi the accusative plural (-d) is historically based on the
partitive, which is said to come from PU *-ti, PFV (Finno-Volgaic) *-tA.
Eastern Sámi languages, such as Inari, still have the partitive -d.
Therefore, it's at least a feature of Finno-Samic/Lappic.

> Moreover, it would be the only exception to the vowel harmony
> rules of the PU. My sources reconstuct the partitive suffix as *-ta/tä
> in the Proto-Baltic-Finnish (PF). We may see that it's the same as the
> PU/PFU ablative suffix. It's a quite common to use ablative instead of
> partitive, e.g. Hungarian uses elative (a subtype of ablative) in this
> sense, the partitive articles du/de la/des in French are the same as
> preposition de 'from' etc. Therefore I'm sure that neither PU nor PFU
> had patitive: it developed only in PF from the ablative by semantic
> split.
What are, by the way, PU's vowel harmony rules?

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.

--
vehke.