Linguistic Bulletins

Short etymologies – the origin of five Hungarian words previously classified as of unknown provenance

Gergely Antal M. — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The digitalized version of UEW, Uralonet, is a useful tool both as a database and as a search engine when it comes to finding new Hungarian or other Uralic etymologies, and as such, it has been used in my previous etymological research. In this paper, I present four dialectal or obsolete Hungarian words and one commonly used one that were all classified as of unknown or uncertain origin before, now showing their potential Uralic cognates with the help of Uralonet. The root of the dialectal word gyóta ‘forest; grazing area in a forest’ seems to be cognate with words listed under U *jotka ‘Zwischenraum, Mitte’ (№ 193). The root of the obsolete word hatak ‘stomach, belly’ is very likely to be explainable from U *koktɜ (? *koptɜ) ‘intestine; any cavernous inner organ’ (based on № 1327), alongside Mordvinic, Mansi, and Selkup cognates. The obsolete word héla ‘Bromus; weedy area’ can be related to cognates of FW *kalke ‘Haar; Halm, Achel’ (№ 1265), though phonologically this etymology is still a bit uncertain. The verb stem hever- and its newly suggested Ob-Ugric cognates could be questionably part of the word family under U? *kȣrŋa- ‘to be washed upon shore, to land; to drift, to float on water’ (based on № 361). The root of dialectal szilke ‘jar with a wide mouth’ and Mansi сулья ‘бутылка’ seems to probably go back to U *śulɜ ‘pot, trough’ (based on UEW № 982), with inexplicable derivation for the Hungarian word.

Challenges for the creation of a Komi-Permyak corpus: Verbs and adjectives

Ditta Szabó, Nikolett F. Gulyás, Szilvia Németh — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 18:24:21 +0000

The paper reports on the current steps in the creation of a new corpus of written Komi-Permyak under grant number NKFIH FK 143242. The texts of the corpus are annotated by our research group using the FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) software by pre-labelling sentences with the built-in general-purpose morphological parser of the software and manually checking the resulting machine-generated suggestions. As an output of the project, we will make the FLEx file available for other researchers to help them annotate their own texts. In order to use the general parser, we need to prepare it for the Komi-Permyak language system, i.e. we need to formalize Komi-Permyak morphology according to the needs of the software. After describing the basic principles of the parser, the paper presents some concrete examples of the challenges of this process in relation to adjectives and verbs.

The use of elme ‘mind’ in Old Hungarian to mean ‘memory’

Réka Szabó — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 18:55:34 +0000

This study demonstrates the existence of the meaning ‘memory’ for the word elme in Old Hungarian. This meaning surfaced as a “by-product” of a broader research project. Originally, the focus of the project was on the conceptualization of the term ELME from the oldest records to the present day. To reconstruct the conceptualization process, I collected all Old Hungarian data of the word elme from the Hungarian Generative Historical Syntax corpus. From these data, it is evident that we can account for the meanings ‘memory’, ‘attention’ and ‘conception, idea’, of which this paper discusses the meaning ‘memory’. It should be emphasized that this meaning of the word elme is currently part of the standard language and is included in modern comprehensive dictionaries, but it is not found in historical-etymological dictionaries. However, it is present in several old dictionaries of Hungarian. Therefore, the question is not whether such a meaning ever existed, but how far back its documentation extends and when it began to occupy its place in the meaning structure.

Interchangeability and synonymy relationships across meanings of verbs that are synonymous (also) in their literal meanings

Éva Hrenek — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 19:27:55 +0000

In my case study, I analyze the meanings of three verbs, namely szúr ‘pierce’, bök ‘poke’, and döf ‘stab’. The focus is on verb synonymy, specifically the type where verbs within the same synonym group share closely related meanings. My research is based on corpus data from the Hungarian National Corpus 2 (MNSZ2). It is grounded in the componential semantics of organic linguistic theory, which emphasizes the significance of meaning components in metaphorization processes (Zsilka 1978a). Additionally, frequency studies are conducted using the available corpus data to link the results of qualitative meaning analyses with frequency data. The interpretation of the findings also draws upon relevant principles from functional cognitive linguistics (cf. e.g. Dancygier (ed.) 2017).

