Following certain abortive attempts at reforming religious life prior to the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation produced a schism in the Roman Catholic Church: Protestant denominations (Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism) came into being in Hungary, too. Reformation yielded a breakthrough in two important respects: in spreading the use of mother tongue and in making religious life public. The first full Hungarian translation of the Bible (1590) was due to Protestantism. By way of printed books, reformation had a communication-technological advantage over the Roman church. Rapid growth of Hungarian ecclesiastical, as well as secular, literature, and the establishment of the Protestant school system, fostered the unification of literary Hungarian and the consolidation of mother-tongue awareness, and brought home the idea of a linguistic/cultural unity of Hungarians.

Keywords: Reformation, Hungarian, Bible translation, Hungarianisation of religious life, emergence of the Hungarian literary language, tendency of unification of literary Hungarian.

Kiss Jenő
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The second period of the oeuvre of János Arany (1817–1882), during the 1850s, is characterized by two poetic lines. On the one hand, he developed a lyrical poetry focusing on an autonomous, individual language variety, fitting into European lyrical modernity. On the other hand, Arany reinterpreted, re-formed the traditional Hungarian folk ballad, with references to its wider environment and European poetry.
This latter kind of poetics elaborated by Arany is analysed in the paper through three ballads. The main features of these epic poems are as follows: (a) objectified storytelling, highly subjectified evaluation, sympathy with or refusal of the participant in the course of the tragic event, viewed from an emphatic vantage point, implicitly, and no sign of self-reference to the speaker, (b) standard register as the linguistic baseline with minor traits of rural dialects, (c) dramatic density, (d) semantic conciseness, (e) simple, short clauses, harmonized with the verse lines and rhythm, (f) moderate metaforization, and (g) high proportion of complex figures as a natural component of the discourse.

Keywords: ballad, rural dialect, objectification, poetics, standard, subjectification.

Tolcsvai Nagy Gábor
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem
Konstantin Filozófus Egyetem, Nyitra

The aim of this paper is to analyse ‘Rose and Violet’, a tale in verse by János Arany, and thereby to show that the notion of folklorism, and texts related to the program of folklorism, are worth reconsidering in terms of the typical modes of linguistic elaboration, thus joining a process of reinterpretation now going on both in literary scholarship and in folklore studies. The analysis argues that the folkloristic character of a text can be taken to involve style and genre imitation; both its folkloristic features and its genre-bound qualities emerge by way of the dynamism of similarities to, and differences from, folk tales. The paper also discusses how the controversial character of the reception of that poem and of Arany’s own attitude to it can be related to the non-recognition of its imitative nature.

Keywords: folklorism, folktale, genre, genre imitation, style imitation, mental spaces.

Domonkosi Ágnes
Eszterházy Károly Egyetem

This study investigates the correlations between the poetic formation of the experience of temporality and the notion of elegy. The main thesis of the paper is that an essential source of the elegiac quality of a poem is a confrontation between the human-specific, organised conception of time (based on linearity and causality) and its continuous and non-rational conceptualization. The author explores the verbal construal of time in a detailed analysis of a prototypical elegy by János Arany. The factors of the analysis are the following: the inherent temporality, aspectuality, and event structure schemas of the finite verbs in the texts, the metaphoric conceptualizations of time, and the perspective changes in the discourse world. The results of the analysis show that an elegy is based not only on the confrontation of the present and the past but also on the complex experience of temporality, as well as its semantic and poetic elaboration.

Keywords: temporality, elegy, figurative language, cognitive poetics.

Simon Gábor
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Finnish readers have come to know János Arany, the man and his poetry, in a variety of ways since 1875. From articles in the Finnish press and from the growing number of translations of his poems, it was evident from the very beginning that he is a classic poet of Hungarian literature whose oeuvre should be widely known. The various stages of the history of the translations are aligned with events in Finnish history and in that of Hungarian–Finnish contacts: the 1870s and 80s (the time of political “fennomania”), the 1920s and 30s (the first decades of Finnish independence), the 50s, the 70s, and the early 2000s. At any Hungarian jubilee commemoration in Finland, along with that of Petőfi, more widely known as the “mover and shaker” of Hungarian poetry, János Arany’s name invariably crops up. At the moment, Finnish translations of 16 of Arany’s poems are known; some poems have more than one Finnish versions, and some have been published repeatedly; Toldi (1927) and Toldi estéje (Toldi’s Evening, 1937) were published in Finnish in their entirety.

Keywords: A. Genetz, A. Jalava, O. Manninen, A. Turtiainen, T. Lyy, T. Lahdelma, S. Pohjola, E. Pitkäsalo, A walesi bárdok (The Bard of Wales), Bor vitéz (Knight Bor), Ágnes asszony (Matron Agnes), Toldi, Toldi estéje (Toldi’s Evening), Szondi két apródja (The Two Pages of Szondi), Mátyás anyja (The Mother of King Matthias).

Szíj Enikő
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The author of this paper, one of the contributors to Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Ungarischen, has been doing etymological statistics for almost 20 years now. Several of his publications discuss present-day Hungarian texts and/or documents of various genres from earlier periods in that respect. This time, he commemorates the 200 years anniversary of János Arany, the writer of the most widely know Hungarian epic poem, Toldi, by presenting an etymological statistics of that poem. The author explores the ratios of various categories of origin in the word stock of the poem, both in terms of types and tokens. The results are compared to those of the author’s earlier investigations. All that is done in the hope that this analysis will be able to serve both as a baseline for future studies and as educational material from primary schools to PhD courses.

Keywords: Arany anniversary, etymological statistics, word statistics and lemma statistics, Toldi, type and token.

Horváth László
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet

János Arany (1817–1882), the great Hungarian poet knew hymns of the Reformed Church ever since he was a child. In his works, he refers to them several times. In a brief paper published in 1861, he criticizes the Transylvanian Calvinist hymnal of the time and even cites a few less well-written lines from it. The present paper shows that the citation is from a Christmas carol taken from a hymn-book first published in 1838. However, Arany may have known a slightly different version of the song, as his citation is not quite accurate. In general, he thought that textual traditions of the congregational songs should be adhered to as far as possible, it is not a good practice to modify them to conform to the fashions of the day.

Keywords: János Arany, Calvinist hymns, Transylvanian Hymn-book of the Reformed Church, text traditions.

A. Molnár Ferenc
Miskolci Egyetem
Debreceni Egyetem

The present study is aimed at the exploration of the written language use of 11 to 15-year-old schoolchildren living in Tornalja (Slovakia), a settlement of the Palóc dialect region. On the basis of school essays written by 11-year-olds and 15-year-olds, as well as in a questionnaire study, I tried to find out whether dialect has an effect on the pupils’ writing habits (spelling proficiency) and if it does, to what extent. The paper gives a detailed analysis of the types of spelling mistakes that occurred, attempts to explain them, and draws the reader’s attention to the practical applicability of other similar studies.

Keywords: Palóc dialect, applied dialectology, the effect of dialect background on spelling, the teaching of spelling, Tornalja (Slovakia).

Haniczko Anna
Konstantin Filozófus Egyetem, Nyitra