Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 109. kötet (2013)
Tanulmányok - Simoncsics, Péter: Linguistic gestures: On negation, with special reference to the Permian languages 151
On negation, with special reference to the Permian languages 155 Imperative (Prohibitive) Sg2 Udmurt e--nmin(i) ’Don’t walk!’ Komi e-n set ’Don’t give!’ (Csúcs 1990: 53-54, Rédei 1978: 83-84). A quick glance shows that negative auxiliaries (1) are preposed, (2) are vowel-initial (i.e. they are vocalic stems), and (3) possess two stem variants: an u- ~ o- stem in the present (and future) indicative, and an e- ~ ё- stem in all other moods and tenses. Vowel-initial negative auxiliaries seem to be a general feature of Uralic, from Saami through Mordvinian to Kamassian and Selqup, and as I have suggested elsewhere (Simoncsics 2011a) partly even in Hungarian. In the Udmurt narrative past negation can also be expressed synthetically (by a caritive participial form) as an alternative to the analytic form also based on the ё- stem: ё\ё1 ’negative auxiliary stemAbe’. Similarly, in the Komi narrative past negation is also formed analytically: aAbu ’negative particle (possibly a loan of unknown origin)Abe’. Apart from the latter variant there seems to be complementary distribution between negative u- ~ o- and e- ~ ё- stems with respect to present indicative and the remaining tenses and moods. In other words and in a broader perspective, in the present indicative we have only и— о- stems, while e- ~ ё- stems occur in the other tenses and moods together with negative forms with a-. It is this kind of double representation of the negative auxiliary in Permian (and in Mari, and, in part, also in Mordvinian) that has prompted some scholars reconstruct two negative stems for Proto-Finno-Ugric, namely *e- and *a- (Bereczki 1996: 55). And „there’s the rub”! Applying Occam’s razor „Numquam ponenda est pluralitás sine necessitate” even in the remote period of Proto- Finno-Ugric we may ask: why reconstruct two negative stems, if the majority of peripheral languages in the West, North and South of the Finno-Ugric region, Balto-Finnic and Hungarian, indicate that just one negative stem is enough? (We could speak of similar phenomena in Samoyedic, but we defer the discussion of this to a later date.) But how can we bring these two stems to a common denominator? The simplest way of solving this riddle would be to suppose paradigmatic vowelalternation for Permian. But, in contradistinction to some closer (and more distant) cognates, such as Mari, Khanty, Vogul and even Hungarian, there is no paradigmatic stem-vowel alternation (Ablaut) in Permian, as pointed out by Austerlitz (1985: 99). Nevertheless, W. Steinitz mentions Ablaut phenomena in Permian in his famous „Geschichte des finnisch-ugrischen Vokalismus”, noting however that most of these are dialectal and some of them „hitherto unexplained”. In the following I will try to solve this Permian enigma.