The primary objective of this research is to enhance our understanding of the relationship between interchangeability and verbal synonymy. Furthermore, it seeks to investigate how frequency data can be integrated into the predominantly qualitative analysis-based approach outlined in this article.

Szinte ‘almost’, szintén ‘also’, éppen ‘exactly’, majd ‘almost’: Functional variation and change in Middle Hungarian registers

Mónika Varga — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 20:14:16 +0000

In standard Modern Hungarian, the elements szinte and szintén have distinct meanings (‘almost’ and ‘also’, respectively) despite their common origin of szín ‘color, view, external appearance’. However, between the 16th and 18th centuries,
szinte and szintén were used as variants, even expressing meanings like ‘spot on’, ’indeed’ or ‘just, really’ which are no longer active (and are understudied as well). So far, the approximator ‘almost’ vs. intensifier or even certainty meaning of szinte and szintén was mostly inferred from the broader context and the co-text, lacking objective structural clues. The present paper involves collocational analysis and comparison of functional variants of szinte ~ szintén from the period in order to provide additional evidence for a better understanding of the structural and semantic characteristics of some of the diverse semantic-pragmatic (sub-)categories explored earlier. The analysis also deals with the distribution of the variants according to sub-periods and text types with diverse register characteristics.

Experimental research in Hungarian articulatory phonetics from the beginnings to the present

Alexandra Markó, Tekla Etelka Gráczi, Kornélia Juhász, Andrea Deme — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:31:47 +0000

The paper focuses on the history of Hungarian articulatory phonetic experiments, providing an overview of the major trends, technological background and main results. The 140-year history of articulatory experiments related to Hungarian is presented in three major periods. The boundaries of the periods are marked by significant milestones and/or several-year-long gaps due to the change of the historical-political background. The first period from 1887 until the end of World War II is the era of sporadic studies focusing on the speech sound inventories of several varieties. The second period during the era of the Hungarian People’s Republic shows involvement of new instruments and a larger number of speakers. In the second part of this period the demand for exhaustive documentation of standard Hungarian is in the focus due to the new genre of atlas/album of speech sounds. The third period after the second millennium opened the floor for new research questions and paradigms via availability of modern equipment such as electromagnetic articulography, ultrasound tongue imaging or electroglottography.

Strategies in inner speech

Zoltán Bánréti, Bálint József Ugrin — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 10:17:13 +0000

This paper presents the results obtained from a questionnaire-based research project on inner speech, primarily focusing on its Hungarian adaptation involving 1675 participants. The response patterns of individuals to the questionnaire items are presented by analyzing the factors formed by the items. These analyses show the classes of responses triggered by the items along a scale ranging from never, has occurred before, sometimes, often, to always. Beyond analyzing response patterns, by uncovering variances within the sample, we identified respondent groups – i.e., response strategies – that reflect variations in individuals’ experiences regarding the nature of their inner speech.

Five main strategies were identified, which reflect individuals’ experiences of inner speech across groups of items: the Uncontrolled, Dialogic-Sentence, Monologic-Sentence, Monologic-Condensed and Hesitant strategies. These strategies may indicate reflections on inner speech and may suggest that inner speech is a simulation model of external speech, involving internal sensorimotor activities.

Nyina Alekszejevna Liszkova (1944–2024)

Márta Csepregi — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 08:35:47 +0000

Jevdokija Andrejevna Nyomiszova (1936–2024)

Mária Sipos — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 08:33:10 +0000

Péter Simoncsics (comp.), Parallel lives: On the professional journeys of Péter Hajdú (1923–2002) and Robert Austerlitz (1923–1994)

Tamás Janurik — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 08:37:51 +0000

Sándor Maticsák, Found words: The Finno-Ugric material collected in the Volga–Kama region during the Orenburg Expedition (1768–1774)

János Pusztay — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 08:40:46 +0000

Ferenc Gregor, Hungarian elements in Slovakian

István Vig — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Judit Baranyiné Kóczy – Katalin Sipőcz (eds), Embodiment in cross-linguistic studies: The ‘heart’

Lilla Petronella Szabó — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 08:51:07 +0000