From narrative past to mirativity and direct evidentiality: the case of Moldavian (Csángó) Hungarian

2.1 The Moldavian dialect of Hungarian

Moldavian Hungarian is a dialect spoken on the eastern side of the Carpathian Mountains. This region has always been outside the borders of the Hungarian state. The core of the Hungarian population was settled there in the 13th century after the 1241–42 Mongol invasion of the Hungarian Kingdom to guard the country from eastern attacks in a network of outposts. A later large immigration wave from the Secler region (Székelyföld) of Hungary took place in 1764, after the Madéfalva massacre of the Habsburg army.^[1] As for the present situation, the 1992 census found 240,000 Catholics in the Moldavia region of Romania, nearly all of whom are of Hungarian descent. About 25% of them, 62,000 people from 80 villages, professed to speak Hungarian alongside Romanian (Tánczos 1997).

Moldavian Hungarians are a rural society which have never had any Hungarian clerisy or Hungarian schools; the language of schooling, religious services and administration has been Romanian for them. Their Hungarian culture is oral culture; their prayers preserve archaic folk poetry rather than written Hungarian religious tradition, to which they have had no access (Tánczos 1999).^[2] Only recently have extracurricular Hungarian classes been introduced for schoolchildren in some villages, based on the local Hungarian dialect. Because of its isolation, Moldavian Hungarian has preserved various features of Middle Hungarian (Kiss 2003: 107–315). The impact of Romanian is manifested mostly in the high proportion of loanwords, as Moldavian Hungarians have met with the material and cultural innovations of the past centuries through the Romanian language. Romanian morphosyntax has affected Moldavian Hungarian mostly by preserving and reinforcing existing grammatical alternatives that are parallel with their Romanian functional equivalents. Thus the influence of Romanian must have helped the preservation of complex tenses, which disappeared from Standard Hungarian in the 16th–18th centuries.^[3] Importantly, Romanian has no grammaticalized evidentiality marking, hence the emergence of evidentiality in Moldavian Hungarian cannot be due to contact effects.

Moldavian Hungarian is not homogeneous dialectally. It has three major subdialects, identified as Northern, Southern, and Secler-type Moldavian Hungarian. The present description is based primarily on consultations (partly in person, partly via Skype) with two speakers of the Southern subdialect, a man and a woman in their sixties, one of them a native of the village Cleja/Klézse, the other a native of Faraoani/Forrófalva. Hungarian is still fully functional in these villages, and our consultants are Hungarian-dominant bilinguals. The consultant from Forrófalva only speaks the Moldavian version of Hungarian. The consultant from Klézse was also exposed to the vernacular Hungarian of the Transylvania region of Romania for some time, and he often made comments on the differences of the Transylvanian standard and his own dialect. Our consultations involved grammaticality judgement tasks, evaluations of minimal pairs, and discussions of the (in)appropriateness of sentences with different past tenses in various contexts. Two sources covering all three Moldavian Hungarian subdialects have also been consulted: the Moldavian Hungarian database of the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics (https://nlp.nytud.hu/csango/), containing video recordings and their transcriptions recorded by Vilmos Tánczos in the 1990s, and Péntek’s (2018) dictionary of Moldavian Hungarian, containing text examples from archived materials of Moldavian fieldwork carried out by the Hungarian Linguistics Department of Babeş-Bolyai University in the second half of the 20th century. Their data indicate that the evidential system outlined below must be, or must have been, present in all three subdialects of Moldavian Hungarian.

2.2 The tenses system of Moldavian Hungarian

Whereas Standard Hungarian only has a single past tense (and an unmarked non-past), Moldavian Hungarian has preserved the complex tense system of Old Hungarian. It has five tenses, which are labelled in terms of the Hungarian grammatical tradition as follows:

As will be argued below, two of the four past tenses have developed evidential and mirative functions. Whereas the tenses marked by -t, i.e., the general past (2.2.1) and the past perfect (2.2.2), are evidentially neutral, the tenses marked by -a/e, i.e., the immediate past (2.2.3) and the imperfect past (2.2.4), encode direct evidentiality.

