# Quaternary suffixes



## antonto

Szia,
I could not find anywhere an answer to my doubt about vowel harmony in quaternary suffixes like in accusative.

When a suffix is tertiary (for instance ök ok ek) I am able to predict when to use each of them according to vowel harmony rules: 
ök-> front vowel, rounded 
ok-> back vowel
ek-> front vowels, not rounded

In accusative suffixes, instead it's possible to use -at as well (tollat). -A is a front vowel, like -o. Is there a rule or anytime I have 4 suffixes (maybe just accusative, I dont know) do I have to learn that noun by heart?

Thank you very much

Antonio


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## Olivier0

Suffix vowels are chosen in series of 2 or 3, never 4. The series are: (starting with all possible back vowels)
- a / e
- á / é
- o / ö / e
- ó / ő
- u / ü
- ú / ű
So the e belongs to two different series, this is the origin of your mistake. (In fact in many Hungarian dialects, the 3rd series is o / ö / ë, so  there is a difference between an open short e and a (half-)closed  short ë, and no vowel belongs to two series; this ë can be seen in  lyrics of folk songs and linguistic material only, it is not present in  normal Hungarian orthography.)

A noun like _toll_ uses the series with a and a noun like _nap_ uses the series with o, this has to be learnt and cannot be deduced from the root vowel. There are different possibilities to create a rule to decide which words normally use -o- or use -a-, but any choice of a rule will have many exceptions. One such rule of thumb is that -o- is for nouns and -a- for adjectives, and that -a- is used when the word already bears a suffix or when suffixation of the word modifies its root (eg. a vowel in the root is suppressed or shortened). But this does not work for _toll_ and _nap_, since _toll_ is still an exception.

-- Olivier


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