HUNGARIAN STUDIES 5. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1989]

István Margócsy: Some Aspects of Hungarian Neology

SOME ASPECTS OF HUNGARIAN NEOLOGY ISTVÁN MARGÓCSY Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Budapest The Hungarian language reform that took place in the first two decades of the 19th century constitutes the first, and one of the most important, events in the intellectual history of modern Hungarian culture. Nevertheless, it yet received a satisfactory interpretation, in spite of many and detailed learned descriptions. Up until now scholars have usually tried to approach the phenomenon either through political history (or rather, through the history of ideas influenced by political history), or through linguistics, ignoring questions of ideology, the two branches of science bearing little relationship to each other. As such descriptions have not been capable of representing the complex character of the movement, their results are not only unsatisfactory, but, in a very natural way, almost contradictory, too. Some of the followers of the purely historical description evaluated the movement very positively (the ground of their appraisal being that in a politically rather "quiet" period only this polemic could motivate a greater part of the nation's population, the national characteristics of reasoning got gaining importance in this discussion). Others present the whole language reform as a conservative phenomenon and treat it as a nationalist manifestation of exclusively national interest. They start from the fact that the great debate achieved no political results in spite of the great stir, and did not even intend to achieve such results. The linguistic approach to the chain of events is also unsatisfactory because it focuses only on certain linguistic phenomena (e.g. the growth of the word-stock, stylistic changes, etc.), and only emphasized the practical side of the movement, without attempting to interpret its ideological components within the scope of usage. Hungarian neology, however, deserves special attention as an act in the history of ideas. On the one hand, it exceeded the standardizing procedures taking place in all other European literary languages in magnitude and proportions, and, on the other hand, its course of events created so wide a social stir, that it had some significance beyond the limits of general linguistic interest, in contrast with other European varieties of linguistic standardization. The cause of this particular Hungarian phenomenon might be sought in the intersection of two different courses of development. In the language reform movement two trends in the history of ideas met and mixed, which moved independently from each other in other European cultures, if they appeared in them at all. At approximately the same time emerged both a new concept of the nation, which tried to outline the borders of the nation by the borders of language, and a new concept of literature, which secured entirely different and new rights and possibilities for the writer in the usage of language. Both ideological phenomena were formulated within the

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