The book under review is a new monograph on the history of the Chuvash language. The book first offers a detailed analysis of the sources of research on the history of the Chuvash language. In most cases and especially for the earlier periods, these sources are linguistic sources like loanwords from and in Chuvash. The earliest written sources are the Volga Bulgar inscriptions of the 13th–14th centuries. The history of the Chuvash sounds are investigated in all positions. The monograph contains many new insights. The author distinguishes three main dialects of the Middle Chuvash or Volga Bulgar period and investigates their mutual influence. A detailed analysis is given of the history of the process of the closing and reducing of the vowels. The impact of the neighbouring languages is given special attention. The author claims that the name Cheremis used to be the name of a group of people speaking a West Baltic idiom, later the name assumed the meaning “foreign people” and changed finally into the foreign name of the Mari. An Appendix dealing with the West Baltic layer of words in Mari and Chuvash close the book. The work contains rich material for a future etymological dictionary of the Chuvash language.

Keywords: Chuvash, Ogur, Volga Bulgar, linguistic history, phonetics, phonology, Mari, Proto-Mari, Cheremis, West Baltic.

Róna-Tas András

One of the topics of the present paper is the time of denasalization of Slavic nasal vowels (e,o) and, correspondingly, the timing of Slavic loanwords in Hungarian that still witness the existence of those nasal vowels (rend ‘order’, gomba ‘mushroom’, etc.). The author reviews the shared conclusion of traditional Slavistics and Hungarian historical linguistics, and shows why and how that conclusion is debated by András Zoltán, professor of Slavistics at the Budapest university. The other topic of the paper, closely connected with the first, is a method of calculation that a Slavist of Szeged, Mihály Kocsis, proposed on the basis of the time of attestation of loanwords in Hungarian reflecting the existence of Slavic nasal vowels. The present author claims that that experiment cannot have been successful and convincing due to the small number and limited length of the extant Old Hungarian (9–14th century) texts.

Keywords: Slavic nasal vowels, denasalization, Slavic loanwords, timing, method of calculation based on attestedness.

Horváth László
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet

The study aims to analyse the processes of transonymisation and deonymisation of the proper name Fregoli in Hungarian. Leopoldo Fregoli (1867–1936) was a quick change artist in the first half of the 20th century and (after a brief artistic tour in Budapest) became famous in Hungary, too: his great popularity resulted in various uses of his family name. The most used meaning of the word fregoli in Hungarian is ‘clothes airer’: the explicitations of this and other antiquated and new meanings are treated in this paper.

Keywords: clothes airer, deonymisation, Leopoldo Fregoli, transonymisation.

Fábián Zsuzsanna
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

In the present paper, we aim to explore three different telicity-marking strategies in Hungarian. In terms of these strategies, telic interpretations can arise (i) through event-maximalization encoded in verbal particles and resultative phrases of change of state or location, (ii) through pseudo-objects such as egyet ‘one.acc’, (egy) jót ‘(one) good.acc’, jókat ‘good.pl.acc’, (egy) nagyot ‘(one) big. acc’, nagyokat ‘big. pl.acc’, hatalmasat ‘huge. acc’, etc., and (iii) through bounded objects of creation and consumption predicates. We show that although telicity is always a direct consequence of the fact that the verbal predicate is quantized, it can arise both in the presence of maximalization over events (cf. verbal particles and resultative phrases) and in its absence (cf. pseudo-objects and created/consumed objects). Based on these three different strategies in the expression of telicity, we conclude that the class of telic predicates is clearly heterogeneous in Hungarian.

Keywords: situation aspect, particle, resultative predicate, pseudo-object, created and consumed object, telicity, event maximalization, Hungarian.

Farkas Imola-Ágnes
Babes-Bolyai Tudományegyetem

Kardos Éva
Debreceni Egyetem

This paper discusses a special use of what are known as negative emotive elements, the phenomenon of value shift. Negative emotive elements that, in themselves, out of context, exhibit a semantic content that can be taken to correspond to some negative emotion, are able to undergo value loss or, less frequently, value shift. By the former term, I mean the phenomenon where a negative element becomes an intensifying modifier for some other word as in b r u t á l i s a n gyors ‘brutally fast’. By the latter term, I mean cases in which the element, in spite of its inherently negative content, expresses the speaker’s surprise or positive value judgement as in b r u t á l i s alaplap ‘a brutal [= extremely/surprisingly good] mainboard’. Negative emotive elements can be found in a number of languages, and can also be attested historically. Nevertheless, disregarding my own earlier studies, very few papers discuss them; and even the ones that do, concentrate on, or even restrict their attention to, the phenomenon of value loss. The aim of the present paper is to fill that gap by contributing some observations concerning the study of value shift in negative emotive elements.

Keywords: evaluative content, value shift, negative emotive elements, enantiosemy, pragmatics.

Szabó Martina Katalin
Szegedi Tudományegyetem
MTA Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont

Old compilations of Hungarian phraseological units contain several obsolete expressions for ‘wife-ridden’, one of which is Anda Pál hadába való, lit. ‘a member of Paul Anda’s army’. Our earlier dictionaries – following Szirma y's Hungaria in Parabolis – relate it to Anda Pál, a 17th-century cavalry corporal, who asked for leave every weekend to go home to his wife. This paper claims, however, that the story is an etiological anecdote and Anda is in fact an archaic charactonym meaning ‘silly, simpleminded’. It was originally the present participle of and-, an obsolete root of Modern Hungarian andalodik ‘get into reverie’ and andalít ‘put into reverie’. The purpose of adding Pál ‘Paul’ is only to personify the adjectival meaning and even had, whose meaning has narrowed down to ‘army’ in Modern Hungarian, may have been used in its earlier meaning ‘kinship’. Thus the original meaning of Anda Pál hadába való may have been ‘a member of the group of (wife-ridden) silly, simple-minded husbands’.

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

Forgács Tamás
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

The 20th century has brought interesting changes in the humanities. Comparative-Historical Linguistics has reached its peak, and the paradigm framework has begun to come apart. Today we can see the following tendency: the main trends – at least for a while – have been taken over by formal theories: structuralism and generativism. The mainstream of Hungarian linguistics belonged to the German lineage and tried to connect to the trends established by Saussure and Chomsky. The functional-contrastive approach has been neglected for a long time, but it is finally leading to a definitively cognitive approach. A very important incubator of this development was the Institute for Hungarian Language in Berlin. My paper focuses on its activity in the light of scientific articles in the journal “Ungarische Jahrbücher”.

Keywords: Comparative-Historical Linguistics, functional-contrasive approach, cognitivism, Ungarische Jahrbücher, Berlin.

Hegedűs Rita
Humboldt Universität, Berlin
Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem