Keskustelu:Hungarian Historical Phonology loll

Semantic problems aside, phonologically the comparison does not seem too difficult: loll could be a regular reflex of an Old Hungarian *lall < *lëlka, with the same raising alT > olT as in cases like (hal- : ) holt 'dead', nyolc 'eight', oltár 'altar', Boldizsár 'Balthasar', Magdolna 'Magdalena' etc. But I'm not sure if there are other examples with the cluster ll. (In native vocabulary, at least hall 'to listen' is not a counterexample, due to coming from OHu. hadl- << PU *kont-ələ-.)

On the other leg however: Abondolo (1996: 108–109) has a speculative but interesting comparison that this Ugric etymology might be connected with western *jëlka (Finnic *jalka etc.). Rather than an irregular *l- being introduced in Ugric, I would suggest that *jëlka is the novel form, by dissimilation from an original *lëlka, or perhaps, by the influence of *jälkə 'footprint, trace' (e.g. in the compound *lëlkan_jälkə > *jëlkan_jälkə >> Fi. jalanjälki). Any hypothesis like this also seems works better for just Ob-Ugric than for also Hungarian, because *jëlka already has a different Hungarian reflex proposed: gyalog 'on foot'. It would be possible to speculate about ways in which a single original root could have split in two forms in Hungarian, but the safer option would be to take this as another argument that loll is not a cognate of the Ob-Ugric words.

(There are regardless still issues with gyalog too. E.g. I think there are no good examples of word-initial *j- yielding gy- across all Hungarian dialects. I have wondered if this gy- could point to a yet third variant with original *ď-… perhaps continued also in Finnic *talla-, though this word family too needs more attention to issues of morphology and phonology.)

For further thinking out loud, if loll is not cognate to the 'foot' words here, it could have also had normal Old Hungarian *u; and an OHu. *lull would then actually have some suggestive similarity with the word for 'hand' in Nganasan, ďütü (Castrén jụtụ) < ? *jutå. Possibly ď- < j- here is older than the lack of an onset in the other Samoyedic languages (paralleled by PU *joŋsə > PSmy *jïntə > Nganasan ďintə 'bow', but other Samoyedic *ïntə as in Nenets ngin° etc.). Of course comparing just Hungarian lo- with pre-Nganasan *ju- is not much substance, especially without some explanation for the rest of the words. A fossilized 3PS possessive suffix *-tå < *-sa might be actually possible for Samoyedic (with parallels in Hungarian cases like szá-j 'mouth'), but the Hungarian side looks more opaque. --J. Pystynen (lähetä viesti) 15. elokuuta 2022 kello 21.10 (EEST)