You don't have to be a writer to live under the spell of the ancient power and limitless beauty of the Hungarian language.
"You can really forget your mother tongue. But not only abroad, in the dominant atmosphere of foreign languages or in the neighborhood - you can forget it here at home as well. If we don't use it for what it is meant for, the language withers. If we don't express the truth with her, and if we don't entrust her with our most urgent, burning dreams, she withers away, like women living without love" - Sándor Csoóri.
I start my writing with a quote, because as a kind of literary ceremony I like to invoke our greats who lived under the spell of the Hungarian language. You don't have to be a writer to live under the spell of the ancient power and limitless beauty of the Hungarian language. If someone ponders a word even for a moment, then separates it from his everyday speech and says it over and over again, he will hear its ancient music, which pulsates through time from the depths of centuries and millennia. It's an intoxicating feeling. There are words in which I hear the screeching of the devil's chariot in the wilderness, and there are also words in which the stone music of forest streams; one of my favorite words is autumn (or winter, as the csangó poet Demeter Lakatos wrote and said). As a writer, I love the Hungarian language, I am obsessed with it, but I don't sacrifice to it in a secret church, but in my everyday speech, when I talk to my son, write, or talk to my friend over a glass of wine. The Hungarian language is the only country to which I can escape, the only country in which I can build the worlds I dream of and put into words the nightmarish images that torment my mind.
And yes, I believe that anyone who knows Hungarian has a devil.
As a Hungarian born across the border, I feel the leaden weight of Sándor Csoóri's words, and I can testify that the language withers in the prevailing atmosphere of foreign languages. Or bloom. The matter is decided in the head. In my mind, the word Hungarian merged with the feeling and ideal of freedom and became the mother tongue of freedom. But after I moved to Budapest, I realized that even in today's Hungary, we can forget our mother tongue, and strangely enough, we can forget it most easily at home. We don't care about our mother tongue, we neglect it, because we believe that it is our right from birth, our basic right, so it is an unforgettable ability that cannot be erased from our cells or torn from our mouths.
It's not, it's just as much a parental inheritance as anything else we can squander.
That is why it hurts me so much that our language is deteriorating, and I was shocked when I read the article entitled Nem baj a feeling, but that's why you would have morning sickness, published on Index, in which the linguist Zsófia Ludányi claimed, among other things, that "language deterioration is not a concept that can be interpreted scientifically, it is not possible to classify new language forms and language changes in this way".
This is like a doctor saying that disease is a physiologically uninterpretable concept, because it is not possible to classify changes in organs and cells in this way. The language does deteriorate, it rots from the inside, when, for example, it is deliberately disrupted through commercial TV channels and world wide web media. Unfortunately, Hungarian news portals use Google Translate to "explain" a lot of their articles, and these mostly turn out to be misleading mirror translations, which are full of foreign structures. And, of course, external pests also gnaw at the root of the tongue.
On the other hand, I agree with the researcher that language lives, pulsates, develops and changes, some words wear out, and sometimes after centuries they rise from their ashes, come to life with a new meaning, are resurrected; or they are damned forever and new ones arise in their place. At the end of the 19th century, the word "lady" was considered old-fashioned and out of fashion, Dezső Kosztolányi called it our "magnificent, Mongolian-flavored" word, and today we would not even think of omitting it from our everyday conversation. The language works as a living organism, sometimes it takes in loanwords, and they take root or remain foreign bodies, which are expelled over time by the healthy organism of the language itself.
But this requires a healthy immune system and a healthy sense of language. And we lack that.
Moreover, the Hungarian language has a fairly conservative structure, it does not change as rapidly as Zsófia Ludányi suggests; or why did I almost completely understand the 12th century Death Oration, our first coherent linguistic memory? Of course, a Hungarian who has learned the language of commercial TV channels may complain that he doesn't understand at all, but in fact he does, he just doesn't want to understand. In any case, in a more orderly village, they will surely understand, on the border here and beyond; and few speakers of Western languages can boast of understanding a medieval version of their language.
Our language has started to deteriorate rapidly in recent decades. And it is worrisome, because for centuries it moaned about the primacy of the Germanic language, and yet it remained Hungarian at its core; the Russian influence disappeared from it almost without a trace (on the one hand, on the other hand, it still retains a faint memory), but the threat of alterity never threatened Hungarian speakers as fiercely as the destructive influence of vulgar English threatens in today's globalized world. From all corners of the world and from all smart devices, the foreign language form, which conveys the foreign point of view, is radiating, and this incessant attack challenges even the most sophisticated language sense. Foreign words are not the most dangerous, but patterns of foreign language structures that are insidiously built into our consciousness, which we unconsciously acquire and begin to use in our everyday speech without noticing. To name just a few: What I like now is that (correctly: What I like most is that...); We didn't see this coming - We didn't see this coming (correctly: We didn't expect this), He is the one I am waiting for - It is he, whom I am waiting for (correctly: I am waiting for him) - and the rest.
