"As humans, we always have a choice. It's just easier and more convenient to go with the flow than to act; and even in a hostile or misunderstanding environment to take on one's own. Especially with the spine softener ingrained in many of us four decades behind us."
Petőfi reaches this conclusion in relation to Pál Pató's behavior
...Although his fathers
would leave him Everything so abundantly,
He never has anything.
But it's not his fault;
He was born Hungarian,
and in his homeland the old motto is:
"Hey, we'll get to that!"
Man tends to absolve himself of his responsibility with this evasion: "I inherited this, I can't do anything about it." But if Pató Pál's carelessness is hereditary, then why were his fathers able to leave everything so abundantly to him? This is as much of a trap for thinking as when LGBTQ heroes recite hereditary gender behavior. They just don't think that if individuals of different sexes are not attracted to each other for this reason, then how can the behavior itself be passed on (to the unborn offspring)?!
As humans, we always have a choice. It's just easier and more convenient to go with the flow than to act; and even in a hostile or misunderstanding environment to take on one's own. Especially with the spine softener ingrained in many of us four decades behind us. This shows in both small and large things. In politics, do we follow an external example, or do we stand up for ourselves? And in science, do we accept entrenched prejudices, a false world view imposed on us - or do we stand by our insights and values? But also in everyday life: we fit in with the mainstream, or, properly evaluating our community traditions, we don't leave ourselves like turning a glove inside out.
Let's take a very ordinary area of human contact: our use of language . I am not referring to the native language that enriches our vocabulary, nor to the constantly developing layered languages. If we let them, they will work in a way that suits the environment. However, let's take into account how the colloquial language - thanks to the means of communication - has a constantly diminishing - and actually unifying - effect. That's why I accept the label of extremism when I say: whoever puts a microphone in front of their mouth or makes a statement to the end of the lens, should know Hungarian. It's true, the challenge is huge. In our world, which lives with falling acceleration, a multitude of melodies of words, structures, and accents fall upon us from the wider world. You can't resist that much. But we don't have to resist, but sift through, shape, sweeten to our mother tongue.
So the most important thing is that every public figure learns to speak intelligibly if possible. Leave word-initial stress and do not adopt the melody of foreign languages. Many people like to emphasize the long vowel, and if this becomes fashionable, the newsreader will use the term "steering wheel" in this way. When reading a written text, the voice must be raised before the comma, but the emphasis must not fall there! A common mistake is warlike speech and a dilapidated vocabulary. And rattling, if not a speech error, is a mannerism.
The rise of the electronic style could be dealt with separately; this is how the bad habit develops that even our children leave out punctuation marks, write everything with lowercase initials, forget accents. the breakdown of the place of the last name.
Hungarian speech usually follows the written image, but not always: see the phenomenon of simile. For most of us, this comes naturally. János Kádár's foreignness was only enhanced by the fact that he could not make the additions clear: út-ján (he said what all Hungarians would pronounce: úttyán). On the other hand, the Hungarian language should be allowed to process the foreign sounds. I feel a bit of German stupidity in the way we insist on the "ch" sound that is not in Hungarian, e.g. in the word "technique". An educated person cannot say this with a "k" in our country. An attractive example of this is the procedure of the English, they certainly say with k; and they usually freely adapt borrowed words. Thus, it is easier for them to pronounce the French word "image" as "image" - and they do so anyway. And we stick to the word "influenza" in a tongue-in-cheek way; it breaks the tongue of the English as well, so it is left with "flu". Or there is the word "hygiene" - its tone is an assassination attempt against the Hungarian sense of language. The effort of slavish adoption betrays the mental distortion that accepts that we belong to the second-class peoples of Europe, and that we seem more civilized to ourselves, the more we resemble the use of language that we think belongs to the "cultured world". How much more selective it is to talk about a "problem" than a "tangle"; to congratulate than to welcome! And of course, the conceptual confusion arises when foreign words are used: solid has nothing to do with the meaning behind it: gentle (but: solid), virulent (not virulent, but: poisonous, infectious), acute (not: serious, but acute , immediate). If I also misunderstood, I say: "I took water from the well."
I tried to organize the confusion of the word usage:
- completely unnecessary foreign words: delegation, petition, coordination, segregation, tolerance, teacher, escalation, proactive - the list of these expands almost daily;
- language breakers: primarily those that violate the rules of the Hungarian language or are alarming to the Hungarian ear (such as the already mentioned hygiene, influenza, but also kleptocracy , oligarchy ) should be avoided. In this case, the major languages simply adapt the word to their own phonemes. Then there are those
- they are confusing. These violate the logic of the Hungarian language: e.g. cleansing (in the sense of extermination), liquidation (instead of destruction), but we also use Hungarian words, e.g. gay (no longer know what "gay with love" means). There are some that have been taken over repeatedly, which has made them ambiguous: medium (person who contacts spirits and means of transmitting news), link (unreliable person and relationship). I'm not dealing here with playful language corruption: king (as an adjective).
