Hungarian and Croatian translations of István Werbőczy’s Tripartitum
The Hungarian and Croatian translations of István Werbőczy’s Tripartitum can, in fact, be justly described, using Katalin Péter’s words, as “a secularised Erasmian program”, or rather, the implementation of such a program. The aim of both translations was to make the texts easy to access and experience for plain readers. Probably the same aim influenced the structure of the Hungarian and Croatian (and possibly the German) translations. This claim is substantiated by similarities, based on an identical approach, across various (in the present case, primarily the Hungarian and Croatian) translations. It is another issue, however, what grammatical and syntactic means were used to reach that goal, based on the typical difficulties of translating the corresponding Latin constructions. The texts are also instructive with respect to linguistic contacts (loanwords, calques, terms, etc.).
Keywords: Tripartitum, Decretum, Erasmus, simplifications in translation, accessibility
Nyelv és stílus
Textual variations and alternative titles of Gyula Krúdy’s autobiographical novel
Gyula Krúdy’s autobiographical novel, entitled Gentlemen, vagabonds, and gypsies, was published in sequels in a Budapest daily in 1932, less than a year before the writer’s death. The introductory part of the novel describes the agony and death of the writer’s father. A critic called this novel a “Tolstoyan masterpiece”. Although this is clearly an exaggeration, the parallel with Tolstoy is not quite unfounded. In this novel, Krúdy describes the physiology and psychology of dying almost as expressively as Tolstoy does in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The author of this paper uses philological, textological, and stylistic methods to compare the novel’s diverse textual versions; in doing that, he hits upon a portion of text, over 600 words long, that has not been included in any published version of Krúdy’s novel.
Keywords: philology, textology, publication history, text version, text corruption, text editing
Nép és nyelv
Linguistic and ethnographic traces of South Slavic (Croatian, Serbian, and sporadically Slovenian) immigration in geographical names of Southern Transdanubia, part 1
The author used published lists of geographical names from three counties of Southern Transdanubia (Baranya, Somogy, and Tolna) for his investigations. In the introduction, he gives a survey of the history of South Slavic immigration to Hungary during and after Turkish rule. The first, longer, part of the paper focuses on occurrences of South Slavic (Croatian, Serbian, and a few Slovenian) geographical names.
Keywords: published lists of geographical names in the counties of Southern Transdanubia (Baranya, Somogy, Tolna); the history of South Slavic immigration to Hungary during and after Turkish rule
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
Intonation units and clauses in speech
The aim of this paper is to employ a complex empirical methodology to explore characteristics of intonation units in utterances. In the first phase of the experiment, intonation units were identified by subjects on the basis of the meaning of linguistic expressions plus the way they sounded. In the second phase, participants only had access to the second type of information. Average results of the number of boundary markings exhibited hardly any difference between the two phases (24.3 and 25.8); furthermore, the number of identical boundary markings was high. The results suggest that the concept of intonation units is a better basis for establishing the segmentation of utterances both on the production and the perception side than the concept of sentences, as in earlier similar experiments. The importance of clauses in linguistic interaction is emphasised in the present investigation exactly by our refraining from making that category a point of departure; rather, its characteristic interaction with intonation units is empirically confirmed.
Keywords: acoustic clue, clause, intonation unit, segmentation of utterances, prosody
Strategies and patterns of reading digital texts
In the twenty-first century, the means and ways of attaining knowledge have changed: information often appears in a virtual environment, and info-communicative technologies are used for accessing it. The paper defines the notions of digital literacy and digital text, and proves their interaction with the description of individual steps of the process of information processing. Summarising the results of a number of research projects both inside and outside Hungary, the author describes the characteristics of the reading of digital texts, adding the results of a study of her own. The paper presents the results of an empirical study whose aim was to explore and measure the text comprehension performance of Hungarian secondary school students, including their reading strategies and reading patterns, in a digital environment. The results show that Hungarian secondary school students’ reading patterns with respect to the reading of digital texts are identical with the results found in the international literature. Digital text reading strategies and steps of navigation through texts are determined by the reader’s aim, the type of reading, and the structural and formal features of the given text.
Keywords: digital literacy, digital text, pattern of reading, reading strategies for digital texts
Specimen lexical maps from the Atlas of Historical Family Names of Hungary
The results of recent research in geographic onomastics give us quite a few opportunities to make earlier linguistic claims more exact. Data bases containing hundreds of thousands of names from early eighteenth-century Hungary (Atlas of Historical Family Names of Hungary, 1715 and 1720) can be used not only for onomastic but also for historical linguistic (word historical, etymological) investigations. The paper uses particular examples – lexemes meaning ‘baker’ (sütő, pék) and the dialect word cibere ‘sour soup’ used as family names – to demonstrate the usefulness of onomastic maps in etymological research. The examples show that geographic onomastics has to be included as a kind of novel aspect among our analytic methods to resolve issues that used to be problematic or unresolved. In drawing conclusions, the testimony of cartograms of geographic onomastics is to be taken into consideration.
Keywords: geographic onomastics, etymology, dialect words, historical family names, Atlas of Historical Family Names of Hungary, early eighteenth-century Hungary, national census (1715, 1720)
A cognitive poetic explanation of Hungarian metrics
The study aims at elaborating a cognitive linguistic explanation for the basis of Hungarian metrics, the cadence. It initiates a new theoretical and interpretive model in the field of cognitive linguistics. The main finding of the research is that cadence is a bipolar structure in cognitive grammatical terms: it has a dependent procedural phonological nature either harmonising with conventional phonological constituency or transforming it. The metrical organisation has an attention-redirection process as a result, and affects the macro-process of meaning construal. This explanation integrates both the rhythmical-musical and prosodic-phonological aspects of metrics; however, it does not assume any tension to exist between them. Rather, it considers these aspects as complementary facets of poetic meaning generation. The paper investigates the concept of cadence in literary studies, establishing a new cognitive poetic perspective on metrics. Then it directs attention to the problems of Hungarian metrical theory. After that theoretical grounding, the study models the symbolic structure of cadence from a phonological and a semantic point of view. The paper illustrates the interpretive efficiency of the proposal with a cognitive poetic metrical analysis of a Hungarian poem by Attila József.
Keywords: Hungarian metrics, cadence, stress pattern, unipolar and bipolar organisation, dependent process morpheme, construal
Szemle
A Nyelvőr hírei