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A rádióban elhangzott dialógusok jellemzői

Author(s): Irén Láncz / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2016

The paper looks at the characteristics of dialogues from the aspect of conversation analysis and she also tackles certain pragmatic and linguistic features based on conversations from the Hungarian programs of Radio Novi Sad. By presenting parts of dialogues she shows how elements of the conversation script, among other things engaging in conversation, speaker change and ending the conversation, are materialized. Basing it on the analysis, one can say that not only questions (Yes/No questions, WH questions and from the pragmatic point of view open-ended questions) but also comments and statements of facts can organize dialogues. Unlike everyday dialogues, dialogues in formal situation rarely contain a change of topic. The author shows how the participants return to the original topic. There are linguistic errors in the spontaneous spoken dialogues from the radio. The examples show how they become corrected. The context of the conversation includes the situational context, context of the action and thematic context. Their components among other things include reference to space and time and marking relationships between speakers in the conversation. The study shows the presence and linguistic means of expression of these components.

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A receding paradigm as a tool of language discrimination

Author(s): István Kozmács / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2020

The 1Sg forms of ik-verbs are identical in the definite and indefinite conjugations in Standard Hungarian. The use of nonstandard forms can evoke discrimination despite the fact that it has been well-known for a long time that by the 18th century the ik-paradigm survived only in some eastern and western dialects of the language (Simonyi, 1906a, p. 14; Brassai, 2011, p. 253; Benkő, 1992, p. 213). In the early 19th century the language revival movement revived the disappearing ik-conjugation (Révai, 1806) and made it part of the educated, literary, and later standard variety. The present paper demonstrates how a paradigm that almost completely receded became the tool of language stigmatization as a result of the actions of those with linguistic power, and shows, on the basis of a questionnaire based study, to what extent the ik-paradigm is present in the language use of 14–19-year-olds at the beginning of the 21st century. This paper addresses the issue, on the one hand, of how the use of the ik-conjugation of Hungarian can still be the measure of educated speech in Hungarian despite the fact that, according to historical linguistic evidence, this conjugation was no longer used in most of the Hungarian language area over 200 years ago. On the other hand, I aim to demonstrate, on the basis of a questionnaire based survey, that education is the most important factor in the continuing use of the conjugation (or the remnants of it).

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A szexualitásról való beszéd frazeológiája Csíkszentdomokoson

Author(s): Katalin Lajos / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2021

The book What makes you feel out of this world: Sexual culture and morality among peasants by Lajos Balázs (Pallas-Akadémia, 2009; second edition 2010) met a long-felt need on the topic. The work is an ethnographic survey, an actual monograph of the topic of sexuality and sexual morality in a village of Eastern Transylvania, Csíkszentdomokos (Sândominic). Various scientific fields (sociology, sexual-psychology, folkloristics etc.) concern themselves with the topic of the book, yet it is still a taboo in Romanian culture, and there is no other work which tackles with the specific tools of ethnography this topic in a depth, so it can be considered a really important achievement in the field. The paper undertakes the task of analysing the phraseology of the texts of the interviewed subjects, and by mapping the topics related to the issue of sexuality show the richness of phraseology in this village.

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A Szigeti veszedelem jelzőrendszere

Author(s): Ilona Rajsli / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 3/2016

Attributives are among the most prominent stylistic devices in Zrinyi’s epic poem, The Siege of Sziget. In our paper we study constructions with attributes of qualification from the aspect of grammatical category and structure. Regarding grammatical category – next to adjectival attributes – attributive nouns are extremely powerful and of condensing nature, while participles as attributes have special stylistic effect; all three types are found in the corpus. Structurally there are three types of attributives: simple (containing one attribute), multiple and cumulative attributives. In the latter type the attributes in the structure can be co-ordinate, and in this case they semantically strengthen each other, or the sequence of attributes entwine and thus have the character of gradation. There are a number of attributes which function as a decorative element or are there for the sake of prose rhythm or rhyming, and they are often recurrent; they function as kind of permanent attributives, creating thus the typical “Zrinyi-attributes”. Synesthetic or metaphoric attributives also give a special atmosphere to this epic poem. Next to the stylistic function of the attributives semasiological aspects were also considered alongside the contextual issues of pictorialness, metaphoricalness and attributes, for example, attributive constructions built into similes.

