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Hungarian Vowel Harmony

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Hungarian Vowel Harmony i- Hungarian Vowel Harmony Anna Dunbar-Hester Senior Thesis, Linguistiscs and Languages Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore Colleges December 5,2002 In this paper I will be discussing the Hungarian Vowel Harmony System. First I will give a brief discussion of the Hungarian Suffix System, then introduce the Vowel Harmony System. Next I will explain the field research that I have done, after which I will make conclusions about the rules of harmony in Hungarian and formalize these rules through Generative Phonology and Optimality Theory. 1. The Hungarian Suffixation System. 1. The Hungarian Vowels Hungarian has an inventory of 14 vowels. Following precedent set by Robert Vago (1974), I will use native orthography throughout this paper for ease of interpreting data. The vowel system is as follows: FRONT BACK UNROUNDED ROUNDED UNROUNDED ROUNDED Short Long Short Long (Short) Long Short Long . HIGH i r 0 u u U MID e 6 0 a 6 LOW e a a Because the vowel system is so complex, I will also include here a feature analysis to help break down the above information: Native PhonetiC Back Round High Low Long Orthography Representation i i - - + - - i i: -- + - + e E - - - + - e e - - - - + a a + + - + - a ::> + -- + + 0 0 + + - - - 6 0: + + - - + 0 00 - + - - - 0 00: - + - - + u u + + + - - U u: + + + - + li y - + + - - U y: - + + - + 2. Suffixation Hungarian employs a large system of suffixes, which are heavily used to fonn words, each suffix having a single morphological function. The following examples are taken from Siptar and Torkenczy (2000) because they are great at demonstrating the wide range of suffix use available in Hungarian. a. barat -sag -os -abb -an friend -ship adj. compo adv. 'in a more friendly manner' b. haz -as -u -ando -k -nak house adj. verb participle pI. dat. 'for those intending to get married' C. te -het -seg -es -ebb -ek-et do -able -ness adj. compo pI. acc. 'the more talented ones' (ace.) 3. The Case System A number of common suffixes belong to the case group, which I have included here because they are necessary for understanding Vowel Hannony. This list is derived from two sources, one of Siptar and Torkenczy (2000) and the second from Torkenczy (1997), in attempts to provide the most complete list. Case Marker A~proximate Meaning Nominative 0 (subiect) Accusative -t (object) Dative -nak/-nek to for Instrumental -vall-vel with Illative -ba/-be Into Sublative -ra/-re onto Affative -hozl -hezl -hOz to Inessive -banI-ben in Superessive -onl -enl -on on Adessive -nal/-nel at Elative -bOl/-ool out of Delative -rol/-rol of about from top of Ablative -toll-toI from Causal/Final -ert for Translative -vaJ-ve (turn) into Essive/Formal kent kePR, ulLi.i1 similar to something Terminative -IQ up to Associative ~stul/-esti.il/-asti.il together with Temporal -kor at Distributive -onta/ -ente/ -ante repeatedly, every Note that some vowels sometimes have alternates and some do not. The vowel choices fall into the following sets: 1) ale 2) o/ela 3) ale 4) 6/0 5) e 6) i 7) 0 8) ufO. II. Hungarian Vowel Harmony. 1. Vowel Harmony Types Polgardi (1998) says "Harmony is a process whereby some segmental feature associates to all segments of a certain type in a specific domain." Hungarian contains two kinds of vowel harmony, one applying to roundness and the second to backness. Roundness Harmony in Hungarian is quite simple and therefore many linguists do not spend too much time studying it or debating its driving forces. My research is also not going to involve Roundness Harmony. The second type of Vowel Harmony employed in Hungarian is Backness Harmony, which is much more complicated than Roundness Harmony and therefore more controversial. I will do my best to present the basic arguments regarding Backness Harmony, and present the case that is most satisfying and complete in my opinion, that of Miklos Tarkenczy and Peter Siptar, in their book entitled The Phonology of Hungarian. 2. Outline of Backness Harmony Now I will give a basic outline of Backness Harmony to aide the understanding of upcoming issues. Backness Harmony works on the prinCiples of keeping vowels of one type or another (front or back) within an individual word. Hungarians pride themselves on haVing a harmonic language because it essentially makes the words prettier to listen to and easier to pronounce. Native, non-compound word roots in Hungarian are either of the front or back type. A front word root has only front vowels or front and neutral vowels only. A back word root has only back vowels. Sometimes there are mixed vowel root words though, when a word root has both neutral and back vowels, and that is where real problems begin. We