The typewriter effect in Hungarian

Until about a decade and a half ago, Hungarian printed and typewritten texts showed some systematic differences. Typewriters traditionally lacked three keys from the full Hungarian alphabet: the high long vowel letters í, ú, and û. With the high vowels the functional load of length is quite small. Minimal pairs do exist, but they are not common; examples are given below:

színt 'color-accusative'	vs.	szint 'floor'
fûlnek 'they are heated'	vs.	fülnek 'to an ear'
nyúlunk 'we grasp'	vs.	nyulunk 'our rabbit'

The phonemic contrast also obtains in word- and stem-final position (Nádasdy 1985: 228-229). Nádasdy and Siptár (1994: 62) claim that it is the small functional load of length for high vowels that makes it possible to understand texts typed without the high long vowel letteuitqrs.

Until about 1980, words with the three high long vowels were found only in typeset or handwritten texts; typewritten texts made no distinction between, for example, írt 's/he wrote' and irt 's/he exterminates'. After considerable pressure from the Orthographic Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the typewriter standard was officially changed in 1980 to include the keys for í, ú, and û (see Fábián 1982: 32). For more than 50 years, Hungarian linguists have claimed that the increased use of typewritten texts, which lack the letters representing long high vowels, has influenced spoken Hungarian by accelerating the replacement of short high vowels in place of long ones. We will call this hypothesis the typewriter effect. To the best of our knowledge, this hypothesis has never been tested empirically. But first, a survey of the literature is in order.