Re: Questions about Hungarian

On 5 May 2004 vehke <vaksje@...> wrote:

> > (/a/, /o/, /u/, /3/) or "palatal" (front) ones (/a/, /E/, /i/,
> /a/ occurs as both a back and a front vowel (perhaps you meant /A/)?
> Could you perhaps give the corresponding UPA symbols?
  Unfortunately I'm a horrible typist and a superficial proof-reader...
I meant "palatal" /E/, /e/, /i/, the UPA symbols are: ä, e, i.

> According to Sammallahti, PU does have non-initial /i/ (UPA i), as in
> the following examples (in UPA):
> [...]
> Yet, that doesn't explain the vowel change PU *-ti > *-tA (not to
> mention becoming harmonic), apart from the _kĹŤli_ example. Hmm...
  I've learned the discussion with Rob Haden, theat Sammallahti suppose
harmonic front */i/ (UPA i) ~ back */1/ (UPA i with breve below) pair
in place of neural /e/ of the Hungarian school.  According to this
Sammallahti's PU *-ti should be rather harmonic *-ti/t1. The other
problems still exist.

  However, do you and Rob study the same Sammallahti? Rob "wagers that
there was no partitive in Proto-Uralic".

  (Unfortunately, my e-mail client is not Unicode-compatible, thus I
wasn't able decode _kĹŤli_.)


> > but Erza Mordvin tuvo (due to a /u/ > /1/ > /i/ change) or Finnish
> Is that PFU /u/? Can't seem to find the sound change. Or is /u/ Erzyan,
> while /i/ is PU?
  Since this lemma doesn't continues in Hungarian, I couldn't look up
its PFU reconstruction in my sources (it was only an example in a
textbook). But I found another one (notation by UPA using flying
accents, @ = schwa, D = greek delta):

  Finnish lintu 'bird', Estonian lind vs. Lappish (Norwegian) lo,d'de,
Cheremiss (Eastern) luDo 'duck', Vogul lo-nt 'goose', Hungarian lu'd <
*FPU lunta. The first vowel is back in all FU languges (even Lappish)
except Baltic-Finnic.

  This process -- simultaneous illabization and shift to front --
became more general in other Baltic-Finnic languages, e.g. we find az
intermediate form in Estonian, cf. ko~va /k3va/ 'hard' ~ Finnish kova,
in Livonian /k3viSt/ 'whetstone' ~ Finnish kovasin. In Livonian
dialects we can find the whole sequence, cf. /siu(v)/ < /s3u(v)/ <
/syuv/ 'sommer' ~ Finnish suvi.

  This it seems that this process started to develop -- mainly before
nasals and /v/ -- in the southern area of the Baltic-Finnic group and
it spread northwards (but became improductive before its complete
development).

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