A recently published volume entitled ‘The present and future of Hungarian’ represents a novel approach to the history of the recent past of this language, its current situation, and its foreseeable future. The novelty of the approach primarily comes from a consistently applied functionalist perspective, considering language to be an entity that is undetachable from language use and from the community of language users. It is also due to this perspective that the discussion is multi- and interdisciplinary in nature, involving a number of interrelated disciplines. The authors depict major events and characteristics of this language in their broadest possible social embeddedness and successfully pinpoint the areas that appear to be the most salient with respect to the future and competitiveness of Hungarian, as seen from the perspective of its present state.

Keywords: Hungarian language community, situation of Hungarian in Eastern Central Europe, language and language use, social embeddedness of language, Hungarian language strategy.

HoffmannIstván
Debreceni Egyetem

This paper reviews and evaluates the volume ‘The present and future of Hungarian’, edited by Gábor Tolcsvai Nagy, from the viewpoint of the Institute for Hungarian Language Strategy. Given that the topic of the volume is the present state of this language, as well as language planning and language strategy, the Institute obviously appreciates the scientific results presented in the volume concerning an array of fields within the general area of language use. We also reflect on those results and mention our own accomplishments in the given fields. The community of the Institute see the importance of the volume in the fact that it justifies the existence of individual language planning processes and of language strategy that collectively covers those processes both in a professional and in an administrative sense and provides help for the relevant governmental background institution, the Institute for Hungarian Language Strategy, fulfilling a linking role between the world of linguistics and that of state administration, in developing an ever more professional language strategy for this language community.

Keywords: Hungarian language, language planning, language strategy, first language education, language community, language use, language cultivation.

Bódi Zoltán, Eőry Vilma, Katona József Álmos, Strausz Péter, Tóth Attila, H. Tóth Tibor
Magyar Nyelvstratégiai Intézet

Space, spatial orientation, and mental maps are closely related to language in several respects: first, in the expression of spatial relationships; second, in referring to spatial categories themselves; third, in linguistic aspects of the frame of reference of orientation; and fourth, in place names that identify and refer to individual concrete places and spatial objects. Lessons drawn from the investigation of spatial language are currently also capitalised on by researchers in the problem area of language and mind. Models based on the mental representations of place names are partly language and culture dependent. Speakers’ knowledge about how reliably place names can be correlated with actual properties of the landscape or whether they should simply be taken to identify its individual components also affects cognition: it tells us how much we rely on them in structuring space and developing a mental map.

Keywords: place names, spatial orientation, cognitive map, place name model, linguistic relativism.

Reszegi Katalin
Debreceni Egyetem

The present paper explores the written and communicative context of witness depositions in 16–18th century Hungarian witch trials. In particular, it tries to account for the prossibilities and ways of scribes’ interventions. As compared to present-day ways of recording statements in court, the historical material reveals a number of essential differences of principle: what can be most clearly detected is the pursuit of explicitation (in a particular amalgam with reliance on situational/thematic context); less clearly revealed are idealisation of language use and omission of peculiarities of oral discourse. All these are related to the particular legal and cultural embeddedness of witch trials.

Keywords: witch trials, 16–18th centuries, witness depositions, principle of uniformity, written and communicative context.

Varga Mónika
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet

A book published in 2016 in Aachen promises a genuine surprise for historical linguistics: the author tries to demonstrate the appearance of Latin and (Proto-)Romance loanwords in Proto-Hungarian (IstvánFritsche, Koinzidenzen. Eine Studie über echte oder vermeintliche lexikalische Einflüsse der Romania aufs Urungarische. Shaker Verlag). Why a surprise? According to a consensus view of etymologists, such loanwords cannot be attested from the Proto-Hungarian period (prior to 895 BC). The author of the present paper submitted the book to intense study. The result is as follows. The author of the book does not make clear where and when Hungarians could be claimed to have maintained intensive contacts with speakers of Latin or (Proto-)Romance prior to 895 (this would be a prerequisite for borrowing dozens of words). Furthermore, the proposed etymologies do not comply with strict requirements of etymological studies. The author of the book comes up with imaginative ideas but, taking into consideration the unclarified nature of the historical events and the lack of dated presentation of (Proto-)Romance data, these ideas do not pass the test of reliability. In sum: the book does not prove that Latin and (Proto-)Romance loanwords would have been borrowed into Hungarian in the Proto-Hungarian period.

Keywords: Proto-Hungarian, putative Latin/Romance loanwords, methodological problems in research on early loanwords.

Kiss Jenő
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Some Hungarian popular bird names come from people’s first names, albeit none of them have become official names of the bird species concerned. Many of them are also onomatopoetic in addition to being based on first names; thus such bird names exhibit “covert onomatopoeia”. Examples include butamáté (< Máté) ‘hoopoe’, csicsipál (< Pál) ‘great tit’, gábor and gábormadár with many other variants (< Gábor) ‘shrike’, gegő (< Gergő), györgydiák (< György), both: ‘butcher bird’, lidike (< Lídia), lili, lilimadár (< Lili), all three: ‘redshank’, mátyás, mátyásmadár, matyi (< Mátyás), all three: ‘jay’. These bird names came into being such that a human first name that more or less resembled the given bird’s song was turned into (part of) a bird name. It was rather arbitrary (i) which birds received first name based names and (ii) which birds received names with “covert onomatopoeia”. In modern ethnobiology, American bird names like killdeer and whip-poor-will are similarly instances of “covert onomatopoeia”.

Keywords: Hungarian popular bird names, onomatopoetic bird names, bird names based on people’s first names, onomatopoeia, reanalysis, folk etymology.

Kicsi Sándor András

This paper discusses an issue of translation technique in Old Hungarian translations of the Bible: the occurrence, use, and differences of menny ‘heaven’ vs. ég ‘sky’ as Hungarian equivalents of Latin caelum. The corpus of study involves translations of the Gospel of Matthew in the Munich Codex, the Döbrentei Codex, and the Jordánszky Codex. The author presents the meanings of these words and the various solutions in the texts, providing some contribution to the scholarly discourse concerning the relationships across the individual translations.

Keywords: Old Hungarian, Bible translations, translation techniques, menny ‘heaven’, ég ‘sky’, caelum ‘heaven/sky’.

P. Kocsis Réka
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem