Download

/Õ/ HÄÄLDUSE VARIEERUMINE

Author(s): Pire Teras / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 63/2017

There are 9 vowels in Estonian: /i, ü, u, e, ö, õ, o, ä, a/. Unlike other vowels the classification of the vowel /õ/ has been problematic. In the phonetic transcriptions /õ/ has been transcribed as [ɤ] or [ɯ] (IPA) or [e̮] (Finno-Ugric transcription). What are the possible reasons for this variance? This paper gives an overview of the results of experimental phonetic research focusing on the quality of /õ/: articulation, acoustics and perception. All these results, as well as phonetic transcriptions of Estonian dialects, point to variation in the quality of /õ/. In the articulation of different speakers the configuration of the body of the tongue and its height are similar to the close back vowel /u/ or to the close-mid back vowel /o/, but /õ/ is unrounded ([ɯ] or [ɤ]). In the acoustic analyses /õ/ has rather been compared to the close-mid vowels than close vowels, admitting that /õ/ can be closer than other close-mid vowels. Perception tests have shown that /õ/ occupies the space corresponding to both the close-mid and close vowels. The pronunciation of /õ/ can also vary due to the speaker’s regional background. Phonologically, /õ/ has been classified as an unrounded close-mid central or back vowel or unrounded close back vowel. Considering the phonetic variation of /õ/, a compromise in the classification of /õ/ can be that it is an unrounded non-open back vowel.

More...

Download

A „Székely Ektiviti” és „Székely aktív” társasjátékok nyelvi anyaga – marketing és nyelvészet kereszttüzében

Author(s): Katalin Lajos / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 4/2016

The “Székely ektiviti” or Szekler Activity parlour game was created in 2009 and has been commercialized since 2011. The main difference between the Szekler activity game and the original version lies in the linguistic content (apart from some minor differences in the rules of the game). As its name suggests it contains 100 cards with Szekler dialect words (at least considered as such). In 2012 the creators added 50 more cards, thus the game consists of a total number of 300+150 tasks. The present study aims to analyse the linguistic content of the game, namely to examine how and in what sense are the words/phrases “Szekler” and what conscious or hidden ideologies are reflected in this language corpus. In order to have a comparative overview, the paper also analyses the linguistic content of a similar game originating from the same context – the „Székely aktív” game. The two parlour games are also discussed from a marketing perspective, focusing on how they fit into the branding trends prevailing across different economic sectors in Szeklerland.

More...

Download

A 2009-ben és 2010-ben érettségizett romániai magyar diákok továbbtanulása

Author(s): János Márton / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2012

The article is a synthesis of two research projects (ones done in 2009 and 2010) that focus on further education for Hungarian language high school graduate students from Romania. The applied research method can be seen as a unique tool for Romania as the researchers (by using questionnaires) have gathered data from the schools and other relevant sources directly (e.g. using Facebook). The aim of these research projects was to identify the main school tracks and further learning paths that might be followed by minority students. The article therefore answers questions like: What can minority students do after their finishing high school in their mother tongue? Do they continue their studies in their mother tongue or in the official (Romanian) language? The article’s readers can also gain close insight into the territorial distribution of minority student participation within the Romanian higher education system.

More...

Download

A fordítás fordítása: a émet fordítás hatása a magyar visszafordítások kommunikatív dinamizmusára

Author(s): Zsolt Pápista / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2016

The present paper explores the influence of a Hungarian text’s German translation on the communicative dynamism of such texts that present Hungarian back-translations of the German translation. The analysis was conducted on five texts with emphasis on their theme-rheme division: on the first chapter of Dezső Kosztolányi’s novel Skylark (in Hungarian: Pacsirta), its German translation, as well as three students’ translations that were the Hungarian back-translations of the German translation. The analysis concluded that the German text did not have a relevant influence on the rhematic sections of the students’ translations. It did, however, greatly affect the number of thematic sections, as it (to a lesser extent) caused certain thematic sections (that are present in the original source text) to be missing in the students’ translations, while also (to a greater extent) leading to a rise in the overall number of thematic sections.

More...

Download

A hungarológia térhódítási esélyei az európai tudományos szférában

Author(s): András Zselyke / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 10/2012

Két összefoglaló jellegû, lényegre törõ cikket olvashatunk a Hitel ez évi, februári és júniusi lapszámaiban.

More...

