Hungarian language

“ Some years ago the crowded house which greeted{287} this Magyar melodrama would have been impossible. Half the audience, though Hungarian, would not have understood their own language. They would have wanted it translated into German.
To understand the immense strides which Magyarism has made one must look back a little. To-day hardly a German word is to be heard in the thoroughfares, and no German words disfigure the public announcements, the sign-posts, the playbills, or the street corners. There are many thousands of Hungarians who do not even understand German. ”

“ The Hungarian language has no diphthongs and no mute letters. Every character is to be pronounced distinctly and in full, always retaining the same sound, and each word in as many syllables as it contains vowels. ”

“ I mixed exclusively in Hungarian society during my stay at the baths of Tusnad. With Baron —— and Herr von —— I talked politics by the hour. The Hungarians have the natural gift of eloquence. They pour forth their words like the waters of a mill-race, no matter in what language. My principal companion at Tusnad spoke French. The true Magyar will always employ that language in preference to German when speaking with a foreigner; but as often as not the Hungarians of good society speak English perfectly well. ”

“ The literature of so noble a people can not remain longer neglected in England. Besides the political importance which the country will yet assume, there is beauty and originality in the language itself deserving study. Of all European tongues, it has most of the Oriental spirit and form in its idioms. We are glad to find that an elementary work, entitled 'The Hungarian Language; its Structure and Rules, with Exercises and a Vocabulary,' is in the press, by Sigismund Wékey, late aid-de-camp to Kossuth. ”

“ Here’s the first gun: ‘The majestic words will find an echo in all parts of Hungary, which will ever remain in the debt of the great Hohenzollern, who has forever conquered the soul of every Hungarian; ... the love and gratitude of the Hungarian nation will follow the guest of our King wherever he goes.’ But that is mere rhetoric. Listen to this: ‘In every line there is so much heart and so much sympathy with the Hungarian nation, its glorious past as well as its promising future, that it seems not the language of politics only, but of a loving friend, on whose well-meaning we may ever rely! ”

“ Another feature which distinguishes Hungarian from all the Indo-Germanic languages, but which we find in the language of the Ugrian tribes, is the assimilating of the vowel in the affix to that in the stem of a word. Just as in music the notes in a chord have to be in harmony with one another, so in a Hungarian word. ”

“ That the Hungarian language belongs to the stock called Altaic is well known, but whether it is to be referred to the Finnish or the Tartaric branch is a question that still awaits decision. This enquiry, interesting [Footnote 1] to us Hungarians both in a scientific and {viii} a national point of view, was the principal and the moving cause of my journey to the East. ”

“ The Hungarians are of Magyar descent and speak a beautiful, musical language, while the Austrians are a mixture of many races whose common tongue is a borrowed, unclassical German. Each country has its own government, its own parliament, and its own cabinet officers. The Hungarian nobility regard the Austrian nobles as mere upstarts. Nothing is so displeasing to a Hungarian as to be called an Austrian, or to be told that Austrians and Hungarians are one and the same people. ”

“ Without entering into a discussion of the Hungarian constitution, it is well to point out one factor which lies at the root of all political and constitutional development in Hungary and explains the Magyar outlook for centuries past, even up to the present day. Till 1840 Latin was the official language of the country, and in that Latin the term for the political nation was Populus, which we would naturally translate as people. ”

“ The Hungarian people are distinct in language and history from all their neighbors. In fact, the Hungarians differ in many respects from all the other people of Europe, the inhabitants of Finland being their nearest kinspeople. Their early history is unknown, but they came from western Asia where the Mongolians, the Turks and the Finn-Ugrians struggled for mastery about the beginning of the Christian era. ”

“ The culture and language of the Hungarian minority are being preserved and promoted through schools, newspapers, periodicals, books, theater, and other cultural activities. Members of the Hungarian minority, however, frequently complain that the number of schools, books, and other cultural material available to them in their own language is far short of the demand and not nearly proportionate to their numbers. ”

“ The great European languages have affinities with one another: Latin puts one on bowing terms with French and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; English is not entirely unrelated to German, Dutch, and even Norwegian; old Greek is the key to modern. But in Hungary one comes face to face with an absolutely new language, in which even guesswork is impossible. When "Levelezö-Lap" means a postcard, and "ára egy napra" means price per day, you feel that it is all up. The nearest relatives of Hungarian are Turkish and Finnish, the Asiatic ancestors of the race having lived between Finns and Turks ”

“ Here the Hungarian is eminently patriotic: he endeavors as much as possible to forget that he and his are bound to the empire of Austria, and he speaks of the German and the Slav who are his fellow-subjects with a sneer. The people whom one encounters in that corner of Hungary profess a dense ignorance of the German language, but if pressed can speak it glibly enough. I won an angry frown and an unpleasant remark from an innkeeper because I did not know that Austrian postage-stamps are not good in Hungary. ”

“ There must have been a time when all those tribes lived in one land in common with the Hungarians, and spoke one common language. One of the proofs given by Sajnovics is that the similarity occurs in the most familiar words used in primitive life, such as numerals, names of parts of the body, pronouns, water, fire, sun, moon, wood, names of animals. Another proof is furnished by likeness in grammatical structure. Hungarian is a language of affixes. ”

“ It has published, at its own expense, a very large number of works; among them a series of critical Commentaries on the ancient monuments of the Magyar language, "which bears no affinity to the European tongues, and differs as much from the Sclavonic as from the Teutonic and the Latin idioms." There is a very important and very rich collection of Hungarian translations of the Latin and Greek classics; another of translations of the principal modern dramatic authors. The Hungarian mind has been prolific for its stage, in original pieces. ”

“ HUNGARIAN TYPES.
The population of the country is composed of various nationalities. The conquering Hungarians did not oppress the ancient inhabitants of the land but13 left them undisturbed in the use of their native language, and, even in later days, their tolerance went so far as to actually favor foreign, and, more particularly, German immigrants, and to this exceptional forbearance alone must be traced the survival of so many nationalities, and the lack of assimilation, after so many centuries. ”

“ It is true that the language contains a large number of important words, chiefly substantives, of Turkish origin, but they are borrowed words, and no more warrant our regarding Hungarian as a Turkish tongue than the considerable Romance element in English would justify us in calling it a Romance language. ”

“ If we may be permitted to use the language of geology, the soul of the Hungarian people during the Middle Ages might be said to show in section three different strata. At the bottom is the primitive pagan nature, brought from their Asiatic home. The next shows a more cultured mental condition, the result largely of intercourse with Turkish, Slavish, German, and Italian neighbours. Last comes Christianity, introducing a multitude of new features into the life of the people. ”

“ The characters and the whole atmosphere of the poem are purely Hungarian. This accounts for the immediate popularity of the book. A country notary, an honest but inexperienced man, travels on horseback to Buda. After many amusing adventures he arrives at his destination, but to his great disappointment he sees that in the very capital of the country, which ought to be the fountain-head of the national spirit, everything is foreign, the language the people speak, the books they read, the garments they wear, and even the measures they dance. ”

“ During the last few years of his life, Hungarian literature had begun to take a new direction.
Among those who were stirred into activity by Bessenyei were the clergy, and their superior literary education made them important factors in Hungarian life. Their studies were chiefly classical, so that when once they began to write, they naturally took the classical poets, and especially Horace, for their models. It must be remembered that during the eighteenth century Latin was so largely used in Hungary that it might almost have been regarded as a living language. ”

“ The learned dialect, too, in which it is written, is crowded full of Persian and Arabic words, often to the nearly total exclusion of native Turkish material. In the Finno-Hungarian branch of the family, finally, there is the same paucity of literary records. In Hungary, after its conversion to Roman Christianity (about A.D. 1000) , Latin was for a long time the almost exclusive medium of learned communication and composition. The Reformation, in the sixteenth century, favoured the uprising of a national literature, in a vernacular tongue ”

“ So strongly did they become permeated by the spirit of occidental civilization, that the menace of absorption by the Turks was rendered abortive whenever the Sultan’s hordes made successful advances towards Vienna. At the same time, fusion with the Germans was prevented by the oriental origin of the race. The foundation of a separate European nation was thus laid in the Hungarian plains.
Language to the Magyar has always represented nationality. ”

“ In Bohemia, Hungary, and elsewhere there were revivals of racial enthusiasm and of nationalistic aspirations which grew increasingly ominous. The Hungarian diet of 1844 substituted as the official language of the chambers Magyar for Latin, and during the forties there was built up, under the leadership of Louis Kossuth and Francis Deák, a flourishing Liberal party, whose aim was the re-establishment of the autonomy of the kingdom and the thoroughgoing reform of the government. ”

“ All causal verbs—whether derived from active or neuter verbs—are transitive, and conjugated like these in the indefinite and definite form.
The Hungarian has, properly speaking, no passive voice for active verbs, but grammarians have introduced a so-called passive voice for transitive verbs which is, however, not generally used, but is restricted to a few verbs only. The root or the primitive of the passive is the same as the causal verb, but is conjugated like the neuter verbs; as, szeretni, to love ”

“ The number of Germans scattered in Hungarian districts is 2,000,000. The only advantage which the natives of the soil possess lies in their occupation of the richest lands in their country.
[157]
A minor group of Hungarians have settled on the eastern edge of the Transylvania mountains. Here they live surrounded by Rumanians on all sides except on the west where a lone outpost of Saxons brings Teutonic customs and speech to the east. The name of Szekler, meaning frontier guardsmen, applied to this body of Magyars is indicative of their origin. ”

“ While not surrendering to their demand for the Magyar language of command in the Hungarian part of the Imperial army, it proposed that the men who do not speak that language should be trained in it as far as possible. ”

“ In the northeastern valley of this river, Hungarian and Ruthenian languages replace each other. The area of Magyar speech thus defined [156] lacks homogeneity in its western section lying west of the Danube. Important enclaves of Germans are solidly intrenched in this portion of the Hungarian domain. The central portion of the monotonous expanse unfolding itself between the Danube and the Theiss is, on the other hand, characterized by uniformity of the Hungarian population it supports. Enclaves however exist all along the border of this eastern area. ”

“ The Hungarians have besought the King that their own language might supersede German, but though he has proved kindly to his Hungarian subjects in many other ways, he remains adamant on this.
The greatest difference, however, between the Dual Monarchy and the United Kingdom is the difference brought into high relief by the above point, namely the racial and linguistic diversity between5 Austria and Hungary. The inhabitants of the two countries are not men of one blood and one tongue as the English and Scots are, but are separated by lines of deep cleavage. ”

“ As regards care and fidelity in translating, these attempts are sufficient to gain for Mr. Butler a place in the first rank amongst those who have translated Hungarian poems into foreign languages. His conception is for the most part faultless. ”