According to Wilhelm von Humbodt’s dictum, all languages reflect a definite “linguistic world view”. This is especially apparent in processes of lexical borrowing and their results: loan words and loan translations. A faithful representation of pieces of such world view may come up against grammar-based obstacles in loan items. In such cases grammar or, more specifically, “system congruity” often comes off badly – but language tends to remedy such unsystematic twists as time goes by. In both defining and comprehending loan words, and especially loan translations, the researcher may be assisted by bilingual/multilingual texts. Familiarity with languages of neighbouring Slavic peoples may be an important help in understanding and accepting one another.
Keywords: Hungarian-Croatian linguistic contacts, loan words, loan translations, world view, grammatical “system congruity”
The present study gives an overview of the linguistic situation of the Hungarian language community after World War II. The investigation focuses on the features of the social, cultural and political power factors of the Hungarian language. In 1945 a centralized hierarchical communication system was introduced with strict censorship, with control on social semantics, by the communist rule controlled by the Soviet colonization. It resulted in the levelling of linguistic performance and creativity, with innovation fading, and free identification and reflection, self-reflection on language use and joint acting being prohibited. In 1990 the situation turned into its opposite in most cases. The decentralized heterarchic network system has been developed with general democratic control, freedom of speech and human rights, whereby dialogue, discussion about social semantics, meaning not defined in one ideological centre are the basic features. The radical change resulted in linguistic plurality, the acknowledgement of and reflections on variability in language, its functions for adequate conceptual construal, linguistic expression, individual and group identity. In this process the view of language shows the diversity of linguistic performance, whereby creativity and innovation are appreciated, free identification and reflection, self-reflection on language use and joint acting are supported, certainly in varieties and with critical opposing views, too. On the other hand, the cultural and socialization schemas of the previous era still live on and influence the ways of life in the region, generating postcolonial cultural tensions.
Keywords: colonialism, communication system, heterarchy, hierarchy, language community, postcolonialism
Nyelv és iskola
This paper deals with questions of the language education of Roma primary school children, in the social environment of whom Romani language resources are in use, too, besides the Hungarian ones. This is done by using the toolkit of postmodern or new sociolinguistics. The theoretical ideas are concretized on the basis of a fieldwork carried out in an Eastern Hungarian Vlach Romani community and in the school visited by the children of this community. The paper consists of three parts. The first one is related to the language education of the Roma children, and it focuses on the dominant sociolinguistic discourses of the last few decades: it points out that school and standard language use presuppose each other unnoticed because of the strength of the related language ideologies (Blommaert 2006, Laihonen 2011) in discourses about either Hungarian or Romani (Boyash). The second part concentrates on the difficulties that the children of these communities using Romani and Hungarian language resources have to face in school, and explains how language ideologies about standard and duality (bilingualism) in language use make school life more difficult for them. The final part is an overview about locally usable language education principles drafted on the basis of new sociolinguistics.
Keywords: language resource, language repertoire, language ideology, Romani, school
Nép és nyelv
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
This paper discusses the factors that made Gábor Dayka, a late eighteenth-century Hungarian poet who lived a mere 28 years, turn towards grammar writing and linguistics. Studying Dayka’s career, the present author has found that, in addition to his individual endowments, the poet was directed towards grammar writing and linguistics by his secondary school grammar education, his learning a number of foreign languages, and his extended practice of translating works of fiction from Latin, Ancient Greek, German, etc. into Hungarian. His extant writings on grammar in Hungarian, as well as his two compendia on Hungarian grammar in Latin (Proludium in Institutiones Linguae Hungaricae and Ternio Grammaticae Hungaricae, 1794), witness a noteworthy achievement in grammar writing and linguistics by Dayka, who was poet to the core.
Keywords: Gábor Dayka, 18th century, grammar education, foreign language learning, translation
This paper studies Hungarian words of animal sound imitation in terms of their acoustic similarity to the environmental noises imitated. The waveforms of vocalizations produced by seven animals that can be taken to be prototypical for Hungary were selected from the animal sound data base of the Berlin Museum of Natural History and analysed by the present author. The acoustic structure of the segments identified in those vocalizations were compared to the phonological structure of the corresponding onomatopoetic items and to suprasegmental parameters measured in their rendering by eight university students from Budapest. The transformation of the vocalizations into discrete signs, in addition to the perception of pauses, exhibits correspondence with patterns of intensity and fundamental frequency of the vocalization. On the basis of the study of the intensity structure of vocalizations, the variability in sonority of the onomatopes under study is correlated with the intensity structure of the animal sound phenomenon represented. The investigation of fundamental frequencies of the onomatopes read out by our subjects shows that items iconically representing the sound of animals producing higher frequency sounds that human speech exhibited higher f0 values than the given speaker’s average fundamental frequency.
Keywords: animal sound, onomatopoeia, iconicity, multimodality
The present study is based on Hungarian oral narratives produced by 7 to 14-year-old subjects on story construction and spatial orientation, as well as ones produced by 21-year-old subjects on metalinguistic matters. The five most typical discourse markers, így ‘so’, ilyen ‘like’, hát ‘well’, mondjuk ‘say’, ugye ‘eh’, were selected from those narratives and given a closer look. The aim was to determine how the roles of those discourse markers are distributed in the texts produced by each speaker, how much the items under scrutiny become individual features characteristic of the given speaker, and to what extent the use of discourse markers is age range specific. Our hypothesis was that some discourse markers would play a measurably more significant role in the speech of some speakers than in the speech of others, hence they could be identified as individual linguistic features. In addition, we investigated age-related peculiarities of the use of the selected discourse markers both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Keywords: spontaneous narrative, discourse markers, individual features, standard deviation, speaker’s age
Szó- és szólásmagyarázatok
Szemle