Download

A miks sa torusse ei räägi? Miks-küsilausetega tehtavad suhtlustegevused argitelefonivestlustes

Author(s): Kirsi Laanesoo / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 13/2017

This paper analyses interrogatives formed with the why pronoun in Estonian everyday telephone conversations. Why-interrogatives are regularly defined as questions asking for reasons for or accounts of actions. This paper, however, demonstrates that only a small fraction of why-interrogatives are actually used for questioning. The data come from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu. Altogether 41 why-interrogatives were analysed using the approach of interactional linguistics. The primary social actions conducted by why-interrogatives are the following: question, reproach, command, suggestion, complaint and challenge.The study reveals that why-interrogatives are multifunctional, used to carry out several social actions concurrently. The question form makes it possible for the recipients to interpret why-interrogatives as questions (by giving a neutral answer) or as some socially dispreferred actions, such as reproaches, challenges etc (by justifying themselves). Why-interrogatives demonstrate the speaker’s negative stance towards a preceding action.

More...

17.00 €

Preview

A New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects is Forthcoming

Author(s): Jeno Kiss / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2010

The author presents the New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects which is in progress. We get a short review about the necessity of a new general dialect atlas in Hungary. The main reason is the radical decrease of dialect words which was effected by the end of the traditional agricultural way of life. The other reason is that the data of the first general Hungarian Dialect Atlas was collected between 1949 and 1964. The author presents the aspects of the research and the content of the questionnaires; the character und the number of the lexical, morphological, syntactical, and sociolinguistic questions; and the sociolinguistic aspects of the informant selection. The collection was started in 2007 and will be finished in 2011.

More...

Download

A nyelvjárások témaköre néhány Magyarországi és Vajdasági középiskolai tankönyvben

Author(s): Krisztina Szécsényi / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 4/2016

More than half of the Hungarian children have dialectal background (Kiss 2001), a fact that cannot be ignored by the teachers of Hungarian language. In the teaching of mother tongue the norms the standard variety are preferred, but it is also intended to point out the meaningful role of the dialects and to develop a positive attitude in children towards them. Pupils can acquire knowledge about the standard and the dialects as language varieties from their teachers and their school textbooks. Textbooks at the same time provide support for the teachers, too. The subject of the paper is the appearance of the topic of the dialects in secondary school textbooks. We examine the theoretical knowledge and practical exercises they contain, and if the textbook contributes to positive attitude towards the dialects. Our study covers the most commonly used secondary school textbooks in Hungary and Vojvodina.

More...

2.50 €

Preview

A nyelvváltozatok bemutatása a szlovákiai magyar tannyelvű iskolák anyanyelvtankönyveiben

Author(s): Katalin Misad / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2017

In­ my­ paper­ I analyse­ the­ question­ of­ the­ demonstration­ of­ language­ variation­ in Hungarian­ textbooks­ of­ first­ language­ intended­ for­ primary­ and­ secondary schools­ in­ Slovakia.­ This­ time­ I only­ deal­ with­ aspects­ and­ methods­ of­ treatment of­ language­ dialects­ and­ contact­ varieties­ in­ these­ textbooks.­ Summing­ up­ the experiences­ of­ the­ research,­ we­ can­ determine­ that­ the­ examined­ textbooks transmit­ almost­ exclusively­ theoretical­ information­ on­ language­ dialects,­ while most­ of­ the­ study-aids­ convey­ negative­ stereotypes­ about­ the­ contact­ varieties.

More...

Download

A Palóc nyelvjárás kutatása a XIX. században

Author(s): Eniko Gréczi-Zsoldos / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 4/2016

The history of researches into the Palocz dialect goes back to studies written in the 19th century, when Fabian Szeder published his articles on the Paloczes in the contemporary scholarly journal, Tudományos Gyűjtemény (Scientific Collection). Gyula Pap’s collection of Palóc népköltemények (Palocz Folk Poetry) was published in 1865. Sandor Pinter, a lawyer in Szecseny, published his book A palócokról (About the Paloczes) in 1880. The topic of the paper is the presentation of contemporary methods of collecting dialect material and consideration of certain interrelationships between the Northern contiguous Palocz region and the Southern enclaves.

More...

Download

A phonetically-based approach to the phonology of [v] in Hungarian

Author(s): Zsuzsanna Bárkányi,Zoltán Kiss / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2006

We propose a unified, surface-based functionalist analysis of the phonology of Hungarian v, which is shown to fare better than past generative formalist/representational models. The model introduced can account for the two-fold patterning of v with respect to voicing assimilation without evoking exceptional means. Furthermore, it can also explain certain asymmetries as well as graduality displayed by v's phonotactic distribution, namely, that some clusters are more frequent in the lexicon, whereas others are marginal. The analysis is grounded in the aerodynamics of v's articulation (which involves inherently contradictory targets) as well as in the relative perceptibility of its contrast in various contexts. It is shown with the help of quantitative experiments that v's phonological patterning is directly derivable from these phonetic factors.