The already common redundant use of pronouns: e.g. "Pisti" is actually insulting because it reduces the person to an object.
Of course, foreign words can play a role in clarifying: like means to like. But the Hungarian word in this case has a more general meaning, not only referring to machine feedback. But even in this case, we should act according to the rules of our phonetics and word formation, e.g. in this case: e.g. "I like it" or "I like it" ( forget-me-not ).
physical now supplanted the more advanced Hungarian word "physical" in all fields.
Official estrangement from the common language creates the expression "the population's health status improved" or "refugee application" . The word "matter" here is a noun. (Here and in the following, I will give examples of texts published or spoken on major mass media.) A striking piece of official language distortion: "the area was affected by a flood event" . Many times, the mirror translation causes somersaults in the Hungarian mind, e.g. when we say "relationship" instead of relationship, or we look good with the outlooking look (from where? where?). The opposite of the mirror translation, when we forget the original meaning of the foreign word: "Oleg Anaschenko was liquidated" - was he liquefied so that he became liquid?
Thinking is affected even more strongly than before by the break-in of grammar. Such is the corruption of the possessive conjugation: e.g. "they go their own way" (correctly: his way), "the mayors should talk about it" (correctly: they should speak), "these people have a responsibility" (correctly: their responsibility); and while "the job of the officials" is fine, the beginning of the sentence, "The job of the civil servants is..." would require the form "their job" here.
By now, the redundant , Indo-Germanic use of the verb has become established (it is completely common to use "has the property" instead of "has the property" or "has the property".
In the same way , it should be -structure. Thus, e.g. "You gotta let me go, I'm too crazy for you," they sing on the radio instead of "you gotta let me go."
The verb interest is formed from the word interest . Use of the original: I am interested in this. Today, however, it has been crushed by Anglo-Saxon (business) usage: we are interested in it (as a result of "interested in"). Just as "it's far from his interest" I would rather express it as "not at all".
However, the "beech tree language" indicates an even more serious disorder of thinking. Such as. in a weather report: "cyclonic effects dominate" . I saw it in an apartment ad: "well-priced condominium" apartment. And in the TV movie Süleyman, the Sultan is told that the messenger "asks for your admission" , instead of the messenger asking for admission (in front of you). It may have spread from this series that when entering, the receiving party shouts "You can" instead of "free" - and since then everything starts to become free. However, the most spectacular example from the TV is the announcement that in the hospital "most of the injured were treated with sprains."
One of the characteristics of the Hungarian language is the treatment of pairs and plural phenomena as a unit: my eyes, my ears, my hair. In English, trousers or scissors are used in the plural; in Hungarian, the two trouser legs separately are not a unit, but only part of the whole; likewise, the cutting edges of scissors are not scissors per se (they can only be used as knives). That's why it bothers me when I read something like this in my daily newspaper: "The Council of Europe decision on the integration of Gypsies refers to Hungarian practices as an example to follow." – Hungarian wrist exercises?... (one number is required here!)
In any case, a sign of a thinking disorder is senseless communication, which breeds especially with negative content. E.g.: "new levies will cease" . It's not even "newer" good. Correct: "Further charges will cease." Or: “…increasingly they can't do that.” = in other words: they can do it less and less... The wrong order of words also refers to something like this: "The initiative of yesterday's opposition parties..." (correctly, the order makes sense this way: 1,3,4,2,5).
The bad choice of the conjunction of the subordinate clause "Companies are those WHO can tell" what kind of knowledge they need is spreading rapidly. The "ship that is not suitable" is "companies that are included". But these subjects are not persons!
Saying "at the height of 5 o'clock" . about low and high wages instead of simple small and large . We have the local name Kisbér, but there is no Alacsonybér.
And the mess resulting from inattention, if instead of "I don't want to keep you up" we say: "I don't want to keep you up". in time does not mean in time, but: well in advance.
A striking example of intellectual idleness is the machine translation of one of the European slogans: More Europe!
More? One is enough for me. Rather: bigger, better, stronger. Maybe: more Europeanness.
To keep our language intact in its spirit - in Europe...
Author: András Kelemen
Cover image: Hungarian linguist award (magyarnyelvor.hu)
