One of the main goals of language policy is considered to be the avoidance or management of language conflicts. In reality, however, language policy is an effective tool for achieving the unequal distribution of social goods and political capital. The Law of Ukraine “On Supporting the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language” was adopted on April 25, 2019. In this article we show how language policy can serve as a tool in the struggle for power and in the formation and reproduction of social inequalities through the law seemingly born to protect the Ukrainian language. In the article, we also show that in power struggles, language policy often does not serve to avoid conflicts over language, but on the contrary: it causes internal and external conflicts.

Keywords: language policy, state language, language law, minority rights, language and power, inequality, Ukraine.

Beregszászi Anikó
II. Rákóczi Ferenc Kárpátaljai Magyar Főiskola

Csernicskó István
II. Rákóczi Ferenc Kárpátaljai Magyar Főiskola
Pannon Egyetem

The 10th-century Byzantine conversion of Hungarians was carried out through Slavic mediation, as there were many Slavic-Hungarian bilinguals among the Hungarians settled in the midst of Slavic population, and Slavic-Greek bilingual missionaries were easy to find in the Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire (e.g. in Macedonia). Most of the early Slavic borrowings to Hungarian came from the Slavic substrate of the Carpathian Basin (Pannonian Slavic), and this is also true of Christian terminology. Due to the high degree of similarity between 10th-century Slavic dialects, it is difficult to separate terms locally borrowed from Pannonian Slavs from those introduced by the Byzantine missionaries speaking Slavic in Hungary. However, there are some words and expressions of Balkans origin (hálát ad ‘give thanks’, karácsony ‘Christmas’, pitvar ‘porch’, formerly ‘limbo, edge of Hell’, etc.) that could hardly have been found in Pannonian Slavic; these were most probably brought by the Byzantine missionaries and spread among the Hungarians.

Keywords: etymology, Slavic borrowings, Christian terminology, Byzantine mission.

Zoltán András
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The case study intends to demonstrate how the databases and name statistics of Hungarian historical anthroponymy built over the last decades can be useful in the study of cults of saints. The paper concentrates on given names, since the effect of saints’ cults on personal name giving can mostly be detected by studying the historical changes, and the geographical and social diversity of the given name stock. The comparison of the two cults is motivated by several reasons. First, from a methodological viewpoint, it makes the evaluation of the measure of the impact more precise. Second, the two saints are linked by several aspects of cult history: both of them are Eastern soldier saints, frequently depicted together. However, their Hungarian cults developed differently: while Saint George became the prototype of soldier and knight saints in Hungary (and throughout Europe as well), the veneration of Saint Demetrius remained limited and was confined to the orthodox areas of the country since the early modern period. This difference can also be revealed in the popularity of the two names in Hungary. The name György ‘George’ has been far more frequent than Demeter ‘Demetrius’ from the beginning and is among the 100 most frequent given names of the whole population today, although its popularity has been decreasing. By contrast, Demeter can be counted as a definitely rare name. Their geographical distribution at the beginning of the 18th century shows the same picture: while the name György was the second most frequent name in the whole population, Demeter was used in the regions habitated mostly by orthodox Romanians and Rusyns.

Keywords: database, given name, frequency, cults of saints, naming habits, name geography.

Slíz Mariann
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

This paper examines nouns of foreign origin with strongly marked consonant clusters at the end and how they behave when Hungarian native speakers inflect them for the accusative case. Unlike other Hungarian nouns (or what speakers reckon as Hungarian nouns), a significant part of Hungarian native speakers add the accusative case marker to these nouns without a linking vowel (e.g. taps > tapsot [t?p?] > [t?p?ot] ‘applause, nom. > acc.’ but Hanks > Hankst [h??ks] > [h??kst]) which is highly unexpected. The investigation took place within the model of analogical grammar. The gang of monomorphemic Hungarian nouns that end in the consonant clusters [ks], [ns], or [ps] facilitates the appearance of a linking vowel in recent words of foreign origin with three consonants at the end when Hungarian speakers inflect them for the accusative case. When, on the other hand, there is no linking vowel at the end of the nouns of foreign origin in the accusative, the gang that affects them comprises those Hungarian monomorphemic nouns which have non-branching codas with an [s] in them. There are three gangs that affect the nouns of foreign origin with two consonants at the end. The first one is where the branching coda’s first consonant is [r] or [l] and a linking vowel is required. The second and third gangs comprise Hungarian monomorphemic nouns that have non-branching codas with an [l] (in the case of the second gang) or with an [n] (in the case of the third gang). These two gangs allow their members to exhibit the absence of a linking vowel when they are in the accusative case.