More...

Download

A pioneering theory of information structure

Author(s): Katalin É. Kiss / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2008

The paper deals with Samuel Brassai, a 19th-century Hungarian linguist and polyhistor, who was the first in the world to discover the role of information structure in the syntactic organization of the sentence. Preparing to describe Hungarian syntax, he first wanted to establish the universal and typical characteristics of the sentence on the basis of a number of genetically unrelated languages. The universal structure he identified is essentially the topic-comment structure (called inchoativum-bulk articulation by him). French-type languages realize a constrained version of this universal structure, requiring the topicalization of the grammatical subject. In Hungarian, the initial position of the comment is a focus (in his terminology: attribute ) position. His Hungarian sentence model is a forerunner of today’s generative sentence structure.

More...

17.00 €

Preview

A Slavonic etymology of Hung. ocsúdik ‘to come to, to awake’ and the question of the morphological adaptation of Slavonic loan verbs in Hungarian

Author(s): Michal Németh / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2015

The two Turkic etymologies of Hung. ocsúdik (1508) ‘to awake, to come to, to regain consciousness’ proposed, on the one hand, in the late 19th century by Vámbéry (1870) and, on the other, by K. Palló in 1976 and 1982, have been rightly rejected by the authors of TLH. At the same time, the explanation for the origin of this word found in the etymological dictionaries of Hungarian (TESz, EWUng, Zaicz 2006), namely, that it is a derivative of an unknown unproductive stem, is not entirely convincing for morphological reasons. The present paper offers a new etymology for this word, explaining it as a loanword from East Slavonic очюдитися ‘to regain consciousness, to awake’ attested in 16th- and 17th-century Russian. The starting point for the discussion is M. Stachowski’s (2014) article, in which he compared Hung. ocsúdik with Polish dialectal ocudzić ‘to revive’.

More...

Download

A szeretet himnuszának diakrón elemzése a Magyar Bibliafordításokban

Author(s): Brigitta Szalma / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2016

The paper analyses St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians chapter 13, namely the well-known anthem of love in the different Hungarian Bible translations. The aim of the research is to compare the texts of the Döbrentei and Érdy Codices, and draw a parallel between the reading of the St. Paul›s letters in the translation of Benedek Komjáthy and the translations of János Sylvester, Gáspár Károli and György Káldi. The first part of the paper – by properly contextualising the translations of the analysed text – briefly presents the given historical age, in which the translation of the examined text was made, and presents the significant linguistic phenomena of the era. According to the author, the six text corpus compared can be interpreted as phases of standardization of the Hungarian language; the religious-denominational differences influenced the spelling of the texts on a large scale, simultaneously the historical and cultural historical events had considerable effect on the formation of text translations.

More...

Download

A typology of Hungarian time adverbs

Author(s): Aniko Csirmaz / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2006

Hungarian has a number of apparently synonymous time adverbs that can measure the duration of time intervals. The paper explores these adverbs in some detail, and argues that contrary to appearances, none ofthem are freely interchangeable. The starting point is a discussion of the property of homogeneity that time adverbs are sensitive to. The paper argues for a specific treatment of homogeneity and a preliminary adverb definition based on that treatment. It is proposed that some, but not all, Hungarian time adverbs share the default definition. The diverging adverbs may (a) contain a covert frequency predicate or (b) not measure the duration of the time interval directly, but by determining an endpoint of the interval. Hungarian time adverbs also differ in the range of time intervals they can measure; some, but not all adverbs can measure all available time intervals including the event, iterative, habitual and reference time. This variability in time adverb modification is arbitrary and needs to be explicitly determined for each adverb. Apart from discerning the interpretation of Hungarian time adverbs, the conclusions have a more general impact. On the one hand, apparently homogeneous adverbs can have disparate definitions. On the other, it is necessary to permit explicit, arbitrary constraints on adverbial modification. It is also argued that time adverbs can impose non-local restrictions on the eventuality modified, strengthening the need for a powerful theory of adverbial modification.

More...

