The study of Old Hungarian toponyms has played an integral role in Hungarian research in historical linguistics for a long time. Recent decades have witnessed an increased scholarly attention to these linguistic elements again, influenced by a variety of factors. Findings in history (especially diplomatics and historical geography) enabled the inclusion of new sources in such studies and the strengthening of the onomastics approach offered more effective means for studies in historical linguistics. Etymological explanations have gradually been replaced by the method of toponym recon struction, which examines the genesis and changes of toponyms in a complex system of linguistic, social, and cultural relations. At the same time, the previously used chronological approach was replaced by the relative chronological assessment of various toponym types. The toponymic patterns of certain eras and regions may be drawn with the use of these two methods and this enables us to explore temporal and spatial relationships of languages used in a specific region. These studies may contribute to reviewing and refining our knowledge on the linguistic and ethnic relations of the Carpathian Basin from a historical perspective, while even more comprehensive findings can be expected as a result of cooperation with associated scholarly disciplines (especially history and archeology).

Keywords: historical toponomastics, toponym reconstruction, relative toponym chronology, Hungarian-Slavic contacts in the early Old Hungarian era.

Hoffmann István
Debreceni Egyetem

The author of this paper tries to find answers for two questions in connection with the Hungarian verbal ending -lak/-lek (lát-lak ‘I can see you’, néz-lek ‘I am looking at you’): (1) Does this ending belong to the definite or the indefinite conjugation? (2) How did this complex ending come into being? The answer to the first question is that such verb forms, considering their functions, refer to definite objects, though their personal ending -k referring to the subject directly links them to the indefinite conjugation. The author takes verb forms in -lak/-lek to be associated with the direct object by the element -l-, and morphologically and hence functionally referring to a definite object – but not expressis verbis formed as part of the definite conjugation but rather to be a particular and unique phenomenon. The most authentic answer for the second question was in fact born already more than 100 years ago, which was debated by some people from time to time: the -lak/-lek ending has developed from the first person singular of frequentative (and denominal) verbs with an -l suffix by means of metanalysis. In the -lak/-lek ending two suffixes were associated: the -l verbal ending of 2sg and the -l frequentative (and denominal) suffix which are homophonic with each other, therefore they became one portmanteau morpheme of the 2sg object and of the 1sg subject.

Keywords: Hungarian language, morphology, verbal ending, language history.

Honti László
Nyelvtudományi Intézet
Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem

The author has been working on etymological statistics for more than twenty years now. In 2017, he compiled a statistics of origin of the most widely known Hungarian epic poem, János Arany’s Toldi, with respect to the inventory and occurrence (types and tokens) of the words and lemmas occurring in it. The present paper is a counterpart of the 2017 paper, complementing it in some respects. This time, the author explores the proportions of categories of origin with respect to the stems of the words included in the poem. On the one hand, the results are compared to those of the earlier study, and on the other hand, the present paper is intended to serve as a basis of comparison for similar studies in the future. The author hopes that the results of his analyses can be utilised at various levels of education from primary schools to doctoral studies.

Keywords: Toldi, etymological statistics, statistics of origin of stems, inventory statistics, occurrence statistics.

Horváth László
Nyelvtudományi Intézet

Based on a questionnaire study on three Hungarian modal adverbs (talán ‘perhaps’, valószínuleg ‘probably’, vélhetoleg ‘presumably’), the paper argues for the necessity of investigating modal force, and for interpreting it from a functional perspective. Modal force is a context-dependent phenomenon, with broad variation at the level of tokens. Still, at the schema level, it is possible to establish typical schematic contexts and associated characteristic modal forces. The paper offers an empirical methodology for exploring such schemas.

Keywords: epistemic-inferential (epistential) modality, modal force, schematization, type vs. instance.

Kugler Nóra
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

In the past twenty years, the acoustic analysis of vowel qualities has become a standard approach in dialect research in general, and in dialect geography in particular. Usually, normalized vowel formant values are mapped and statistically analysed. While little has been done so far to describe the acoustic characteristics of non-standard varieties of Hungarian, there are more than one million data instances from computerised dialect atlases, mainly The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects (AHD), where articulatory details are reflected by the narrow phonetic transcription. Vocalic qualities are denoted in AHD with basic symbols and diacritics as needed, according to the standard Hungarian transcription system. The present study attempts to define, in a quantitative framework, the typical qualities of some vowels, based on the subjectively transcribed atlas data, and to assess the spatial evolution of these vocalic qualities. To this end, estimated F1 an F2 values are attributed to a number of combinations of vocalic symbols and diacritics. At each location of AHD, typical F1 and F2 values are calculated in function of the frequency of different vowel variants, as transcribed in the atlas, for the three most open vowels /a?/, /?/ and /?/. These typical F1 and F2 values are mapped so as to show the spatial differences in the phonetic quality of each vowel under investigation. For a better understanding of spatial patterns in vowel articulation, a large-scale dialect research focusing on acoustic measurements of vowels would be indispensable.

Keywords: Hungarian dialectology, vowel qualities, formant measurement, linguistic geography, dialect atlases.

Vargha Fruzsina Sára
Nyelvtudományi Intézet
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Variants of phraseological units commonly emerge and become usualised by the replacement of some of their components with synonymous items (e.g. fabatkát / hajítófát / egy rozsdás pitykét / egy garast sem ér ‘not worth a penny’). In old texts, one can find examples of component substitutions in which a word is replaced with one similar in sound, which may result in somewhat meaningless expressions. This paper presents four such examples from the Middle Hungarian period and proves that they are not usualised forms but forms of text corruption.

Keywords: phraseology, historical phraseology, phraseological variants, text corruption.

Forgács Tamás
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

This paper aims to show that in the text of the Domonkos Codex – Life of Saint Dominic, compiled and translated into Hungarian from several Latin sources, with its only existing manuscript from 1517 – a different Latin source beyond the ones known hitherto can be discovered and identified. A short passage (23 lines) was translated from the Postilla super librum Sapientiae (i. e. Postilla on the Book of Wisdom) by the famous Dominican theologian Hugo a Sancto Caro (Hugues de Saint Cher) in the 13th century, which work is a part of his monumental biblical commentary. The authors demonstrate how this excerpt – including also the interpreted verses of the Vulgate (Wis. 10,13–14) – was inserted into the Hungarian text of the codex. A short comparison with a parallel biblical citation in another vernacular codex is also added, as well as some further remarks about the unknown compilator.

Keywords: medieval vernacular texts, Latin sources of vernacular texts, translation from Latin, ways of compilation, Hugo a Sancto Caro, Saint Dominic.

M. Nagy Ilona
Debreceni Egyetem

N. Horváth Margit
Tóth Árpád Gimnázium, Debrecen

The effects of foreign languages on various languages are quite diverse. Undoubtedly, this is also true for the Hungarian language. In addition to the highly prestigious international languages of each historical period (Latin, German, Russian, English), Hungarian was also significantly influenced by the languages of neighboring peoples. In this sense, the influence of the Russian language on Hungarian can be considered to be twofold, because in addition to its role as a world language, for several decades it was in a neighborhood relationship, and from 1944–45 to 1989 it was in a very intensive relationship with the Hungarian language. In this paper, we try to present the names of collective farms (kolkhozes) created on the Soviet model and the names of jobs people performed there, as well as the diversity of the names.

Keywords: Hungarian language, Russian language, language connections, foreign language effects, Sovietism, collective farm.

Gazdag Vilmos
II. Rákóczi Ferenc Kárpátaljai Magyar Főiskola

The description of fields of the Benedictine monastery in Bakonybél from 1086 is an early and important document of the Hungarian language: it contains 87 Hungarian place names and 136 personal names. To 9 of the abbey properties belong also detailed border descriptions. Of these the study presents the 9 place names that are found in the description of the property Koppány located in county Veszprém, by the following points of view: localization of the places, name versions in later sources, formation, structure, functional-semantic content of the names, and if it is a common or a proper noun.

Keywords: Bakonybél Regestrum, historical place names, early document, description of fields.

Pelczéder Katalin
Pannon Egyetem