The relationship between literature and onomastics is, in an overwhelming majority of cases, studied within the area of prose narratives. Such focusing of attention is reasonable, inasmuch as the practice of literary name giving provides copious food for thought and in fact enforces the exploration of that particular field. It is a slightly unusual case when it is a lyricist who finds himself intensely interested in onomastic problems. The case of Dezső Kosztolányi is even more complex: he had a significant oeuvre both in prose fiction and in poetry, and it is often difficult to tease apart his lyricist’s and prose writer’s motivation and experience in his numerous linguistic reflections on onomastic issues. The case of Attila József, the actual topic of the present paper, is far clearer. He built a theoretical conception of poetry around proper nouns. This is called his “theory of the magic of names”. In his theoretical discussions, the poet tried to unfold the secret of the power of words and to unravel the linguistic prerequisites of strong poetic effect. He struck upon the problem of name giving as he was investigating those issues. He then applied that knowledge, partly relying on personal experience and partly on theoretical points based on ethnological considerations, in creating his own poems. This aspect of his poetry is known as “onomastic inspiration”. The paper studies the first phase of that complex process. Later on, the poet adhered to that conception but complemented it with onomastic aspects of Freudian depth psychology. The study of those later developments will be a topic for another paper.

Keywords: magic of names, magic of words, incantation, onomastic inspiration.

Tverdota György
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The paper uses the examples of three narrative pieces, two crime stories and a novel, to demonstrate the role of the distortion of names in forming characters and orienting interpretation. The point of departure is Agatha Christie’s popular character, Hercule Poirot, and the comparative investigation targets pieces involving characters that resemble him in one way or another. In these pieces, full or partial identity of names opens the way to intertextual interpretation: the character’s name takes up the function of intertextual allusion. Katalin Baráth’s short story The Belgian is an example of full identity both in name and in character. The protagonist of José Carlos Somoza’s novel, the plot of which takes place in ancient times, corresponds to Poirot in a number of respects, despite the significant spatial, temporal, and cultural differences. Finally, in Josef Škvorecký’s short story Women behind the Steering Wheel, it is only partial or apparent correspondence that can be found between the two characters.

Keywords: distortion of names, parallelism of characters, Hercule Poirot, crime fiction.

Benyovszky Krisztián
Nyitrai Konstantin Filozófus Egyetem

The paper discusses intertextual possibilities of reading based on the title hero’s name in Esti Kornél texts written by Dezső Kosztolányi, an outstanding writer of modern Hungarian literature in general and of the first generation of the journal Nyugat in particular. This relationship between the text and the receiver can be described as a set of reflected or unwitting associations. Within the oeuvre of Kosztolányi, these texts are of debatable genres and loosely related to one another, mainly in terms of proper names and some recurrent themes rather than linearity and explicitness, thereby emphasising the fictitiousness of the stories. The name Esti Kornél serves as a kind of associative link across these texts, as well as in contemporary texts of fiction that contain it; it has an intertextual role by evoking earlier contexts in which the name occurred and the properties that were associated with it in earlier texts.

Keywords: Esti Kornél, intertextuality, associations, contexts, semantic structure.

Páji Gréta
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The paper centres on Áron Tamási’s Jégtörő Mátyás (Matthias the Icebreaker, 1935), a novel that both its writer and several contemporaries thought was his most significant work. After the success of his Ábel Trilogy, Tamási started writing another trilogy that remained incomplete, however: only Jégtörő Mátyás and Ragyog egy csillag (A Star is Shining, 1938) were completed. The two novels are linked to one another by their conception, background, and characters, but there are important differences, too, between Jégtörő Mátyás with its folkloristic nature and its reaching back to Asian influences (Buddhism) and Ragyog egy csillag centring around popular religiousness and ethics. Taken together, however, the two novels are characterised by a totally specific “magical realism”. The framework of the present folklore-linguistic analysis is given by (i) the folk-tale character and (ii) the vernacular parlance of the two novels, as well as (iii) the folklore tradition they follow, and (iv) the transcendence of folklore in them. More particularly, aspects like the following are traced down: spirits in animal form, speaking beasts, helpful spirits, popular religiousness; Transylvanian pawkiness, set similes, set phrases, proverbs, dialect words, eye dialect, grammatical constructions, name giving; witches, wisps, taboo words, nakedness (eroticism), objects. All these factors together make up an unparalleled folkloristic world view, an “extended reality” in Tamási’s own words, laden with the writer’s always positive sense of mission, the philosophy of serenity.

