New insights on the Hungarian objective conjugation

This paper argues that some surprising new diachronic insights can be gained on the so-called objective conjugation of Hungarian – or at least some hypotheses can be put forward which seem rather plausible. Most notably, the 1st person plural suffix -juk (back vowel allomorph) can be traced back to *-já-muk, making use of the fact that Uralic *m was partly shifted to *w in Hungarian and that contractions occurred. In addition, related issues concerning the forms of the objective conjugation are explored. The paper uses the method of internal reconstruction in combination with what is known about Hungarian sound history.