The Phonology of Hungarian (review)

This book comprises nine chapters: ‘Introduction’ (3–12), ‘Preliminaries’ (13–48), ‘The vowel system’ (51–74), ‘The consonant system’ (75–94), ‘Phonotactics’ (95–153), ‘Processes involving vowels’ (157–75), ‘Processes involving consonants’ (176–213), ‘Processes conditioned by syllabic structure’ (214–77), and ‘Surface processes’ (278–96). The chapters are organized thematically into three parts: ‘Background’ (3–48), ‘Systems’ (51–153), and ‘Processes’ (157–296). It concludes with a list of references (297–312) and a general index (313–19). The dialect described is Educated Colloquial Hungarian, ‘the spoken language of “educated” people living in Budapest’ (3). To facilitate access to the facts and their conclusions, the authors present ‘a rule-based account of the phonology of Hungarian’ (3), adopting a nonlinear, derivational framework (as opposed to a nonderivational framework such as government phonology or optimality theory). There are numerous references throughout to important previous discussions of the subject matter.

For those who are not specialists in Hungarian phonology, Parts 1 and 2 will be the most useful. Part 1 provides a good, if brief, overview of the orthography, relevant phonological theory, previous literature, Hungarian dialects, the origins of the word-stock, Hungarian phonetics (segmental and suprasegmental), and morphology in both its inflectional and derivational aspects. There is also some attention to sentence structure. Part 2 is devoted primarily to establishing the underlying phonological units of Hungarian and the essentials of its syllabic structure, but there is preliminary attention to several important processes (e.g. low vowel lengthening, stem vowel shortening), including vowel harmony. The discussion of vowel harmony is especially good. It is clear and uncluttered by attempts to regularize a process which, in fact, requires the establishment of stem types. That is, the authors deal with so-called transparent vowels (i.e. vowels that do not participate in harmony) as such—they do not attempt to accommodate them as surface realizations of abstract underlying units that undergo absolute neutralization. In addition, they include rounding harmony (i.e. the alternation o/ö/e) in their discussion and also treat the interaction of harmony with vowel lowering (i.e. the pattern o/ö/a/e). The result is a comprehensive and integrated reference of harmonic and harmonic-related phenomena. Part 2 concludes with a lengthy and highly informative discussion, available nowhere else in English, of syllabic structure and constraints on consonants in sequence, both at word-level and morpheme-level.

Part 3 is somewhat more theoretical, providing nonlinear descriptions of the phenomena previously mentioned and others including vowel-zero alternations, palatalization, voicing assimilation, and assibilation. The phonology of t is discussed in substantial detail, both as it relates to verbs with this segment occurring stem-finally and to its occurrence in the suffix signaling ‘past tense’. The section concludes with a discussion of postlexical phenomena.

This book will not disappoint specialist or nonspecialist readers. The former will value it for the originality of its analyses; the latter, for its clear presentation of the facts. All will appreciate it as a competent, organized source of the facts and bibliographic references to other treatments.