Instead of this permissive, trendy attitude - neither meat nor fish in Hungarian - the linguists could really carry around the bloody sword and fight against the deterioration of the language and other evils, because no one will fight for correct Hungarianness for them and for us, because the Hungarian language is our it is our common cause, it concerns only us in the world and we are the only ones interested in its fate. Although I understand that nowadays it is necessary to take a postmodern, value-sterile position, so that someone does not call us snakes and frogs for daring to believe in something as researchers, but I consider such behavior to be morally unacceptable. I recommend that they take the example of their linguist colleague Manó Kertész (1882–1942), because he not only respected but also passionately loved the Hungarian language, the subject of his research. Let's see how Mánó Kertész begins one of his chapters on peasant life, authenticated with a sea of footnotes, in his book Proverbs, in which he examines the origin of our vocabulary and sayings:
The fate of the Hungarian land is our fate; the abundance or scarcity of our wheat, the thriving breeding or stunting of our studs, foals, and herds: the prosperity or abject poverty of all of us. It belongs to all of us - both those who roam the land and those who, separated from the land, seek their prosperity with other work of their hands, brains and hearts. This earth is the nourishment of our body, but also the noble joy of our right side. The entire history of a thousand years of ups and downs has forged the chains connecting the Hungarian soul and the Hungarian land so strongly that these chains could not be stronger. Our language, too, in that phase of its history that is almost before our eyes due to the abundance of our memories, sends its strongest roots to the Hungarian soil, and from here its most beautiful flowers sprout. […]
And after these beautiful words, he begins his extremely scientific dissertation. It can be so.
It is an even more interesting phenomenon that, among the popular experts in our public life, the security policy expert Robert C. Castel, born in Arad, speaks in the most shrewd way, snappily and with Hungarian fervor. He has been living in Israel for decades. Nowadays, he gives the Hungarians an example of a sense of language and a form of bravery, let's appreciate him for that. So, as I mentioned, I think it is much more dangerous that Hungarian structures and linguistic solutions are pushed back, for example, recently they prefer to say "cannot be saved" or "cannot be tolerated" - instead of inexcusable and intolerable. The conquest of foreign words is not without danger either, but the latter are mostly fashion phenomena, and the fashionable expressions of the previous generation are laughed at by the next generation, or who says "king" or "fat" these days?
And as for the vocabulary... in the cited article, the linguist said that:
"word borrowing is a natural phenomenon, the adoption of foreign words is one of the most productive ways of expanding the vocabulary in Hungarian (and in many other languages as well), so there is no question that this would endanger the Hungarian language. There can also be a difference in meaning, for example feeling is not the same as feeling. Or even a Hungarian equivalent does not develop, for example the words spoiler or bullying do not (yet) have a Hungarian equivalent. Foreign words are linguistically equivalent to their counterparts of non-foreign origin, i.e. they are no worse than them."
I dispute that foreign words are linguistically equivalent to native words. The language can be democratic from the inside, but if we immediately give equal rights to all newcomers, sooner or later this damn great democracy will turn into a dictatorship of foreigners. I think that in the discussion of foreign and Hungarian words, instead of Zsófia Ludányi, we should listen to Dezső Kosztolányi, one of the most experienced connoisseurs of the Hungarian language. According to Kosztolányi's belief, the foreign word usually usurps the place of dozens of Hungarian words in the sentence, and it also displaces words with which we could express ourselves in a much more nuanced way:
"There are sometimes ten Hungarian words for a foreign word, which indicates a finer nuance of the desired concept. Why should I say intelligent, when I can say that he is intelligent, intelligent, educated, initiated, has found his feet, and why should I talk about a pedantic person, when I know that he is a hair-splitter, scumbag, unqualified, self-important, who also looks for lumps in his poop?"
Kosztolányi explains in the writings of the linguist that there must be spiritual reasons for our use of words, for example, if we always use foreign words, then in fact - God sees our soul - we want to be important, or we are lazy, indifferent; perhaps we have other, more dishonest intentions, see how the puliska became "polenta" in restaurants recently, and how its price increased as a result, or how the abalone was Frenchized into "souvidalte".
In Hungarian, everything can be expressed more simply and sparingly, in the writings of the language teacher István Tótfalusi, he warns the readers that bad sentences and convoluted foreign structures are vague and deliberately ambiguous, because this way the speaker can avoid responsibility (see "failed", "broken" or "I messed up instead of ") - so let's not think that in most cases it's just laziness; the spoilers want to turn us into horses.
What is the solution?
Let's be boldly Hungarian. Let's think about what the csangos of Szabofalv, Moldavia, did when they first saw a buzzing motorcycle. In the thirties of the last century, the motorcycle first entered the villages of Northern Csángó, which had been separated from the Hungarian language bloc in the Middle Ages, and since they did not know what it was called, they named it. Their sound sense of language told them to name him with a sound-imitating word, "tortorgtatto" because of his strong, strange voice.
Isn't it gorgeous? If they succeeded, what are we waiting for?
For linguists, politicians, puppeteers? Let's start bravely, one by one, otherwise the world around us will become unexplainable. In Budapest, I hardly see Hungarian signs or Hungarian company signs anymore. The new housing estates also have fashionable, English names, and this unconsciously affects our use of language, because it suggests that only what is foreign is valuable. Let's not delay, let's not give in to the small things of life, for example, I myself have been calling a flash drive a false tooth for a long time (based on a simple analogy: it carries knowledge and information, and false teeth and scientists are sometimes born with teeth). We can preserve our traditions not only through folk dance, equestrian archery or handicrafts, but also through language cultivation. The Hungarian language itself is "artificial intelligence", it is built on a huge database of knowledge, there is a lot of knowledge in our simplest words, idiomatic expressions, sayings, and through our language we can use an "algorithm" that allows us to relive the past and anticipate the future with every word we say. . We can all be custodians of our language, believe me, it's fun for a penny, and you don't even need boots and a bow.
The author is a Ferenc Herczeg award-winning writer, a senior staff member of the Magyar Demokrata weekly.
Featured image: elte.hu
