A csángó: nyelv vagy nyelvjárás?
Peti Lehel – Tánczos Vilmos (szerk.): Language Use, Attitudes, Strategies. Language Identity and Ethnicity in the Moldavian Csángó Villages, Nemzeti Kisebbségkutató Intézet, Kvár, 2012.
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Peti Lehel – Tánczos Vilmos (szerk.): Language Use, Attitudes, Strategies. Language Identity and Ethnicity in the Moldavian Csángó Villages, Nemzeti Kisebbségkutató Intézet, Kvár, 2012.
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The development of the lexicon and conceptual system of Estonian has been influenced by the translation of Bible into Estonian. In order to achieve a more precise translation, new words were created either by means of borrowings or derivation using extant word stems. One of the central concepts in Christianity is agape (love), which was translated in early Estonian texts mostly by the word ‘arm’, which was a word with a rather broad meaning. During the Bible translation in the beginning of the 18th century, a new term ‘armastus’ was derived from the same-stem verb ‘armastama’, as an exact counterpart for Greek agape. In the later development of Estonian, the meaning of this term expanded. In the article, the development of Estonian counterparts of agape and the closely related concepts charis and eleos are examined with the comparisons of Latin and German terms, which were languages also used in Estonia during the missionary work and Bible translation.
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This study examines the choice between the singular long and short illative case. The research question examined is which morphophonological variables are statistically significant for choosing the long or short illative case. The variables considered were gradation, the type and direction of gradation, the quantity degree of the base form, stem-final alternation and the stem-final alternation pattern, the final sound of the base form and the number of syllables in the genitive stem. The data for the study came from the Morphologically Disambiguated Corpus of the University of Tartu. A total of 1710 illative case forms were analysed. With the help of the computer software program R, a chi-square test and standardized Pearson residuals were performed. Based on the standardized Pearson residuals, the short illative is more likely when the word has gradation or quality alternation, the word has stem-end alternation, the final sound of the word’s base form is a consonant or there are more than three syllables in the genitive stem. Likewise, the short illative is more likely when the stem-final alternation pattern has words belonging to the seminar, redel, kringel, siil, sai, lagi, nali, sõber and õnnelik types. The long illative is more likely if the word has no gradation (or has quantity alternation), the word has no stem-final alternation (or the stem-final alternation pattern has the ending -(V)s, if the word has the ending -(V)ne or -ke, if the word belongs to the suur, küünal, soolane, uus–küüs, or käsi type, the final sound of the word’s base form is a vowel or there are three syllables in the genitive stem. The direction of gradation and the quantity degree of the base form are not statistically significant factors in the choice between the short and the long illative. However, the short illative form was preferred by all morphophonological variables in the analysed data. Future studies could perform a multivariate analysis with morphosyntactic and semantic variables.
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The article examines the choice between the singular long and short illative case. It attempts to find out which morphosyntactic and semantic variables are statistically significant for choosing the long or short illative case. The variables considered are part of speech, part of sentence, government, fixed word combination, proper or common noun, proper noun semantic group, common noun semantic group and meaning of the verb lemma. The material investigated comes from the Estonian web corpus etTenTen and the Estonian Reference Corpus. In the final material, a total of 840 illative case forms were analysed. The material was balanced (420 long illative forms and 420 short illative forms) and all word forms were included only once. With the help of the computer software program R, a chi-square test and standardized Pearson residuals were performed. The results were controlled with a so-called part-whole method and using Cramér’s V effect size method. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analyses, five variables were found to be important: government, fixed word combination, proper or common noun, proper noun semantic group and common noun semantic group. it was found that the government structures, proper nouns and the levels ‘person names’ and ‘place names’ from the variable proper noun semantic group prefer the long illative case. The short illative case is more preferred with fixed word combinations and the levels ‘place phrases’ and ‘state phrases’ from the variable common noun semantic group. In this univariable corpus-based study, the variables government, fixed word combination, proper or common noun, proper noun semantic group and common noun semantic group were statistically significant, but further studies should test if these variables remain statistically significant when applying multivariable analysis or in experiment-based studies.
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The article presents alternative etymologies for the Estonian words koost ‘(wooden) spoon’ and kaugas ‘men’s shirt breast with a double waist, used as a pocket; wallet’ and the Northern Finnic word represented by Finnish kaukalo ‘trough’. The word koost is found primarily on the western Estonian islands. Julius Mägiste has proposed a Russian etymology for it, as a borrowing based on *kopusta ‘mixing tool’. Mägiste’s Russian etymology presumes the phonological development chain *kopusta > *koβusta > *kovosta > koost, proposed specifically for this case, which is implausible. Koost is most likely of Baltic origin, from a loan base the successors of which are lithuanian kaũstė / kaustė̃ ‘vessel hollowed out from a tree trunk, drinking horn’, latvian kaũšķins ‘ladle’ etc. Upon its borrowing, the Baltic au was replaced by ou, which later developed into a long ō. this kind of substitution and phonological development is characteristic of livonian, where vowels are in quantitative and mostly also qualitative paradigmatic alternation, including ou : ō. The borrowing has presumably come to Estonian via Livonian, where it is no (longer) recorded. Although the presumed Baltic loan base lacks phonological features of diagnostic value, the word’s geographical distribution indicates that it could have been borrowed from Curonian. The proposed connection between kaugas ‘men’s shirt breast with a double waist, used as a pocket; wallet’ and latvian kabata ‘pocket’ requires a remarkably complicated phonological adaptation for a relatively recent borrowing and is unconvincing. kaugas is most likely an older Baltic loan, having originated from the stem *kauk-, the possible Indo-European archetype of which is *(s)keu- / *kou- ‘to make curved, curved, hollow, cavity’ and/or *(s)keu- ‘to cover (up), wrap (up)’. The members of this large and diverse Baltic word family include Lithuanian káukė ‘mask, face cover, gas mask’, kiáuklas / kiáukutas ‘cover, shell’, káukė ‘mortar, wooden ladle, dish, basin etc.’, kaukẽlė ‘wooden dish’ and others. kaugas does not denote a pocket on a garment in today’s meaning. A pocket woven/sewn into a piece of clothing is a sufficiently new phenomenon that the Baltic loan base could not possibly have carried that meaning. Among the oldest forerunners of pockets was a piece of skin, which could be pulled with the aid of a sheep-split into the shape of a small round bag or purse. In this context, derivations of the *kauk- stem such as káukė and kiáuklas / kiáukutas can be seen to fit in the semantic field of the loan base. Estonian words for ‘pocket’ such as tasku, vikk, 231 kalits, kulit etc. have been borrowed into estonian on the basis of words in other languages denoting pockets. Kaugas is not among them, as it belongs to a much earlier loanword stratum. The Baltic loan base *kaukāl- / *kaukōl- ‘vessel hollowed out from a tree trunk’, the successor of which is e.g. lithuanian kaukẽlė ‘wooden dish’ has been borrowed into Finnic as *kaukal-: Salaca livonian kougil, Karelian koùgõl ‘kneading trough’, votic kaukalo / kaukolo ‘trough hollowed out of wood’, Finnish kaukalo ‘trough’ etc. the sequence -Vl in these Finnic words is the representation of the loan base’s productive deverbal affix *āl- / *ōl-, one of the essential meanings of which is conveying the result of an action. An earlier explanation held kaukalo and its equivalents to be derived from the stem kauka-‘distant, far, for a long time’, on the basis of the fact that kaukalo denotes an oblong vessel. This is, however, merely a folk etymology. The Baltic loan base contains a reference to the way in which such vessels were made.
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This article consists of two sections: in the first section, I provide additional evidence of the proposition made in Luobbal Sámmol Sámmol Ánte (Aikio) 2012 that derivational suffixes prevented the secondary lengthening of low vowels in Proto-Finnic when preceded by a single voiced consonant in an e-stem word. I will argue for this restriction by discussing the etymology of Estonian mäletama ’to remember’. In the second section, I suggest a new interpretation for the etymologies of Proto-Finnic *nälvä ’slobber’ and Proto-Uralic *tulka ’wing, feather’ as well as new etymologies for Finnish muikea ’sour’, muju ’smile’, muikku ’vendace (Coregonus albula)’ and muisku ’kiss’ deriving from Proto-Uralic *muja ’to become happy; happiness, smile’.
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In this paper, the author poses three questions of historical phonology and gives explanations that are meant to be rational: 1. With respect to the Hungarian reflexes of Proto-Uralic/Proto-Finno-Ugric/Proto-Ugric word initial *p, *t, and *k, two reasons are suggested for the dual reflexes *p > H f ∼ b and *t > H t ∼ d: (a) the word internal (primary or secondary) voiced consonant triggered the assimilation (that is, voicing) of the initial consonant; (b) subsequently, due to an effort to eliminate homonymy, the closest congener of the initial consonant (that is, its voiced counterpart) replaced the original voiceless stop. It is also discussed why *k does not similarly have dual reflexes (k ∼ g) in Hungarian. 2. Concerning the phonological reality of Proto-Uralic/Proto-Finno-Ugric/Proto-Ugric *δ and *D, as well as the potential etymological correspondence of s-initial Finnic words with t-initial words of the other Uralic languages, it is proposed that *2 and *´2 should be assumed rather than *δ and *D, and the correspondence “Finnic s- ∼ other Uralic t-” is explained by positing a PU/PFU *ϑ. 3. Reflexes in present-day Uralic languages of the PU/PFU word internal clusters “*l/*ľ /*r/*j/*δ (= *2)/*D (= *´2) + (some vowel +) *m” are explained by the palatalisation and subsequent semivocalisation of the first consonant; the resulting semivowel either remained as it was, or underwent partial assimilation to the other consonant, or it was dropped: “C > Ć > j > 0/ /ń”.
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This article takes a close look at correlatives in Hungarian and shows that they occupy a particular space in the typology of correlatives: Hungarian correlativization is solely used as a left-peripheral discourse strategy, which will be evidenced by the fact that correlatives display properties of topics, both when it comes to syntax and discourse. Concerning their discourse interpretation it will be argued that correlatives in Hungarian are aboutness topics, and take part in a discourse structure akin to simplifying left dislocation. Concerning their syntax, unlike Hindi correlatives in the analysis of Bhatt (2003), correlatives in Hungarian are not merged to their demonstrative associate in a local manner; nevertheless, their relationship to their associate is subject to locality considerations. Hungarian correlatives are merged at the edge of the CP that contains the base-generated DP and may undergo topic movement to the left, into higher clauses. The demonstrative associate on the other hand minimally raises to the left periphery of its CP, and alternatively into higher clauses, via topicalization or focusing. This means that Hungarian correlativization involves two mobile elements: both the correlative clause and the demonstrative are able to undergo movement.
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Review of: 1. Вугорска-беларускй слоушк. Пад рэд. Атылы ГОЛАТТТА i Ларысы СТАНКЕВШ. I Прэдзьгаэа, 2007. 280 с. - Magyar-fehérorosz szótár. Szerk. HOLLÓS Attila és Larisza SZTANKEVICS. Nyíregyháza, 2007. 280 p. by: И. И. Савицкая (Минск) 2. BELENTSCHIKOW Renate (Hrsg.): Das Russische in zweisprachigen Wörterbüchern. Internationale Fachtagung, Magdeburg, 18.-22.5.2005. БЕЛЕНЧИКОВА Ренате (ред.): Русский язык в двуязычных словарях. Международная научная конференция, Магдебург, 18-22 мая 2005 г. Band 13. 2006. 392 с. by: Лариса Станкевич (Брест—Будапешт) 3. BORYS Wieslaw: Slownik etymologiczny języka polskiego. Krakow: Wydawnic- two literackie, 2005. 861 S. by: Michael Moser (Wien) 4. WITKOWSKI Wieslaw: Nowy slownik zapozyczen polskich w języku rosyjskim. Wydanie drugie, rozszerzone. Kraków: Universitas, 2006. XXIV + 251 S. by: Michael Moser (Wien) 5. DANYLENKO Andrii: Slavica et Islamica. Ukrainian in Context. (Sagners Slavistische Sammlung 31.) München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2006. 460 S. by: Michael Moser (Wien) 6. Szűcs Olga: Nyikolaj Bergyajev történetfilozófiája 1901-1924 között írt mű¬vei alapján. Dobroljubov Társadalomtudományi Társaság Közhasznú Egyesület, 2006. 167 p. by: Золтан Фаркаш 7. MARIN EL LI-KÖNIG Gertraud: Russische Kinderliteratur in dér Sowjetunion dér Jahre 1920-1930. Slavistische Beitrage 457. Hrsg. von Peter Rehder. München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2007. 293+7 S. by: Иштван Фрид 8. Studia Russica XXI. Литература и визуальность. Под ред. Анны ХАН И Жужи ХЕТЕНИ. Budapest: Institut Philologiae Slavicae Orientalis et Balticae, 2004. 436 p. by: Эржебет Каман
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In Olga Penavin’s legacy there are 480 folk beliefs compiled in Csantavér. They were collected from 85 informants by 28 primary school pupils in 1960. These beliefs are presented from the aspect of ethnography, semiotics and lingvistics in this presentation. Some of them are regulations and advices about magical processes, but most of them are connected to procedures in everday life. They can also appear in form of prohibitions. These refer to the things one must not do because of certain consequences. Prohibitions can also be grouped. Some convey ominous signs of death and other prophecy signs. The messages reflect the beliefs of a community. A semiotic approach can show the correlation between the relevant elements (for example: witch – whirlwind, witch – threshold, rubbish), their opposition (woman – man, right – left) and their semiotic web. These statements and prohibitions have specific forms of sentence structure. The linguistic analysis takes account of the specific sentence structures, the morphological characteristics of the words and the semantic markers.
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Emoticons are considered to be a useful way to express non-verbal information in electronic discourse. However, detailed analysis of the usage of emoticons has not been done by Lithuanian linguists so far. The aim of the research is to identify emoticons that are used in internet discussions most frequently and to determine their functions in a text. The research material consists of 450 comments from the internet forum Draugas.lt, all comments were written during the period of the year 2010–2015. Comments were taken from the discussions about diseases, nutrition, movies, religion, spirituality, studies, sports, cars, computer games, finances. The overall length of the texts of each topic is 1300–1600 words. The method of the research is corpus linguistics. The analysis of comments revealed that there are six emoticons used in internet discussions most frequently: :), :D, ;), :P, :/ and :(. They can: a) strengthen or repeat emotional content of written information; b) reveal writer’s attitude or evaluation of written information which could be difficult to identify without emoticons; c) function as markers at the end of sentence. Emoticons ;) and :) have wider meaning: they can also be used with phrases of politeness or help to connect with other participants of discussion as well as soften negative information.
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It is traditionally held with respect to Hungarian degemination that geminates do not occur in this language word initially or flanked by another consonant on either side. The occurrence of geminates, true and fake ones alike, is said to be impossible except intervocalically or utterance finally (if preceded by a vowel and followed by a pause). However, this traditional view is oversimplified. Siptár (2000) proposed to amend it by positing three different degemination rules, applying at word level, postlexically, and in the phonetic implementation module, respectively. Furthermore, he reinterpreted several cases that traditionally had been analysed as degemination as lack of gemination. In view of the recent literature, however, the hypothesis can be advanced that the whole issue should be seen as a matter of phonetic duration rather than that of phonological quantity. In particular, the hypothesis is that the familiar degemination effects are not specific to geminates: they are due to phonetic compression of CCC clusters. The paper presents and discusses that hypothesis and cites some results of a small-scale phonetic experiment designed to confirm (or disconfirm) it by empirical data. Six short texts involving all types of geminates and control sequences with both short and long consonants were created. Six consonants (two fricatives, three plosives, and a nasal) were used in the test (and control) sequences. The duration of the target consonant and that of the consonant cluster including it were measured in each case. The results partially support the hypothesis but they also raise some further questions.
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The paper deals with the Turkish deictic locative adverbs bura- (‘here’) ora- (‘there’) and şura- (‘here’, ‘there’). Some researchers (Lyons 1977, Levinson 1983, Anderson and Keenan 1985) claim that şura- occupies an intermediate position between bura- and ora-. Some others (Küntay and Özyürek 2002, 2006) note that şura- is neutral with regard to distance specifications. This investigation has identified a rather problematic usage of the deictic locative adverb şura-. Taking into account that contemporary Turkish language has gradually developed from a three-member deictic system into a two-member system, the paper attempts to more thoroughly investigate the usage of the locative adverb şura- and describe the prevailing deictic system in the Turkish language
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This paper explores the relationship between the use of demonstrative pronouns in deixis and anaphora in the framework of the functional-cognitive theory of language. Part of the international literature suggests that deixis and anaphora cannot be separated from one another (see, in a formal pragmatic framework, Lyons 1977/1989; Levinson 1994), whereas other authors think that those two pragmatic/text linguistic processes are not connected in this manner (see, e.g., the cognitive-functional approach of Marmaridou 2000). The way Hungarian demonstratives work does not support the latter claim. Along with universal characteristics, it can be observed in Hungarian that, in the non-attributive (independent) use of these pronouns, event deixis (a subtype of spatial deixis) exhibits properties that it shares with discourse deixis, whereas discourse deixis leads on to the anaphoric use of demonstratives. In Hungarian, the switchover between the two types of use is clearly associated with perspective; in particular, with the shift from the referential centre to a neutral vantage point.
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The article analyses the usage of two Estonian converbs (the prototypical –des converb and its negative counterpart the -mata converb) in Estonian dialects. The data is collected from the morphologically tagged texts of the University of Tartu’s corpus of Estonian dialects. Compared to written texts, converbs in spoken (dialectal) speech are infrequent; also, -mata converbs are rarer than -des converbs. -des converbs are most used in the Western, Coastal and Insular dialects, whereas the -mata converb is more frequent (although still rare) in the Tartu, Võro and Western dialects. In dialects, converbs are used in fewer functions than in Standard Estonian. The -des converb is used most often to indicate manner, but also as a temporal adverbial; the -mata converb conveys mostly the meaning of manner or means (all cases that answer the question how?). -des converbs indicating manner are less frequent in the North-Eastern and Coastal dialects, while in South Estonian dialects (Võro, Seto and Mulgi), there are more manner converbs and fewer temporal converbs. The relatively frequent usage of short adverb-like manner converbs in dialects is also the main difference from the use of converbs in Standard Estonian. However, this is probably not a characteristic of dialects, but rather of spoken language, which tends to favor the usage of shorter and more grammaticalized and lexicalized converbs. In dialects, there are both implicit and explicit subject converbs. Although explicit subject converbs are rather rare and these are used in more or less set phrases (the most used are päikese tõustes ‘when the sun is rising’ and X’i nähes ‘in the presence of X’, in the Western dialect also ‘as X remembers’), in the Coastal dialect, the verb mäletama ‘remember’ can also be used in this construction (this is not possible in Standard Estonian, where only limited transitive verbs can form an explicit subject converb construction). The implicit subject converbs in dialects are similar to the corresponding construction in Standard Estonian.
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The article discusses (not aspiring to completeness) 130 Slavic borrowings in the Hungarian language. These borrowings are mostly related to the rural life and agriculture. When the nomadic Finno-Ugric people, who came from the territories east of the Ural Mountains, finally settled down and started to cultivate soil, they had to acquire the terminology related to the new way of life.
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The present paper is a narrower cross-section of the very rich contribution to Croatistics by the Hungarian linguist László Hadrovics (1910–1996). It presents the findings of his research entailing the contact between the Hungarian and the Croatian languages, the Croatian literary language in Burgenland (former Western Hungary) as well as his findings in etymological studies. Hadrovics was a prominent, internationally acknowledged linguist of his time. His great achievements are marked by the richness in data and by the numerous novel methodological approaches applied in his monograph on the words of Hungarian origin in the Serbo-Croatian language. His book served as a pattern to a great number of successive publications. His work on the Croatian literary language in Burgenland, among others, publishes its first dictionary of this kind. As far as his etymological studies are concerned, the renewal of his research methods is of prominent interest. Hadrovics broke up with the practice of earlier etymological research which was based on using dictionary entries. The author went back to the sources themselves, which yielded much more reliable results. With his new approach, he gained outstanding results, even on an international level.
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The paper describes digital resources available for Enets, an endangered Northern Samoyedic language: a multimedia dictionary and a digital corpus, both created by the author with her collaborators. Possible uses of these resources for linguistic research are discussed with the help of several examples. The dictionary is shown to seize limits of phonetic variation involving a mixture of two vowel phonemes, and the corpus is shown to provide a better description to grammatical structures involving ditransitive semantics. All examples illustrate the added value of the digital resources’ use.
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We investigate the digital vitality of Uralic languages and dialects, and discuss how existing approaches to language revitalization relate to this model.
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