>Exactly. A protoform *uyaga is the more probable one => this passed
>regularly to *uyegV in Hungarian Loans
Then how on earth (and especially why, for what reason) /u/ became
/ü/ and /j/ became /v/. If you had a bit of basics of Hungarian knowledge
you'd realize that in Hungarian the /uj/ occurrences are even more
popular than their counterparts in all Romanian dialects. Starting with
two of the most popular exclamations in Hungarian "juj!" /juj/ and
"huj, huj" (apologies to the Slavic colleagues :-)), "hajrá!" /'huj
'hOj-ra:/.
I am no expert at Hungarian phon. transformation rules, but my competence
of a speaker who speaks fluently (and whose pronunciation is at the same
level of a native-speaker) must prompt me skeptical of the hypothesis
that a Hungarian /uj/ could and had to become /üv/.
Moreover: there is no /uj/ and no /üv/ in these words, but /u-'ja/ and
/'ü-vae/.
This is an obstacle as high as the Altai Mountains. (Hence the
/ül-ö:/ > /i-'l&u/ fits only partially.)
George