Download

A typology of non-verbal predication in Erzya

Author(s): Rigina Turunen / Language(s): English / Issue: 2-3/2009

In the domain of non-verbal predication, three predication strategies are identified in Erzya. Predication is expressed in nominal, adjectival and locational predicate constructions by (i) the zero-copula construction, (ii) the predicative suffix construction or (iii) the copula construction. The variation of predication patterns is constrained by at least two factors. The part-of-speech affiliation of the predicate affects the choice of predication strategy. The relative frequency and degree of obligation for using the predicative suffix construction decreases as we move along the scale verb-adjective-noun. Thus, nominal predicates are encoded more often by zero-copula constructions than adjectival and locational predicates are. Another important factor that affects the choice of predication strategy is genre. To encode the present tense, predicative suffix constructions are more frequent in written Standard Erzya, while the zero-copula construction is more typical of spontaneous speech and translations. In written Standard Erzya, the predicative suffix construction occurs more regularly than the copula construction for encoding the past tense, too, whereas in the data coming from folklore, spontaneous speech and translations, the copula construction is clearly preferred.

More...

Download

Adjectives co-occurring with the illative form of the MA-infinitive in Finnish and Estonian

Author(s): Petra Hebedová / Language(s): English / Issue: 26/2016

In both Finnish and Estonian, the illative form of the MA-infinitive/supine can be used at the end of a predictive the clause, as in the Finnish online hitaita optimal (‘we were slow to learn’) or the Estonian open küps Seda aktsepteerima (‘I am ready/ripe to accept it’). In these sentences, a characteristic expressed by an adjective is attributed to the subject of the sentence, with the scope of the characteristic related to a single activity marked by the an illative form of the MA-infinitive/supine. In this paper, I will present data to describe this type of construction in both languages and will analyze it as a constructional schema in terms of cognitive grammar (Langacker 2000, 2008). My analysis will concentrate on the adjectival component of the schema with the help of examples from Estonian and Finnish corpora.

More...

Download

Adverbial Clauses With -ig and the “until-puzzle”

Author(s): Barbara Ürögdi / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2013

This paper is devoted to untangling some of the cross-linguistic puzzles that are associated with temporal adverbial clauses in general, and until-clauses in particular. After a brief introduction to the issues raised by the construction in Hungarian, the paper presents an overview of the complexities of until-clauses and prior attempts at analyzing these. Then, an account that was first proposed in MacDonald & Ürögdi (2009a;b; 2011) for English is presented, and it is argued that until-constructions do not require any of the special machinery that has been proposed to explain their behavior. The analysis outlined accounts for the properties of temporal adverbials formed with until and for without reference to auxiliary concepts like “expletive negation” and “stativizing negation”. After this detour into English, we return to Hungarian, where until-clauses present a more complex picture than they do in Germanic, and we see how even these data can be accounted for without special stipulations. Finally, the results are tied into the general picture of temporal and event relativization (cf. Haegeman & Ürögdi 2010a;b), providing support for an analysis of a well-defined class of subordinate clauses involving operator movement.

More...

17.00 €

Preview

Ako hovorí slovenská mládež v Maďarsku a na Slovensku v súčasnosti? (Bilingválna reflexia)

Author(s): Mária Homišinová / Language(s): Slovak / Issue: 1/2015

The intention of this paper is to present the empirical research results of the Slovak youth lingual-communication behavior in Slovakia and Hungary, whereas this research work was performed in both countries in the year 2010. Expressions of a spoken form of the Slovak language in surroundings were investigated, which is typical for the application of the written language as a form of a social contact in school – with friends, peers, and in family. The referential framework of this article consists of three analytical levels: 1. the analysis of the knowledge level of the Slovak and Hungarian language (in the case of the Slovak language, its lingual appearances are analyzed); 2. intergeneration relations of lingual communication; 3. the analysis of mutual contexts (the dependence on identification signs)

More...

17.00 €

Preview

Ako vníma materinský jazyk slovenská mládež v Maďarsku a na Slovensku? (Etnolingvistická reflexia)

Author(s): Mária Homišinová / Language(s): Slovak / Issue: 2/2015

The intention of this paper is to present the empirical research results of the Slovak youth lingual-communication behavior in Slovakia and Hungary, whereas this research work was performed in both countries in the year 2010. Expressions of a spoken form of the Slovak language were investigated in surroundings which are typical for the application of the written language as a form of a social contact in school: with friends, peers, and in the family. The referential framework of this paper consists of three levels of analysis: 1. the analysis of communication skills in Slovak and Hungarian; 2. the analysis of the evaluation of life values; 3. the correlation of these parameters: language communication skills versus the perception of ethnic values (mother tongue).

More...