EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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1500 roots in this category used in practice. (The vowel–consonant–vowel units are not roots because we
separate them to a vowel consonant root plus a vowel creator. Our speaking sense always does this.)
Czakó Gábor pointed out that there are a few four-element roots, too. Examples are: prüsz, trüsz,
brum, krák. All are sound imitators.
There are about 2000 roots; they are deeply interconnected by family ties. The
consonant–vowel–consonant types are the most frequent; they constitute 75 % of all roots.
Some of the roots are used alone nowadays, e.g. kar, kör, mar, rom, rag, etc.
Other roots are not used alone nowadays, only in further created form (but were used earlier), now
they could be inferred from their wordbush, e.g. ker, gör, tap, etc.
Trunk: it is a word derivated from root with creator(s), but not used today alone, we only use now its
descendants.
Parts of the root
As the root is the smallest unit of the language with clean cut meaning, it does not mean that it does
not have smaller identifiable parts, with characteristic features. All of these smaller parts are expressing
special meaning-direction contained in the root.
Core of the root: The first one or the first two phonemes (if they are not roots themselves) are called
by CzF the core of the root. They define it as: it is the seed of the root, from which the root is created with
adding one phoneme, but not real creator, e.g. in roots göb, göcs, gör, göm, the core of the root is gö, but in
the words itt, ide, ott, oda the i, o are roots, because t and d are real creators. We define it as the shorter
first part of the root, expressing special meaning-direction.
Frame of the root. The consonants of the root constitute the trunk of the root. In many cases the
meanings of the roots with the same consonant frame differ only with the colour of the vowels, therefore
are very similar. Marácz László calls this frame: ’creating root’. The formula in case of three element
roots is: C_C. In case of K_R the roots are: kör, ker, kor, kar, etc. All of them carry the meaning: ’line or
movement curved, round, reverting or folding back into itself’ 3 .
According to our research every phoneme and phoneme pairs of the root could be considered as ‘part
of the root’; this question is only relevant when we compare the roots or look for relatives. In other
words: what is the connection between two (or more) roots: the first phoneme(s); the frame of
consonants; the same phonemes, but in converse order; the last phoneme(s) (seldom), or other? In
Hungarian it is very frequent that the meaning connection of the roots goes hand in hand with the
formal connection between them.
This strong relationship between meaning and formal connection gives us the system of the roots.
3 Marácz László: Nyelvi és képi gyökök a magyar kultúra megtartói.
http://www.kincseslada.hu/magyarsag/content.php?article.177
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