2.3 Atypical properties of Moldavian Hungarian evidentiality

The grammatical encoding of evidentiality is common in the languages of the world, and linguistic typology has extensively described, compared and classified the general and diverse properties of the different evidential systems (see, e.g., Aikhenvald 2004, 2018). A criterion of classification is whether evidentiality is expressed autonomously or fused with a grammatical category, and in the latter case, what grammatical category it is fused with (Aikhenvald 2015). The situation found in Moldavian Hungarian, where evidentiality marking is restricted to the past tenses, and the evidentiality marker is fused with a past tense suffix, is common crosslinguistically – see also Visser (2015) and Forker (2018).

Another criterion of classification is the number of evidential specifications. Aikhenvald (2003, 2004 distinguishes two-term, three-term, four-term, and multi-term evidential systems. Two-term evidential systems may instantiate the following contrasts:

• A1. Firsthand versus non-firsthand;

• A2. Non-firsthand versus everything else (where ʻeverything elseʼ includes ʻnon-firsthandʼ and ʻevidentially unspecifiedʼ);^[8]

• A3. Reported (or hearsay) versus everything else;

• A4. Sensory evidence versus reported (or hearsay);

• A5. Auditory (acquired through hearing) versus everything else.

Moldavian Hungarian represents a further type:

• A6. Firsthand versus everything else.

Type A6 is predicted in the literature to be impossible, albeit the reasoning, based on intuition, is far from being conclusive. According to de Haan (2012: 11–12),

it would seem to be a near absolute universal that if a language has grammaticalized direct evidentials, it also has grammaticalized indirect evidentials. Or, to put it another way, indirect evidentials are grammaticalized before direct evidentials. Pragmatically, the reasoning seems to be that statements made by the speaker are assumed to convey direct evidence unless stated otherwise. Hence the abundance of lexical material and grammaticalized evidentials to mark indirect evidence, as this is the marked member of the opposition. Once grammaticalized indirect evidentials are present, direct evidentials can be grammaticalized.

DeLancey (2012: 544–545) makes a similar claim, arguing that the particle lõ in the Athabaskan language Hare cannot be a direct evidentiality marker because the language does not mark indirect evidentiality, and “one cannot coherently describe a hypothetical language in which there was a marked construction indicating ʻdirect sensory evidenceʼ contrasting only with an unmarked construction with no evidential value at all”. Hill (2012) rejects this argument; for him it seems a perfectly legitimate strategy for speakers not to mark the source of information unless it has been obtained from direct personal experience. That is, Hill does not exclude the possibility that Hare represents a formerly unattested type, the one identified above as A6.

A further unusual feature of Moldavian Hungarian is that mirativity is expressed by the suffix encoding direct evidentiality. Mirativity has been claimed to be an extension of indirect evidentiality – unless mirativity marking is a system independent of evidentiality, encoded by a separate morpheme, in which case it can cooccur with any type of evidentiality (Aikhenvald 2004, 2012; DeLancey 1997, 2001). Mirativity, along with hearsay and inferential, is a use of the non-firsthand, or mediative, evidential in Lazardʼs (2001) description of evidentiality in Balkan and Middle Eastern languages, as well. Witnessed evidentials with mirative overtones have been reported from two languages: Cupeño (Hill 2005) and Lhasa Tibetan (DeLancey 1997, 2012), but Aikhenvald (2012: 467) found these examples inconclusive. The problem with Hillʼs analysis of Cupeño is that when she discovered mirativity in texts and notes collected by her decades earlier, there were no more Cupeño speakers left, hence there was no way to examine mirativity with targeted tests. DeLanceyʼs claim that the morpheme encoding sensory or visual evidentiality in Lhasa Tibetan also marks mirativity is not found fully convincing because it is not placed within the context of a full grammar of the language. According to Aikhenvald (2004: 210),

any evidential except for visual and firsthand, can acquire mirative extensions. These extensions are a frequent feature of the non-firsthand form in small systems, and of inferred in larger systems. […] The emerging correlation is intuitively right: new and unexpected knowledge appears to be interconnected with something one makes inferences about but has not witnessed or hardly has under control.

The Moldavian Hungarian facts suggest a different – trivial – correlation, which holds for all languages with a two-term evidential system contrasting an evidentially marked and an evidentially neutral form. Namely, if the evidential system can also express mirativity, it is the evidentially marked form that has a mirative use.

In Moldavian Hungarian, the mirative use of the evidential -a/e appears to be elicited in the case of directly experienced events that are not only unexpected but also trigger an emotional reaction – mostly sorrow, anger, or exasperation – in the speaker. An emotional component has been pointed out in the licencing of mirative morphemes in some other languages, as well. As observed by DeLancey (2012: 558), unexpected information often provokes some kind of emotional reaction, and it is inevitable that some emotional value will sometimes attach to a mirative construction. DeLancey points to a number of descriptions that refer to implications of disapproval or other negative attitudes associated with mirative constructions, e.g., Hein (2007) and So-Hartmann (2009: 293–294). In Tsakhur (Tatevosov and Maisak 1999: 232–233), the non-firsthand evidential may acquire a mirative connotation if something happens contrary to the speaker’s expectation and much to their regret. Sapir (1922: 200), too, mentions anger among the conditions licencing the mirative use of the inferential in Takelma: it is frequently used “in rhetorical questions of anger, surprise, wonder, and discovery of fact after ignorance of it for some time”. Mirative exclamations in Moldavian Hungarian often function as self-addressed rhetorical questions – similarly to rhetorical questions marked by mirative forms e.g. in !Xun (König 2013), Magar (Grunow-Hårsta 2007), and Cantonese (Matthews 1998: 330–331), languages reported by Aikhenvald (2004: Ch. 6, 2012).

As I will show in the following section, the atypical properties of evidentiality in Moldavian Hungarian are a result of its historical evolution.

3.1 The -a/e suffix in Old Hungarian (900–1526): the marker of narrative past

Old Hungarian had the same tense forms as present-day Moldavian Hungarian except that the tense suffix on the auxiliary of past perfect tense used to be -a/e, whereas it is -t in Moldavian Hungarian. The functions of the verb forms, however, were different. Old Hungarian (preserved in coherent documents since 1192) had the following five tenses (Abaffy 1992; Szarvas 1872; É. Kiss 2014, 2016):

The suffix -a/e, descendant of the Uralic past-tense suffix, functioned as the marker of the general, narrative past, the past tense of events not linked to the present (hence it is glossed as pst in the Old Hungarian examples). In the late Old Hungarian period, however, it faced a competitor, the suffix -t. The suffix -t originally encoded the perfect aspect (hence it is glossed as prf in the Old Hungarian examples). Unless followed by an -a/e-marked temporal auxiliary, t-marked verbs denoted past events with present relevance (Abaffy 1992; Szarvas 1872). Notice the different functions of the narrative past (used by the story teller giving account of a past event) and the present perfect (used by a participant of the same situation facing the present result of the past event) in the following example:

V+AGR combined with an -a-marked temporal auxiliary represented past imperfect, i.e., continuous or habitual past:

A perfect, -t-marked verb followed by an -a-marked temporal auxiliary expressed past perfect tense:

The tense system outlined above started disintegrating in the late Old Hungarian period already. It was still more or less complete in documents recording ‘bequethed’ texts inherited from earlier times, i.e., in poems, and in the prose of codices. (Of the 46 Hungarian-language codices from the 14th, 15th and early 16th centuries that survived the Turkish occupation of Hungary in 1526, all but one are copies of older texts, mostly Bible translations, monastic rules, prayers, and legends of saints.) In spontaneously created texts, mostly letters, however, the -a/e suffix was already losing ground to -t, which was developing from the marker of past events with present relevance into a marker of past events. Compare the distribution of past tenses in three different text types from the 14th, 15th and early 16th centuries (Abaffy 1992: 163):

In poems and codices, mostly representing copies of older exemplars, we find twice as many occurrences of -a/e-marked verbs than of -t-marked verbs. In letters representing spontaneous language use, the proportion of these tenses is reversed: there are more than twice as many -t-marked verbs as -a/e-marked verbs. The change in proportions went hand-in-hand with a functional change: -t gradually took over the role of the general past-tense suffix. The development of perfect into general past, i.e., the simplification of the [+past, +present relevance] feature complex to [+past] is not unique to Hungarian; it also happened e.g. in the case of the French passé composé (Caudal 2015).

