Lajos Kiss, Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Vice President of the Society of Hungarian Linguistics, Member of the Editorial Board of The Hungarian Language, former Head of Department of the Research Institute for Linguistics, and Honorary Professor of Eötvös Loránd University, died on 16 February 2003, at the age of 81. He was the author of numerous books and papers on etymology, Slavistics, lexicography, Hungarian historical linguistics, and onomastics. His best known book is the Etymological Dictionary of Geographical Names, in two volumes. The present obituary reviews the significance of his scholarly achievements and discusses the major stages of his career.
Jenő Kiss
The ablative in early Hungarian and Finnish grammars
In the European cultural community, linguistics for a long time meant grammar as established by Greek, and transmitted by Latin, authors. As long as Latin remained the chief language of scholarship and written culture in general, grammar obviously meant Latin grammar, and its categories were regarded as universal and generally valid. When vulgar languages started to be described, the authors relied on the Latin model as a matter of course, using principles, categories, and terms of Latin grammar. The authors of early vernacular grammars had to turn this 'dead' grammar of Latin into one that was alive, they had to make it fit languages that were living, variable, and exisiting only in varieties.
This paper traces the use of a term of classical Latin grammar, ablativus, in pre-19th-century Hungarian grammars, as well as a few early grammars of Finnish. The issue that lies behind the use of that term is this: How did the authors try to adapt Latin grammar, having few cases, to the description of Hungarian with its numerous different cases? In parallel with Hungarian grammars, the author also discusses some Finnish grammars. Grammarians of the latter language, also having a large number of cases, appear to have faced a similar problem in the description of the case system and, as the sources suggest, they arrived at similar solutions as the Hungarian authors did, albeit quite independently from them.
Zsuzsa C. Vladár
On two major types of Hungarian family names
Despite their similarities and interconnections, the stock of Hungarian family names that arose naturally in the community, and were officially recognised only subsequently, and another stock the items of which were created more recently and artificially, via a legal procedure of people changing their names, are quite different in a number of respects. These two sections of the overall stock of Hungarian family names are determined, and made different, by the circumstances and ways of their emergence. Their distinct periods of origin involve quite different ways of thinking, and quite different factors and periods of the internal and external history of the language. The relationship between name giver and name bearer is also dissimilar in the two cases: in the former case, the community provides the individual with a name, whereas in the latter, the individual is allowed to choose a name for him/herself, one that is considered "more advantageous" in some respect than his/her former surname. The reasons of name giving and the basis of choosing a particular name, i.e. the motivation for the name being chosen, are also different. Consequently, the means of naming, i.e. the ranges of potential names, are also different in these two sections of the Hungarian stock of surnames. Their detailed comparison and division is all the more necessary since otherwise, without partially different ways of looking at them, no appropriate conclusions could be drawn from an investigation of Hungarian surnames.
Tamás Farkas
Semantic changes of the preverb ki 'out'
This paper gives a syntactic/semantic account of changes in the meaning and use of the preverb ki 'out', embedded in an investigation of the conceptualisation processes pertaining to IN places instantiated as arguments of preverb-verb combinations. That perspective, on the one hand, results in an unusual semantic classification and, on the other, provides some evidence for the idea that the progress of preverbs towards semantic bleaching is a linear chain of interlinked changes from verbs like kimegy 'go out' to verbs like kicsúfol 'mock at', kiszélesít 'widen', kiegészít 'eke out', etc.; changes that are closely connected with characteristics of the posited types of space A, B, and C, and their conceptualisations. The paper interprets semantic changes of the preverb ki in terms of syntactic movements involving one of the two Langackerian elements determining the meanings of verbs, 'trajector' and 'landmark'. Its main conclusions with respect to bound structures are as follows: the enhancement of trajectory (omission of metaphorical landmark) results in meanings like 'the coming into being of objects, things, concepts referred to by the syntactic subject or object', belonging to the concept of MAKING, CREATING. Changes foregrounding the landmark element, on the other hand, may result in meanings involving total affectedness, or else posi-tive changes in the spatial extension or condition of the landmark.
Katalin Szili
The authors investigate a type of construction often used - and perhaps even invented - by Gyula Juhász: a construction exemplified by szép csöndesen 'nice and quiet' (adv.), tikkatag kövéren 'sweltering fat' (adv.). This pattern, hardly ever used by other poets, occurs roughly ninety times in his poems, mainly in those written between 1918 and 1926. The stylistic effect of these adverbial constructions of an uninflected and an inflected adjective is partly due to their un-usual shape, and partly to the fact that they can be (syntactically) interpreted in two different manners: the uninflected adjective can be either an adverb of degree, state, or manner modifying the inflected adjective that follows it, or else an attribute that qualifies the meaning of the latter. This effect is further strengthened by the fact that the juxtaposed adjectives are often synonyms or op-posites of one another.
László Péter - István Szathmáry
Jūjutsu and jūdō: Hungarian and international reflexes of some Japanese sports terms
In dictionaries of the English language, the English version of the Japanese word jujutsu appears in four different spellings: jūjutsu, jujitsu, jiujutsu, and jiujitsu, sometimes embellished by a hyphen, too. The form jiu-jitsu – in which the hyphen only refers to the fact that the word was originally written with two Chinese characters – has also become a loanword in German (also spelt Dschiu-Dschitsu) and in French. On the other hand, the spelling of the Japanese word jūdō is judo in all three languages. (Note that the horizontal stroke standing for vowel length in the Romanised rendering is often omitted.) According to the orthographical rules of the syllabic kana script of the time - that continued to be in use until 1946 - jū was written with two syllabic characters, as ji + u. In three editions of James Curtis Hepburn's excellent and highly popular Japanese-English dictionary, this word was spelt in three different manners: jū-jutsz (1st edition, 1867), jū-jutsu (2nd edition, 1872), and jūjutsu (3rd edition, 1886). In the Meiji period, another Romanisation in which the syllable jū was written as jiu, was also used. As far as jutsu is concerned, the phenomenon that ju is often pronounced as ji can still be observed in the Tokio dialect. Adding all that up (jiu/ju + jutsu/jitsu), we get the four spellings of the word jūjutsu mentioned above, less the hyphenated versions. It can be safely said that the spelling jujitsu that is the most frequently encountered version in present-day English can be attributed to the form that occurs in the Tokio dialect. The word jūdō became widely known abroad a couple of decades later than jūjutsu; it was especially after the outbreak of the Russian-Japanese war that serious interest began to be taken in it. The two words practically meant the same thing in those days. It was not only in English but also in German and French, etc. that the spead of the form jiu-jitsu was largely due to H. Irving Hancock's books whose titles included this particular spelling. Similarly, Hungarian adopted the form dzsiu-dzsicu. Hungary played a pioneering role in the early history of the spread of the word judo in Europe, given that in 1906 Kichisaburō Sasaki taught a four-month course there at the initiative of Miklós Szemere, and in the next year his book entitled "Djudo" was published in Hungarian. That was probably the first book ever written in a language other than Japanese with the word jūdō, rather than jūjutsu, in its title.
Toru Senga