Keywords: folklore-linguistics, magical realism, Transylvanian pawkiness, folklorisitic world view, extended reality.

BalázsGéza
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem
Partiumi Keresztény Egyetem

The aim of this paper is to disentangle the conceptual net lurking behind the appearance of rivers in the context of love in Hungarian folk songs. The theoretical framework of the paper is given by Cultural Linguistics, a branch of cognitive linguistics studying interrelationships of language, culture, and conceptualization. A corpus study of folk songs suggests that one of the main sources of the representation of human feelings is people’s experience of nature, implemented in metaphors concerning the natural environment. It can be stated on the basis of the folk songs studied here that metaphoric reference to rivers can be traced back to the conceptual metaphor emotionsare watercoursesappearing in a number of specific metaphors and image schemas deeply rooted in cultural experiences. The representational structure of folk songs is organised by an overall cultural schema, chastity, emerging from village dwellers’ strict moral norms. The study shows that natural scenes of folk songs are associated with conceptual metaphors, in particular, emotion-metaphors, but a genuine (and full) explanation can only be given in terms of the notion of love as entertained by traditional Hungarian communities and the related socio-cultural norms and moral principles of those communities.

Keywords: cultural conceptualizations, Cultural Linguistics, cultural metaphor, folk conceptualization, folk song, image schema.

Baranyiné Kóczy Judit
Széchenyi István Egyetem

In this brief paper, the author offers a critical discussion of three papers by Nóra Kugler as a point of departure in order to air his own views on generalizable procedures of reasoning in historical linguistics: on the necessity of self-orientation in the relevant literature, on the importance of setting up the proper chronology of the data, on a critical approach in data manipulation, and on using a historical sociolinguistic perspective.

Keywords: critical discussion, historical linguistics, the handling of linguistic data, authenticity.

Hegedűs Attila
Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem

Simon bíró ‘Mayor Simon’, a Hungarian idiom no longer in use was first recorded in 1541. However, its meaning is not unambiguous: it is ‘virago’ in some collections and ‘henpecked husband’ in others; what is more, some give the meaning as ‘mindless’. There are different explanations of its origin, too. According to one interpretation, the idiom alludes to a mayor called Simon oppressed by his wife, but later it was found that the idiom goes back to a German noun, Siemann ‘henpecked husband’ and thus the idiom is a phraseological loan with a modified form to which the bíró ‘mayor’ component was added later, perhaps influenced by German forms like Doktor Siemann. The German lexeme, Siemann, may also refer to both a virago and a wife-ridden husband, and thus Hungarian may have borrowed the expression with both meanings. The Hungarian idiom has an extended variant, too: Simon bíró hajtja a lovat ‘Mayor Simon drives the horse’. The first appearance of this more complete form is found in Baranyai Decsi (1598) where the completion may have been influenced by its Latin equivalent, Currus bovem trahit ‘The carriage draws the ox’.

Keywords: idioms, explanation of idioms, origin of idioms, phraseology, historical phraseology, lexicology.

ForgácsTamás
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

Discussed are the Old Turkic and possible Mongol equivalents of the Hungarian word, among them Mongol ori in the epithet of a Buddhist deity, where it means ‘prince’.

Keywords: etymology, semantic development of Turkic uri ‘offspring’ and Hungarian úr ‘lord’.

Kara György
Indiana University, Bloomington

There is a seemingly rich literature available for researchers in the field of naturalized loanwords in the language varieties of the Hungarian diaspora. Until now, however, no single work has examined substantively the Eastern Slavic loanwords that correspond in their pronunciation to certain words of the Hungarian language, that is, their homonyms. In this paper we draw up a database of interlingual homonyms of the Hungarian dialects of Transcarpathia and try to answer some questions about their classification into loanword types.

Keywords: Transcarpathia, Hungarian dialect, Russian, Ukrainian, loanwords, reception, naturalization, homonym.

Gazdag Vilmos
II. Rákóczi Ferenc Kárpátaljai Magyar Főiskola