As a consequence of this process, the -a/e suffix, the former narrative/general past marker, was gradually constrained to particular functional niches in Middle Hungarian. Abaffy (1992) already observed a new function of -a/e in a few Late Old Hungarian documents; she noticed that -a/e could also denote recent past in reported direct speech. The following Old Hungarian example illustrates both the regular and the newly emerging function of -a/e: the suffix marks narrative past on the reporting verb, and recent past on the reported verb.

Abaffy (1992: 153, 166) claims that the marking of recent past by -a/e emerged as a dialectal phenomenon in codices with ties to Eastern Hungary.

3.2 The -a/e suffix in Middle Hungarian (1526–1772): decreasing frequency, pragmatic conditions on its use

Whereas Old Hungarian marked both tense and viewpoint aspect, i.e., +/–perfectivity, the emergence of a system of situation aspect marking by means of telicizing verbal particles led to the disappearance of viewpoint aspect marking in the Middle Hungarian period (É. Kiss 2016). The language was slowly returning to the Proto-Ugric and Proto-Uralic system of two simple tenses: past and non-past, with past tense marked by the suffix -t instead of the original -a/e.

Compare the distribution of the four past tenses in Old Hungarian, shown in Table 1, with their distribution in a corpus of 1,225 letters from the period 1526–1700 (Mohay 2018: 71), shown in Table 2.

The commonness of the -t-past and the infrequence of the -a/e past is also confirmed by Halász’s (2021) data, who examined the percentages of the -t-marked (vol-t) and -a-marked (val-a) past-tense forms of the copula used as a discrete (main) verb among the tokens of the 1,050,000 word Old and Middle Hungarian corpus of informal language use (http://tmk.nytud.hu). Compare their changing proportions in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1:

The changing proportions of the t-marked and -a-marked copula.

Parallel with -t taking over the role of general past-tense suffix, the distribution of -a/e gradually came to be restricted to specific contexts. Owing to its relative rarity, the -a/e past assumed an elevated stylistic value and tended to be used to highlight important, distinguished events. This tendency has been observed by several authors analysing the Middle Hungarian tense system. Németh (2001) compared the distribution of past tenses in two late 16th-century corpora of similar sizes: private letters and a memoir appended to an entreaty for a land grant, emphasizing the authorʼs services of 65 years for an aristocratic family. She found that the -a/e past, making up 59.4% of all past tenses in the memoir and only 7.1% in the private letters, was used in the case of significant, often majestic, happenings. Zsilinszky (2005), analysing 17th-century manor court records, observed that the -a/e past was often used for dramatic purposes, highlighting incidents that represented a turn in a series of events. Her observations recall the characterization of mirative evidentials in some present-day languages. For example, the mirative marker in !Xun can mark the main point of the story (König 2013). In Cantonese, the mirative can be used to express notable information (Matthews 1998: 330–331).

The pragmatic contexts of the -a/e past have been investigated most thoroughly by Mohay (2018, 2020, 2021. In addition to 1,225 Middle Hungarian letters, she studied witness testimonies of witch trials, relying on the Old and Middle Hungarian corpus of informal language use (https://tmk.nytud.hu/). The Middle Hungarian letters analysed by her show a function of the -a/e past that was already present in some Old Hungarian codices as a dialectal phenomenon (Abaffy 1992: 163): the marking of recent past, i.e., the period within a few days before the speech time (Mohay 2018). The typical time adverbials used with -a/e-marked verbs include tegnap ‘yesterday’, e napokban ‘these days’, ez órában ‘this hour’, most ‘now’, as illustrated in (22a, b). (Since in Middle Hungarian, -t is already a general past-tense marker, whereas -a/e has a varying role, I gloss them as pst and apst, respectively.)