Keywords: analogical grammar, gangs, accusative case, extrasyllabicity, linking vowel, consonant cluster.

Lantay Gyula
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

The oldest copies of Hungarian Cisiojani contain the name forms Késsás and Késást, which are likely to be the corrupted forms of Kéfás, the Hungarian form of the apostle Peter’s Aramaic name (Cephas ‘rock’). The corrupted forms with s, possibly associated with the now obsolete verb késál(kodik) ‘strive, struggle’, seem to have been carried over with minor variations in later copies, including the unique késázá form of the first Hungarian printed calendar. This reinforces the opinion, expressed as early as in Heinrich1880, that the authors of some of the Hungarian Cisiojani made use of earlier calendars in verse.

Keywords: codices, calendars in verse, textual corruption.

Forgács Tamás
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

In this paper my aim is to show a parallelism between the historical forms of three known toponyms Keza from medieval Hungary in order to find their etymological origins. Each one of these three places was referred to in a former talk as the birthplace of the chronicler, Simon of Keza. This toponym was considered to be a former personal name, which became a place name due to possession. I found that the etymon could be a now dialectal word kësza ‘container made of leather’, a word of Turkic or Persian origin. There is no trace of a person who could possibly be the possessor concerned. The toponym Ginza in Fejér County has been suggested as that of one of the settlements formerly called Keza. The change has been explained as due to German settlers, but Csánki’s explanation is wrong, whether or not the change was really caused by language contact. However, I did not find any exact clues for migration in the suggested time period. On the other hand, the historical forms can be explained from Hungarian. The folk etymological effect of the place name Kanizsa could also have caused changes.

Keywords: chronicler from the Árpád-age, Simon of Keza, historical toponymy, etymology of toponyms, folk etymology, contact with German, historical geography.

Németh Dániel
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The paper discusses the history of the word burkony based on a drama translation by János Arany. The word is now obsolete but it was a decidedly widespread word of the Hungarian language renewal in the second half of the 1800s. An examination of examples from press language and the specialized literature yields several consequences: first, the investigation clarifies the etymology of the word and enriches it with new results; second, the significant amount of material presented illustrates the structure and history of meaning of the word in a complex way. This material is still unrepresented in Hungarian dictionaries. Filling this gap, the paper reports on new results with respect to the specific semantic characteristics and history of this word.

Keywords: language renewal, 19th century, János Arany.

Kiss Margit
ELKH Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont

The paper presents the results of a dialect word stock study that was conducted in 2018 among 14–18-year-old students of a secondary grammar school in the Middle Transdanubian dialect region. The respondents (n = 200) live in the small town where they attend school or in the neighboring villages. They filled a questionnaire of 88 dialect words that had been attested at the closest research points (Diszel, Kapolcs, Szentgál) of the Dialect Atlas of Hungarian and have a chance to be known among young speakers of today. 14 dialect words of the questionnaire were not used – and were not even known except one. 74 dialect words are used and 12 of them are used by more than half of the respondents. The study yielded nearly the same results as a former study of 2014 at the same school with the same methods. The author’s hypothesis was confirmed: many young speakers know and use dialect words with the same denotata that can be found in the Dialect Atlas of Hungarian (the enormous amount of data of the atlas were collected between 1949 and 1964).

Keywords: dialect background, regionalisms, youngsters, dialect atlas, dialect word.

Parapatics Andrea
Pannon Egyetem

Géza Bárczi is a prominent figure of Hungarian linguistics; he had an influential role in the history of that discipline both as a professor and as a researcher. The present commemoration was written by one of his former students, someone who knew him closely and finds it important to pass on the memory of her mentor. The paper enumerates the main events of Géza Bárczi’s professional life (from being a secondary school teacher to leading the department of Hungarian linguistics at the University of Debrecen and then at ELTE) and gives a broad picture of the various areas of his work, which covers almost all of the subfields of Hungarian language history (such as phoneme history, historical morphology, lexicology etc.). Géza Bárczi is also considered to be a great synthesis maker, something which particularly shows up in two of his works: he is the author of the first thorough etymological dictionary of the Hungarian language (1941) and of an extensive monograph called A magyar nyelv életrajza (A Biography of the Hungarian Language). He also had an important role in the Society of Hungarian Linguistics, of which he was the president for 17 years. His lectures were unforgettable experiences for his students: he was always seeking for the truth in his research and his way of presentation was always known for its crystal clear logic and elegant style.

Keywords: history of the Hungarian language, synthesis making, etymological dictionary, University of Debrecen, ELTE.

Korompay Klára
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem