Wild Hungarian lipograms
Many readers here might be familiar with Georges Perec’s novel La disparition (ingeniously translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void), where the mad French writer succeeds in...
View ArticleWhen Hungarian was almost Romance
In the second volume of a Festschrift for Oswald Szemerényi published in 1979, I found Adam Makkai’s paper ‘Latinate Diglossia in Finno-Ugric’ that is one of the few examples of ‘speculative...
View ArticleHungarian and Mansi connections
In the Introduction to the Study of the Finno-Ugrian Languages course that I’m sitting in on again this year, the lecturer handed out a nice concise listing of similarities between Hungarian and...
View ArticleHungarian regionalisms
No teacher would deny that German, Italian, or French differ region by region from the standard language. Nonetheless, several prominent learning materials for speakers of English claim that Hungarian...
View ArticleHungarian-Old Chuvash contacts
In the collection Chuvash Studies ed. András Róna-tas (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982) there’s a fascinating paper by Margaret Palló entitled “The Bulgar-Turkish Loanwords of the Hungarian Language...
View ArticleLast year, this year, next year
It’s interesting to note that Hungarian and Chuvash both express the concepts ‘last year’, ‘this year’, and ‘next year’ with lexically very different words: Hungarian Chuvash ‘last year’ tavaly пӗлтӗр...
View ArticleThe migration of the Hungarians
In Historical and Linguistic Interaction Between Inner-Asia and Europe ed. Árpád Berta (Szeged, 1997), the Proceedings of the 39th Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) in Szeged, Hungary...
View ArticleMore weird sound changes in Romanian borrowings
The Crestomație de literatură română veche edited by I. C. Chițimia and Stela Toma (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1984) that I picked up for cheap last year in a Cluj antiquary has so much trivia on...
View ArticleThe twists and turns of Chuvash etymology
The Chuvash branch of Turkic actually preserved some lexical items common to the whole Turkic family, but you’d never guess it from looking at modern Chuvash. Here the early Chuvash loans into...
View ArticleMagyar is Turkic
The traditional etymology of the Hungarian self-appellation magyar derives the word from the same Proto-Ugric root as the ethnonym Mańsi, perhaps as a compound with a second word *er of uncertain...
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The Volga Bulgarian inscription of Tatarskoe Shapkino
The palatalization of Proto-Turkic /č/ to /č́/ and then the weakening of the affricate’s initial stop to give /š́/ or /š/, is a notable areal feature extending from the Volga–Kama region into...
View ArticleThe migration of the Hungarians
In Historical and Linguistic Interaction Between Inner-Asia and Europe ed. Árpád Berta (Szeged, 1997), the Proceedings of the 39th Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) in Szeged, Hungary...
View ArticleMore weird sound changes in Romanian borrowings
The Crestomație de literatură română veche edited by I. C. Chițimia and Stela Toma (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1984) that I picked up for cheap last year in a Cluj antiquary has so much trivia on...
View ArticleThe twists and turns of Chuvash etymology
The Chuvash branch of Turkic actually preserved some lexical items common to the whole Turkic family, but you’d never guess it from looking at modern Chuvash. Here the early Chuvash loans into...
View ArticleMagyar is Turkic
The traditional etymology of the Hungarian self-appellation magyar derives the word from the same Proto-Ugric root as the ethnonym Mańsi, perhaps as a compound with a second word *er of uncertain...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Volga Bulgarian inscription of Tatarskoe Shapkino
The palatalization of Proto-Turkic /č/ to /č́/ and then the weakening of the affricate’s initial stop to give /š́/ or /š/, is a notable areal feature extending from the Volga–Kama region into...
View ArticleOn the etymology of Hungarian srác
While brushing up on my Hungarian by reading through Routledge’s Colloquial Hungarian (the 2nd edition, which lives up to its title more than the 1st), I learned the previously unfamiliar word srác...
View ArticleThe languages of Czernowitz and old Bucovina
From my acquaintance with the life and work of Paul Celan – not to mention passing through on several occasions and seeing traces of its imperial past – I was aware that the former Austro-Hungarian...
View ArticleWeöres’s ersatz Chinese
The Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres wrote several visual poems, but an especially memorable one is “Kinai templom” (Chinese Temple). Weöres recreates in Hungarian the same monosyllabic, vertically written...
View ArticleA calque on Romanian in Transylvanian Hungarian
Another foreigner learning Hungarian, mainly in Hungary with references based on the standard language, has drawn my attention to a grammatical feature he has heard only in Transylvania and which he...
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