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A typology of contact phenomena in medieval personal names (A historical onomastic survey based on medieval documents from Hungary)

Author(s): Mariann Slíz / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

Medieval Hungary was a multicultural country: beside the Hungarian majority it also had Turkic, German, Slavic, Walloon, Italian, etc. inhabitants. Although the majority of medieval documents were written in Latin, there are a number of charters written in other languages, such as German. This cultural and linguistic diversity provides an opportunity to investigate contact phenomena among different languages based on personal name phrases. The paper outlines the methodological adaptability and the limits of using given names, bynames or family names and name phrases in the investigation of contact phenomena. It introduces language and discourse contact phenomena on the level of spelling and orthography and the morphology and syntax of name phrases, based upon examples from charters written in Latin and German.

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A vajdasági magyar ötödik és nyolcadik osztályos tanulók pozitív nyelvjárási attitűdje

Author(s): Eleonóra Kovács Rácz / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 3/2015

The paper summarizes the results of a study carried out among 300 (fifth and eighth grade) Hungarian elementary school students studying in their native language in eight towns in Vojvodina. The results show that the respondents consider their own dialect appealing, they like it, they are used to it, and in their towns they gladly and often speak it in informal situations. In addition to all this, a dialect is also an expression of local awareness of identity.

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A weboldalak szerepe a virtuális iskolai nyelvi tájképében

Author(s): Gábor Lőrincz,Béla Istók,Szilvia N. Varagya / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2021

Since websites have been dominant elements of the virtual space, they have an important role in forming the image of educational institutions. This paper compares the virtual content of a number of Slovakian and Hungarian primary, secondary and higher educational institutions, focusing on the aspects of online education and the epidemiological situation, and in addition paying attention to the rate of bi- and multilingualism. In the last couple of years several researches have focused on linguistic landscape, which resulted in setting up various subfields, one of which is schoolscape and another one is cyberscape which focuses on virtual relations. In some cases there are overlaps between the subfields, so their study can be connected. Certainly the schoolscape not only refers to virtual relations but to the totality of individual and collective language representations and visual materials, which reflect the communicative practices of this well-structured specified space, the school. Naturally, the virtual aspects make up only a small part of the characteristics of schoolscape – a specific space of visual language use – since in school each visual and linguistic manifestation can be studied which reflects the communicational expectations and requirements of this space.

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A XVI‒XVII. századi szomatikus frazémák szerkezeti és szemantikai vizsgálata

Author(s): Ilona Rajsli / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2016

It comes from the anthropomorphic nature of language that names denoting parts of the body are often found as the key-word of phrasemes (somatic phraseologisms), and since this type of phrasemes can be found among the earliest collections of phrases and idioms, their study is also significant from diachronous aspect. The study examines types of meaning change among 17th–18th century somatic phraseologisms. There are a great number and varied wordings of phrasemes containing body parts, and we are making an attempt at defining the phenomena and the types of changes, and also, at describing features beyond certain semantic phenomena generally characteristic of Hungarian phrasemes. Our study encompasses interrelations between structural and semantic changes, e.g. paradigmatic relationships between phraseological units, changes of the key-word and phraseological synonymy and antonymy. The change of valence relationship can also bring about changes of meaning; in the analyzed early texts the process of phraseologization happens parallel to the transition from concrete to abstract, during which metaphorization plays the key role. The basis for the corpus study are texts written by Gáspár Heltai, Péter Bornemisza, István Magyari and Péter Pázmány.

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ACQUISITION OF DIMINUTIVES IN TYPOLOGICALLY DIFFERENT LANGUAGES: EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIAN AND ESTONIAN

Author(s): Victoria V. Kazakovskaya,Reili Argus / Language(s): English / Issue: 17/2021

The comparative paper considers diminutives at the early stages of development based on the longitudinal data of typically developing monolingual children, aged up to three years old, acquiring languages which are different in terms of diminutive systems, i.e. rich (in Russian) and poor (in Estonian). The impact of such factors as word formation and inflectional productivity, transparency, input frequency and semantic diversity on the acquisition of diminutives is discussed. From these factors, word formation and inflectional productivity are considered to have the most evident impact on the acquisition of diminutives in both languages. Being a powerful trigger for the development of early derivation and morphology, diminutives are prominent at the beginning of the acquisition of derivation in Estonian as the only derivation category, whereas they develop constantly alongside other derivatives in Russian.

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Alkalmazott nyelvészet és magyar nyelvtudomány a kisebbségi felsőoktatás gyakorlatában

Author(s): Orsolya Nádor / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 3/2021

One of the basic elements of applied linguistics is usefulness, which means linguistic approach to social phenomena. This approach was already present in Hungarian linguistics for several decades before the regime change, 1989–1990. At the same time, the research possibilities of the Hungarian linguists living in minority environments were much narrower. Their work was mainly determined by descriptive and historical linguistics, dialect research and linguistic purism, while the connexion between the mother tongue and the majority language, or bilingualism and multilingualism, or the prestige of language varieties, language planning and language policy, moreover, development of the mother tongue-based technical language and terminology should have also been a task even then, but in the given social context it was not possible to focus on. Generations of linguists have been nurtured in departments of Hungarian language at universities outside Hungary. The present study focused on the curricula currently in use, the extent to which general and applied linguistics are present in the curricula of the Hungarian language departments, and the extent to which graduates are provided with market-oriented knowledge in countries where Hungarians are ethnic minorities. One of the reasons for asking these questions is that there is a declining interest in philological-type courses, and even students studying in these courses are demanding marketable knowledge – can we meet their expectations? The study seeks to answer this question by document analysis of the available curricula and ubject descriptions.

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Alte Namen Für “Alte Wörter”. Historische Bezeichnungen der Europäischen Sprichwörter

Author(s): Vilmos Voigt / Language(s): German / Issue: 30/2005

Die auch als wissenschaftlich zu betrachtende Sammlung, Ordnung und Anwendung von Sprichwörtern blicken auch in Ungarn auf einige Jahrhunderte lange Vergangenheit zurück. János Baranyai Decsis Sprichwörtersammlung Adagiorum Graecolatinohungaricorum… (Bártfa 1598) befolgt die entwickeltesten Unterrichts- und Veröffentlichungsmethoden, die es in jener Zeit gab, nämlich Erasmus’ Bände mit lateinischen und griechischen Adagien. Im etwa 5000 (ungarische, lateinische und seltener griechische) Belege umfassenden Buch wird zwar keine ungarische Terminologie angeboten, auf dem Titelblatt kommt jedoch das Wort adagium und im lateinischen Vorwort die Benennungen proverbium und paræmiæ vor – ein Zeichen für die auch im internationalen Kontext uneinheitliche Verwendung von Termini. Im Fall des Ungarischen ist auch gegenwärtig nicht immer klar, was den Unterschied zwischen közmondás (Sprichwort) und szólás (Redensart), und sogar weiteren Bezeichnungen ausmacht. Die internationale Redensartenforschung (für die meistens der Ausdruck Parömiologie gebraucht wird) setzt das Wort Proverbium bzw. dessen Entsprechungen in der jeweiligen Nationalsprache als umfassenden Terminus ein. Interessanterweise haben Klassiker der internationalen Parömiologie wie B. J. Whiting, Archer Taylor und andere die vielerlei Bezeichnungen für Redensarten in den einzelnen Sprachen nicht aufgezählt, auch in Otto E. Molls internationaler Bibliographie wird die Problematik nicht eigens angesprochen.

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Alternatiivseid etümoloogiaid VI: karsima, luga, tera(s), tiib ja tõrkuma

Author(s): Lembit Vaba / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 65/2019

The article presents new or revised etymologies for the words luga (Juncus), karsima ‘to cut off branches’, tera(s) ‘strip of leather for reinforcing stitching’, tiib ‘animals’ (birds, insects) flying organ’ and tõrkuma ‘to not obey, resist’.The vernacular word luga : lua ~ loa ~ luga, denoting herbs of the genus Juncus, is known in the South Estonian dialect area and in some adjacent dialects. This plant name has been adopted as the official Estonian word for the plant family Juncaceae and the genus Juncus: loalised and luga respectively. The word luga is not found in other Finnic languages, and has been regarded as of unknown etymological origin. I suggest a possible Baltic origin, comparing Estonian luga to Latvian luga, also ļuga ‘swampy floating mat in an overgrown lake’ and Lithuanian lū́gas, lū̃gas ‘low spot submerged by river; swampy river branch; pool of water; muddy pool, quaking bog; pond; deep spot in a river’, liūgas ‘small marsh, morass’, liugė́ti (liùga, liugė́jo) ‘to sway, waver’. The comparison is based on two facts: Juncus plants grow in humid and wet meadows, pastures, and on the banks of bodies of water; according to semantic typology, the name for the place where the plant grows may have begun to denote the plant itself. The presumptive loan base featured the vowel u-, not ū- (*luga- ~ *lugā), as Baltic ū > Finnic ū, but the phonetic structure of the loan base does not allow for further specification as to whether the word is an older Baltic or newer Latvian loan; however, considering the relatively small South Estonian usage area of luga, the newer Latvian loan hypothesis is more likely.The verb karsima ‘to cut off branches’, known in the Coastal and Islands dialects of Estonian, has equivalents in all Finnic languages except Livonian. It is an eventual Baltic loan: *skardī- > Old Proto-Finnic *karti- > Late Proto-Finnic karsi-, compare to Lithuanian skardу́ti (skar̃do, skar̃dė), skárdyti (skárdo, skárdė) ‘to kill, butcher (animals); to cut, sever; to tear apart, rend with teeth, rip, break (e.g. thunder breaking trees) etc’, Latvian skā̀rdît ‘to break into small pieces, stamp, pound, pulverize’. Jorma Koivulehto has suggested a Germanic etymology for the verb karsia: Proto-Germanic *skarđian-, compare to Old Icelandic skerđa ‘to dent, damage, reduce’, Old English scierdan ‘to wound’, vüsks skerten ‘to tear apart, injure, cripple, reduce’. As with Baltic loans, the older stratum of Germanic loans also took part in the phonological change ti > si, as a result of which both etymologies are acceptable from a phonological point of view, where both the Baltic and Germanic loan base is related to the same Indo-European archetype: semantically, however, the Baltic verb is closer to the Finnic karsima.Finnic terä represents many homonymous stems of different origin: ‘cutting face of an edge tool; grain; strip of leather for reinforcing stitching etc’. I have previously shown that Finnish terä ‘sun/moon disc; corolla, petal; blossom’ as well as Estonian tera ‘(sun)ray’ and terendama ‘to reflect in the air, loom’ are old Baltic loans: < Baltic dialectal *stera- ‘ray, reflection, gleam, glow’. In the article I seek to demonstrate that this same Baltic dialectal loan base *stera- is also the source of North Estonian tera, teras, South Estonian teräs(s) etc ‘strip of leather for reinforcing stitching’. The word has been recorded in all Finnic languages except Livonian, e.g. dialectal Finnish teräs ‘strip of leather for reinforcing stitching; peripheral slat of door or window’, tere ‘strip of leather’; unplowed wedge of field land between furrows’, Karelian terä ‘width of fabric’ etc. Finnic etymological tradition links this word family to the native Finno-Ugric (more specifically Finnic-Volgaic) word terä ‘cutting face of an edge tool, grain’. However, a Baltic etymology is both phonologically appropriate and semantically more logical, drawing a connection to concepts related to the development of clothing. The eventual loan base is Baltic dialectal *stera-, compare to Latvian stara ‘zone, piece of land; rag, tatter; branch, twig’, (bikšu) stara ‘trouser leg’; compare to Slavic *ster-: Russian простерéть ‘to stretch forward, out’; Indo-European archetype: *ster- ‘band, line, ray’. In the Baltic languages, derivatives with a b are more common: Lithuanian sterblė̃, ster̃blė ‘skirt, front piece of woman’s skirt or jacket, bottom edge of a piece of clothing; katuseräästas’, Latvian starbele, starbeles ‘ridge (a strip of fabric or leather sewed on to a piece of clothing to serve as a hem), fringe, wide hem’, ster̃bele ‘coat hem, fringe, gird’; Indo-European archetype *ster-b- ‘to spread out, stretch out, strew, scatter about’.Coastal siib : siive, North Estonian tiib ~ tiiv : tiiva, tiivas : tiiba ~ tiiva, South Estonian siib ~ siiv : siiva ~ siivo, siivas : siiba ‘big pinion (of bird); lateral or protruding side of something (e.g. windmill, seine, plow; hem of a piece of clothing etc) has equivalents in all Finnic languages except Veps, e.g. Finnish siipi ‘bird’s wing, quill; linnutiib, tiivasulg; fish’s fin; side net of seine etc’, Karelian šiibi id. The Finnic equivalents of this word derive from the same Baltic loan base as Estonian teivas, Finnish seiväs etc, but as a separate borrowing: Late Proto-Finnic *sīpa- ~ *tīpa- << Old Proto-Finnic *sejpa- ~ *tejpa- < Baltic *steiba-, compare to Lithuanian stíebas ‘spar, buttress, pillar; stick, pole; stalk, reed, stub; quill’; Indo-European archetype *steib(h)- ~ *stēib(h)-, *steip- ~ *stēip- ‘rod, bar, cudgel; stiff(ened); to compress, tighten’. The semantic line of Estonian tiib etc ‘animals’ (birds, insects) flying organ’ is vividly represented in the loan base: Lithuanian plunksnos stiebas: iš žąsies stíebo pasidarė plunksną i rašė ‘quill: one made a pen from a quill and wrote’. Analogous substitution is assumed in the cases of Baltic loans such as Estonian liig, Finnish liika, Estonian riit, Finnish riitta, Estonian and Finnish tiine, Estonian kiitma, Finnish kiittää. Presumably, the loan base was a neutrum noun, one of the forms of which served as the origin of the Finnic loan (compare to Russian neutrum nouns крыло́ ‘(bird’s) wing’, перо́ ‘feather, pen; fish’s fin’. In Finnic languages, especially in Estonian, the alternation of stems ending in as- ~ äs- and a- ~ ä-is widespread, including in Baltic loans (e.g. Finnish ankerias ~ ankeria, apilas ~ apila, Estonian jääras ~ jäär; Estonian tiib ~ tiivas and siiv ~ siivas are also products of this secondary development. The semantic development of Estonian tiib and related forms progressed as follows: ‘bird’s wing or tail feather’ → ‘bird’s wing (as well as the flight/movement organ of other animals)’ → ‘a lateral part of an object that resembles a bird’s wing’. In the Northern Finnic languages (Finnish, Ludic), the original meaning of this Baltic loan comes forward, ‘bird’s wing or tail feather’.Estonian tõrkuma ‘to not obey, resist, hold back, refuse; to err, go astray; (South Estonian) to tremble, shudder’, is an eventual Baltic loan, with a plausible etymological equivalent in Courland Livonian te̮r̄gə̑b ‘(he/she) berates/scolds’: *terk(k)V- < Baltic *derk- (~ *derg-), compare to Lithuanian dérgti (dérgia, dérgė) = der̃kti (der̃kia, der̃kė) ‘to curse, slander, defile, vilify; to ruin, damage, to work poorly, fecklessly; to behave nastily, to be mischievious; to live immorally, licentiously; to hit, strike etc’, dergùs ‘ugly, repulsive, disgusting’, Old Prussian dergē ‘(they) hate’, dergēuns ‘intolerable; hated, despised’, Latvian der̂gtiês ‘disgusting, unpleasant, repellent, to sicken/disgust’, Indo-European archetype *dergh- ‘to tear, break, tug, haul; to hurt’. The expected Finnic substitute of Baltic*-rk- is *-rk- (> Estonian-Livonian -rg-; Courland Livonian te̮r̄gə̑b is an example of this substitution), but the alternative substitution *-rkk- (> Estonian -rk-) cannot be ruled out, or it is the result of a separate development: tõrkuma : tõrgun has conformed to the pattern of -uma verbs (featuring consonant gradation) expressing frequentativity. The verbal nouns tõrk and tõrge ‘machine failure etc; inhibition of ability to function, reluctance to do something’, as well as some dialectal forms, derive from tõrkuma. Previously, hesitant and contradictory opinions have been expressed about this Estonian word family. The Baltic etymology proposed herein unites all of the stem variants discussed in a phonologically and semantically logical manner.

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Alternatiivseid etümoloogiaid VII. kail, pendima, raidama, ruttama ja (muna)tael

Author(s): Lembit Vaba / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 66/2021

Alternative etymologies VIIThe article presents new or more precise etymologies for the words kail : kailu ‘white-headed cow’, pendima : pendida ‘to rot, decay’, raidama : rajata ~ raidada ‘to ruin, waste’, ruttama : rutata ‘to hurry, hasten’ ja (muna)tael : -taela ‘egg yolk’.kail : kailu ‘white-headed cow’ is a dialect word recorded in the Western Saaremaa parish which has a clear cognate in dialectal Finnish, where the noun kaila and its many derivatives denote primarily a skewbald or similarly colored domestic animal (cow, bull, horse). According to the data of the Finnish Dialect Dictionary, this word family is found in the southwestern (Varsinais-Suomi) and Häme dialects (western and southwestern Satakunta, northern and southwestern Häme). On the basis of the Finnish stem variants kail-o ‘skewbald cow, bull or horse’, kail-o-kas id., it can be claimed that the stem vowel -u in Estonian kail : kailu indicates the Finnic nominal affix -o. Etymological dictionaries of Finnic languages do not address this word family. It is an eventual Baltic loan with the presumed loan base *gaila- ‘white’, compare to Low Prussian gaylis ‘white’ < Latvian *gailas ‘white’ < ‘radiant’, likely Indo-European archetype *ghoilo- ‘radiant’. This Baltic word family also includes Lithuanian gaĩlis ~ gaĩlė ‘marsh Labrador tea’. It has previously been convincingly demonstrated that kail, the Estonian name for Ledum palustre, is also a Baltic loan.pendima : pendida ‘to rot, decay (tree, leaves), wither (turnips), grow mouldy (grain, hay), putrefy (fish, meat, corpse)’ and its phonological and derivational variants are known in dialects of Northern Estonian. This Estonian verb stem has a known cognate only in dialectal Finnish, e.g. pentyä ‘to rot’. Attempts to link this Estonian-Finnish stem with a similar Permic root (Udmurt pe̮di̮ni̮ ‘to suffocate under ice (fish), pant, gasp; to grow mouldy, fusty’, Komi pe̮dni̮ ‘to gasp, pant; to drown’) fail primarily for phonological reasons.The Estonian-Finnish verb stem pentV- is an eventual Baltic loan: Baltic *pendV-: compare to Lithuanian péndėti (péndėja ~ péndi, péndėjo) ‘to crumble, decay, rot, grow mouldy, fusty; to become weak, sickly, to dry up’, išpéndėti ‘to rot, decay, fester (farmhouse, tree branches, core of a growing tree); to dry and harden (meat); to become lean, thin, emaciated (due to illness or age), to grow old’.raidama : rajata ~ raidada ‘to destroy, waste (young forest)’ and the denominal adverb raidu ‘to waste’ from the same stem: raidu minema ‘to go to waste’, raidus ‘being wasted’ belong to the Islands and Western dialects, although they have been recorded in Harjumaa and elsewhere as well. The words rajama ‘to waste (of grain being cut, or of children wasting bread while eating it)’ and rajastama ‘to waste (of grass being trampled by animals)’ come from the weak-grade variant of this stem. This Estonian word family does not have plausible cognates in other Finnic languages. It is an eventual Baltic loan: Baltic *braidV-, compare to Lithuanian braidýti (braĩdo, braĩdė), bráidyti ‘to wade, paddle, tread on, trample’, nubraidýti ‘to trample, stamp on (e.g. of grain being trampled by geese and other animals); to tire from wading, splashing’, apibraidýti ‘to tread on, trample underfoot’. The presumed originaal meaning of this Baltic verb loan is ‘to ruin or destroy something by trampling on it’, from which the meaning of ‘to waste, squander’ has also emerged in Estonian.ruttama : rutata ‘to hurry, hasten’ and the related noun rutt : rutu ‘hurry, haste’ are well known throughout the entire Estonian language area. ruttama, ruttu, and rutem ‘faster’ are among the 10,000 most frequent words in modern Estonian. Their origins can be traced to the Finnic stem *rutta-, which is the derivational base of the verb ruttama, while rutt : rutu is presumably a verbal noun with the u-affix (< -o or ? -u). This word family has cognates in all Finnic languages except Livonian and Veps. While the loan base for this word family is not (as has been suggested) Russian круто́й ‘steep, abrupt (waterfront, curve); loud, harsh, short-tempered (of character); hard, dense, thick (e.g. a hard egg or thick porridge)’, кру́то ‘abruptly, suddenly; loudly, harshly; strongly, abundantly, densely’, one cannot rule out the semantic influence of these phonologically similar Russian words, including semantic loans appearing in eastern Finnish dialects and Karelian. I surmise that this Finnic stem is a Baltic loan: Baltic *kruta-, the descendants of which in modern Lithuanian include krutė́ti (krùta, krutė́jo) ‘to move, make oneself move (of a living creature or a device), to move to and fro; to show zeal, bustle about; to tremble, quiver, throb, pulsate; to loosen, break up (soil), to cultivate (soil), to scrub, clean (hide); to go, set off; to live, be located’, krutas ‘movement, work’, krutùs ‘lively, mobile, capable, hard-working, industrious’, krùtinti ‘to move, make smth move, force, prompt, incite to do smth; to set off, travel’, krùsti (kruñta, krùto) ‘to start moving, quickly start doing, embark upon smth’: sukrusti pie darbo ‘to get to work’ and others.(muna)tael : -taela ‘egg yolk’ belongs to the Islands and Western dialects, but has also been recorded in the Central dialect, which borders the Western dialect region. In Estonian etymological literature the position is taken that (muna) tael – like the other Estonian names for egg yolk: rebu, (muna) kollane jt, (muna) ruuge, (muna) ruske, vahanõ muna, verrev muna – is derived from the orange-yellow color of an egg yolk, and (muna)tael shares a stem with the Baltic loan tael ‘tinder (Fomes fomentarius) and the combustible made from it’, found in all Finnic languages, which has acquired the additional meaning of ‘egg yolk’ in Estonian. Finnish etymological dictionaries do not mention this additional meaning of Estonian tael. The Estonian dialect researcher Vilja Oja (2013) has begun to question this account, since tael is unusual in comparison to other names for egg yolk. However, there is no reason to doubt that coloration is the most widespread motivation in names for egg yolk, and that applies in this case as well. Growing tinder, not yet processed into a combustible, features coloration characteristic of both egg white and egg yolk, varying from gray (dirty white) to pale reddish-brown, while the base of the fruiting body is brown with a purplish tone. In Finnic languages, the coloration of tinder has evidently provided an impulse for the emergence of additional meanings. À propos, color is an inseparable part of the semantic field of Estonian tael and other modern words originating from the same loan base: Lithuanian dãglas ‘variegated, multicolored, spotted, patchy (pig, skirt)’ and others.

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An Explanation for the Unexplainable: Antiharmony in Finnish Inflection (merta and verta)

Author(s): László Fejes / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2022

No persuasive explanation has been offered for the exceptional disharmony in Finnish merta ’sea-part.sg’ and verta ’blood-part.sg’ until now. In this paper, it is argued that the reason for this phenomenon is complex. On the one hand, the word initial pattern #(C)ertä occurred only in these two forms, while the pattern #(C)erta was - and is - much more common. On the other hand, the change of the forms under analogical pressure was facilitated by the fact that they were isolated inside the paradigm; and therefore, intraparadigmatic analogy could not retard the change.

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An MSSC-approach to Hungarian classifiers

Author(s): Brigitta R. Schvarcz,Kata Wohlmuth / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2021

This paper provides a formal semantic analysis of classifiers in Hungarian. We focus on the puzzle posed by classifier optionality in Hungarian, where most nouns can co-occur with a classifier, but do not have to. Here we show that the presence or absence of classifiers in a numeral expression has semantic consequences. Evidence in support of our analysis comes from nouns that are polysemous and have a physical object and an informational object sense, such as könyv ‘book’, festmény ‘painting’, magazin ‘magazine’. We argue that Hungarian classifiers, such as darab, can take count nouns as their complement, and their role is restricting the domain of counting to physically distinct, Maximally Strongly Self-Connected entities (Grimm 2012) in the denotation of the noun they modify.

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Analüütiliste ja sünteetiliste kohatarindite vahekord 17.–18. sajandi põhjaeesti kirjakeeles

Author(s): Liina Pärismaa / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 65/2019

This article is part of a broader morphosyntactic study dealing with analytic and synthetic constructions expressing spatial relations in the 17th and 18th century North Estonian literary language. The aim of this study is to observe if and how the relationship between analytic and synthetic constructions changes during the two centuries in ecclesiastical texts. It is hypothesized that from the beginning of the literary language reform at the end of the 17th century, the proportion of synthetic constructions increases and that less analytic constructions can be seen in the texts of Christoph Blume, which were written in the middle of the 17th century.This study is usage-based and the material originates from the corpora of Old Written Estonian and the Concordance of Estonian Bible Translations. The study focuses on the relationship of analytic and synthetic constructions in eleven nouns: mägi ‘mountain’, tee ‘road’, linn ‘city’, haud ‘grave’, meri ‘sea’, Jeruusalemm ‘Jerusalem’, süda ‘heart’, taevas ‘heaven’, raamat ‘book’, kõrb ‘desert’, and maa ‘land’. These words were chosen based on the versatility of the forms expressing spatial relations, the existence of both members of the parallel expression of spatial relations, and frequency.The results of this study show that generally the proportion of synthetic locative constructions increased (in eight nouns out of eleven) and the proportion of analytic locative constructions decreased, which could be due to the influence of the literary language reform and the reformers. The more abrupt change in the relationship between analytic and synthetic constructions took place from the end of the 17th century since the beginning of the literary language reform. The results did not indicate that the direction towards analytic or synthetic use depends on the use of internal or external local case or adpositions.In the words mägi ’mountain’, tee ’road’ and haud ’grave’ the analytic locative constructions dominated, which could be caused by the developed traditional marking manner and due to the German influence that was common at that time. Nevertheless, some synthetic locative constructions formed with those words occurred from the beginning of the literary language reform, which indicates that the literary language reform influenced those constructions as well.Blume did not use less analytic constructions to express spatial relations than any other author of that time. He used analytic constructions in eight words out of eleven: mägi ‘mountain’, tee ‘road’, linn ‘city’, haud ‘grave’, meri ‘sea’, süda ‘heart’, taevas ‘heaven’, raamat ‘book’, which could be due to the German influence. However, in the case of tee ‘road’ the proportion of synthetic forms in his texts, which all occurred in his songs, was somewhat higher than in other 17th and 18th century North Estonian authors’ texts (see 3.2). This indicates that it is important to pay special attention to the songs in his texts, because they could have contributed to the adoption of new and/or less widespread forms