should expect that back and neutral vowels yield a back root (isn't that what neutral means?), but this is not the case. 3. Neutral Vowels Neutral vowels are generally considered to be e, ~ i, and f, although there is debate over e. Neutral vowels are sometimes referred to as "transparent" vowels, because they appear to be Invisible In the harmonizing process. Sometimes when multiple neutral vowels occur In succession they do become players in the harmonization, and that is when they are no longer transparent, but rather opaque. (This occurs when they are the last two vowels in a word root.) I will continue to use 'neutral' and not 'transparent,' but later on there will be more discussion of the opaque instances, as they are a major issue. There also seem to be degrees of neutrality, as Ringen and Kontra (1989) suggest and Torkenczy and Siptar (2000) expand upon, where high front unrounded vowels are considered the most neutral a I), the mid front unrounded vowel is less neutral (e), arid the low front unrounded vowel is the least neutral (e). The motivations for classifying different degrees of neutrality will become more apparent when we examine mixed word roots later on, but the basic justifications are as follows. The high unrounded vowels land {never alternate harmonically, because there are no Hungarian back counterparts to these vowels, which makes land (the most harmonic. In suffixes, ealways alternates with either aor O{6, and eeither has no alternate or alternates with a. So, eis less harmonic than iand ( because It sometimes alternates, and e Is the least harmonic because it always alternates. As further evidence that e is the least harmonic, there are no back harmonic neutral vowel roots that contain e, and mixed vowel roots that contain e in the last syllable are the most unstable with respect to selecting a I suffix vowel (Kenesei, Vago, Fenyvesi, 1998). 4. Simple Applications To demonstrate vowel harmony, I am going to provide a few simple examples. Notice in the case chart in 1.3 that some cases have alternate forms, i.e. -val/vel. The correct form is chosen based on whether the vowels in the root of the word make the root front harmonic or back harmonic. If a word contains front harmonic vowels (0, 0, 0, (I), it is considered a front-harmonic root and governs a front- vowel suffix. Note that if a word has a prefix, this does not effect the harmony of the root. An internal word boundary is present in this case. Note also that a word with only neutral vowels acts as front- harmonic. I posit that this occurs because neutral vowels are technically front vowels, even though they are not front-harmonic. A group of exception words of this type will be addressed later. Front Harmonv Back Harmonv gyumolcs 7 gyumolcsvel with the fruit kutya 7 kutyaval with the dog Liveg 7 uvegbOlout of the bottle lampa 7 lampabOl out of the lamp no 7 nonel at the woman nap 7 napnal at the day Peter 7 Peternek for Peter falu 7 falunak for the village kenyer 7 kenyerben in the bread paradicsom7 paradicsomban in the tomato 5. Complications As I stated before, sometimes neutral vowels behave in an opaque manner. Torkenczy and Siptar (2000) have developed a model for laying out exactly the possible behaviors of mixed stems are, which r will produce an expanded version of shortly. I am In favor of this analysis because of its abUity to describe all the complex data in one concise chart, which gives us insight Into the system of when :'::'. different suffixes are chosen. I will now summarize their analysis of mixed root behavior. A mixed root is categorized by the last two vowels in the stem. (Remember that to be a mixed root the root must contain back and neutral vowels.) First, we have a category of roots that have a back vowel in their penultimate vowel position and a neutral vowel in the last vowel position. Cases exist where, regardless of which neutral vowel is chosen, the only vowel that is chosen for the suffix is back. If the neutral vowel is e or ehowever, there are stems that govern either front or back vowels in the suffix, but either is fine. These are called vacillating endings. Some roots only take a front vowel suffix, and this is referred to as a disharmonic suffix. This only occurs when e is in the neutral vowel position. The second category of roots has a neutral vowel in the penultimate vowel position and another neutral vowel in the final vowel pOSition, giving two neutral vowels in a row. These have long been known to cause problems, for example, analizis-nek, november-nek. In these roots, the vowels apparently do not act fully neutral. There are some cases in which they seem to gain opaque status and create the power for governing a front vowel suffix, and other cases in which the stems are again vacillating.
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