In the Middle Hungarian period investigated by Mohay (2018), the recent past marking role of -a/e is not a dialectal phenomenon anymore; she claims that it is attested in letters from all over Hungary.

The letters also contain contexts where the -a/e past encodes significant unexpected events, i.e., it has a kind of mirative role:

In the witch trial testimonies analysed by Mohay (2021), the most typical function of the -a/e past is the encoding of significant events that affected the speaker personally. 21.24% of the -a/e-marked verbs in court records belong to this type. Mohay set up the following five categories of personally experienced significant events typically denoted by -a/e-marked verbs:

1. curse, disease, symptoms of a disease, abuse, death, e.g.:

1. other kinds of negative, threatening events, damage:

1. recovery, relief of bodily symptoms:

1. immediate precursors of a turn of events:

1. emotional reactions to a turn of events:

Mohay (2021: 88) concluded that the most prominent role of the -a/e past in witch trial testimonies is the expression of personal affectedness and experience, i.e., the expression of a kind of direct evidentiality.

In sum: statistical data indicate that the -a/e-marked past lost ground to the -t-marked past in Middle Hungarian. The use of -a/e was gradually restricted to particular contexts, i.e., to verbs describing recent past events and to verbs describing significant events that were unexpected and/or affected the speaker personally. Its frequent use in contexts describing significant unexpected events provides evidence of its mirative value, whereas its growing use in contexts describing events that affected the speaker personally indicates its emerging evidential role. At the same time, the mirative and evidential uses of -a/e are merely tendencies, which are only present in a subset of all occurrences.

3.3 The -a/e-past in Modern Hungarian (1772–): areal reduction; the grammaticalization of the conditions of its use

The functional reduction of the -a/e past also continued in the Modern Hungarian period and was accompanied by areal reduction. The suffix gradually disappeared from north to south and from west to east, and eventually it only survived in the eastern dialects as the marker of witnessed immediate past and witnessed mirative past.

Interestingly, 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century Hungarian grammars, influenced by grammars of Latin, only recognize the temporal function of -a/e. They describe it as the marker of immediate past, calling it the suffix of alig múlt ʻbarely pastʼ or fél múlt ʻhalf pastʼ (e.g., Magyar grammatika 1795; Schedel 1846; Szarvas 1872; Simonyi 1895; Klemm 1928). The poet János Arany, however, also noticed its mirative role (Arany 1879). He described -a/e as a suffix used in eastern and central Hungary to encode unexpected recent events. The recency condition of its use can be neutralized, however, if unexpectedness is accompanied by anger, sorrow, or exasperation. Arany cited the following example of -a/e expressing mirativity without recency:

When Peterʼs death is mentioned for the first time, the -a/e-marked verb describes it as an unexpected exasperating piece of news. In the second clause, his death is a presupposed fact, and the specification of the time of his death is neutral information, with the verb bearing the general past-tense suffix.

The evidential role of the Hungarian -a/e suffix was first noticed by a Turkologist, Gábor Bálint. His Kazan Tatar grammar (1877) mentions – by way of analogy – that Secler Hungarians (the western neighbours of Moldavian Hungarians) use the -a/e past to express actions that they carried out or witnessed themselves. However, Bálintʼs observation remained unnoticed by Hungarian grammarians.

Hungarian grammars from the middle of the 20th century (e.g., Tompa 1962) do not discuss the -a/e past among the actively used past-tense suffixes any more. Vámszerʼs (1972) dialectal study still reported the sporadic use of -a/e as a suffix of recent past in Kalotaszeg, an Eastern region of the Hungarian language area and it also described the condition of direct experience in licencing its use. More recent dialectal studies, e.g. Kiss (2003), mention the survival of the -a/e past in the Eastern Hungarian Secler and Moldavian dialects without discussing its special function.

The notions of direct experience and witnessing, associated with -a/e by Bálint (1877), emerged again in Tolcsvai Nagyʼs (2017) cognitive-functional analysis of the use of past tenses in a letter written by János Arany in 1847, and in the above cited studies of Mohay (2018, 2020, 2021).