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Analysis of Karelian Dialect Division Based on Algorithmic Clustering

Author(s): Irina Novak,Martti Penttonen / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2021

The article presents an algorithm for clustering dialects by similarity of data in the dialect atlas of the Karelian language (Бубрих, Беляков, Пунжина 1997). By repeating the procedure we get a hierarchy of dialects. Cluster hierarchies can be based on all maps of the Atlas, or on any subset of maps, e.g. morphology, noun inflection, or vocabulary maps. As an example, we consider clusters based on sibilants, local cases, and all maps of the Atlas. An analysis of the clusters, with reference to linguistic literature, leads to the following conclusions: Karelian dialects can be divided into two main areas, Karelian Proper and Livvi-Ludic areas. Border Karelian dialects, which are relatively similar to each other, seem more like Livvi Karelian than Karelian Proper. On the other hand, the traditional volost based ­division of Karelian dialects turns out to be too fine-grained to reveal any significant differences.

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Analýza kognitívnych operácií pri porozumení textu u žiakov 4. ročníka základnej školy

Author(s): Ildikó Vančo,Viktória Gergelyová / Language(s): Slovak / Issue: 3/2020

This study aims to analyse the informative-type text, questions, and answers of the fourth-grade reading comprehension test according to cognitive processes. A total of 353 respondents participated in the survey. The examined target group was the fourth-grade pupils of Hungarian-language primary schools in bilingual regions in Eastern, Central, and Western Slovakia. The results obtained show that most of the pupils had sufficient background knowledge to interpret the short and simple text, and the new information was well integrated into their existing schema structure. In terms of processes of comprehension, most pupils had no problem with recognizing and retrieving explicitly stated information in the text, neither with making straightforward inferences. However, there were problems in interpreting and integrating information and summarizing them. The results show that half of the pupils had problems with multi-level interpretation of the information obtained and about one-fifth of the pupils gave incorrect answers even to the questions that required the use of the simplest cognitive processes.

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Anmerkungen hinsichtlich einer baltischen Herkunft von osfi. *vana *’Hochwasser, Überschwemmung’

Author(s): Lembit Vaba / Language(s): German / Issue: 1/2021

The possible Baltic origin of the Finnic word *vana ’flood, inundation’ is discussed: Baltic *tvana-: Lithuanian tvãnas, tvãnai pl ’deluge of a river, inundation, flood; a large number (of); abscess’etc.

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Aplikácia výsledkov funkčnej kognitívnej lingvopedagogiky v menšinových podmienkach

Author(s): Gábor Tolcsvai Nagy / Language(s): Slovak / Issue: 3/2020

The paper gives an overview of the general and special factors of L2 learning of Hungarian minorities across the borders of Hungary, that is, in Slovakia. Indigenous minorities like Hungarians in Slovakia are strongly interested in fluent state language knowledge. Still, the state school system failed to work out and implement a suitable language pedagogy for linguistic minorities, since the state curriculum comprised only one type of Slovak lessons, the one for pupils speaking Slovak as their mother tongue. This curriculum does not consider the special needs for bilingual pupils (on different levels of bilingualism) and those growing up in pure minority environment. The paper introduces functional cognitive linguistics as a usage-based theory and descriptive activity that gives new methods for L2 learning and teaching, building on the vernacular linguistic and conceptual knowledge of the pupils, focusing on the meaning – form pairs of linguistic expressions both in the vernacular and the second (state) language. In the second part, certain grammatical units are discussed as the topic of functional language pedagogy: lexical units and their grammatical adjustment to the syntactic and semantic structure of the sentence, or metaphor in use. In the third part, the topics of the previous section are treated in a comparative Hungarian – Slovak style, as examples of L2 teaching methodology.

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