A magyar nyelv 1. személyeket jelölő morfémái

Hungarian 1sg -m and 1pl -unk/-ünk clearly show that these endings go back to personal pronouns, at least for speakers who are at least mildly familiar with the history of Hungarian. What has been a puzzle within Hungarian historical linguistics, however, are the origins of 1sg -k and 1pl -(j)uk/-(j)ük. The author reviews some attempts at solving these puzzles in the course of previous research, pointing out their weaknesses and fallacies; the morals he draws from them and his knowledge of Uralic languages make it possible for him to formulate and argue for the results detailed in the paragraphs to follow. The Hungarian conjugational categories are interrelated in a rather complex manner: (1) definite conjugation ↔ indefinite conjugation; (2) within indefinite conjugation: subjective conjugation ↔ medial (or -ik) conjugation The use of the personal endings studied in this paper are distributed across these conjugational paradigms, hence in clarifying their history, one has to pay attention to these categories as well. Clarifying the background of 1sg -k is the toughest nut to crack of all personal endings of Hungarian, yet it finally gave in; the key was that 3sg -ik of the medial conjugation is a complex of the former participial suffix -i and the enhancer -k, together becoming the functional vehicle of mediality. With the full development of the medial conjugation, the emergence of the most frequently used personal endings, that is, the 2sg and especially 1sg verb forms, was inevitable. What turned into the ending of 2sg was -l, one of the threefold descendants of the 2sg personal pronoun (PU/PFU *-t- > > H -d, -l, -sz); whereas 1sg acquired its -k, coming from the former enhancer, by association with -ik, the exponent of mediality in 3sg. The detection of the pronominal origin of both 1sg -k and 1pl -(j)uk/-(j)ük became possible by ferreting out, in view of data from related languages, a number of facts and events of historical phonology, historical morphology, and morphosyntax.