Arle R. Lommel and Dr. John Robertson, Linguistics
The fifteenth century was an important time in the development of the Hungarian nation and the Hungarian language. Despite a war with both the Turks and the Austrians, Hungarian culture was undergoing a flowering in the independent principality of Transylvania. This was linked largely to the introduction of printing from Germany. For the first time Hungarian texts could be disseminated widely to a populace that had never seen vernacular literature before. Particularly important in this blossoming was the publication of biblical translations, translations that the Reformers thought would put God into the hands of the people and take away Rome’s doctrinal power.
My project consisted of two parts. The first part was an examination of three Hungarian texts of the Apocalypse of John to see how the availability of Greek biblical texts may have influenced Hungarian religious language. In particular I expected to see heavy Greek influence in calques (loan translations) of terms which had no real Hungarian equivalents. I felt that the reformers would try to move away from the latinate vocabulary of Roman Christianity and instead coin new terms that used Hungarian roots rather than Latin borrowings. For this project I used the three most influential Hungarian biblical texts of the time, Sylvester Janos’ 1541 Vy Teltamentu Magar nelwen (New Testament in the Hungarian tongue), Heltai Gaspar’s 1561 Uj Teltamentum (New Testament) and Karolyi Gaspar’s 1590 Viloli Biblia (Vizsoly Bible). I compared these texts to both Greek koine Apocalypse texts and Latin Vulgate texts to examine their use of loan translations.
The second part of my project involved the creation of a font to represent printed Hungarian in a manner that reflects the distinctive characteristics of late sixteenth century printing. With this font I prepared an electronic version of Karolyi’s text and I have completed the entry of about a third of both Heltai’s and Sylvester’s texts. This portion of my work is still in progress.
In my examination of the use of calques in the three texts I found that the use of Greek texts by Biblical translators had surprisingly little impact on the vocabulary of the Bible. This is most likely due to the fact that the religious vocabulary was relatively fixed in Hungarian before the Reformation. As Hungary had been a largely Catholic nation the Vulgate text of the Bible had been the only accepted version until the Reformation. Thus most translations or coinages of religious terms show a heavily Latin flavor.
Take for example the Hungarian term mindenhato ‘all-mighty’. This is literally ‘all-can-er’ or ‘he who can do all’, a fairly literal rendering of Latin omnipotens. Omnipotens is the Vulgate translation of Greek (pantocrator) ‘wielder of all power’, but it does not really approximate the structure of the Greek word. It is the Latin model which the Hungarian follows. In most instances the Hungarian reformation texts show little break with previous Catholic traditional renderings.
Occasionally a few renderings do show awareness of Greek meanings which can not be attributed to the Latin text or to the religious vocabulary of Latin. For example the modern Hungarian word profetalas ‘prophecy’ is a borrowing of Greek (propheteia) ‘fore-saying’ by way of Latin prophetia. In most instances the Hungarian texts use profitalas but in Revelations 1:3 both Karolyi and Sylvester use jovendomondas ‘a coming (i.e., future) saying, a good translation of the meaning behind the Greek word which clearly shows the influence of the translators’ knowledge of Greek.
Some of the Hungarian terms show a creative, if not too literal, flair for capturing the meaning of their source terms. For example the beast in the Apocalypse is called fenevad. This now archaic term is originally derived from the root fen- ‘gnash’ and vad- ‘wild’, so it is a ‘gnashing wild (animal)’. This term better conveys the meaning of Greek N#/ (therion) ‘(wild) beast’ than does modern bestia, a Latin borrowing. Although fenevad is archaic the continued use of translations based on Karolyi’s translation has kept this term alive, and the closely related term fene ‘gnashing’ is used as a mild curse in modern Hungarian. Another creative term is Karolyi’s use of kepmutalo ‘picture changer’ for hypocrite. This term combines kep ‘picture’, a native Hungarian word, with mutalni ‘to change’, a term borrowed from Latin (compare with English mutate). Since the time of Karolyi this has been changed to kepmutato ‘one who shows pictures (i.e., untrue images)’, one of the few instances which I found in which the Hungarian biblical text moved away from the use of a Latin based term in favor of a native term.
Overall I found that the availability of Greek texts during the early years of the Reformation in Hungary had very little impact on the vocabulary used in the Apocalypse and that most concepts with no native Hungarian terms were still expressed either by Latin loan words or by terms coined on the basis of Latin originals. My original hypothesis that Hungarian reformers would try to use language to distance themselves from the Roman church thus turned out to be largely false.
The creation of a font for early printed Hungarian texts was considerably more difficult than I had anticipated, and is still in progress. Sixteenth century Hungarian printing was characterized by a large number of ligatures (joined characters) such as fb, fl, f3, st, ct, and ft, and the use of the tall swash s (f). The following is a sample of the appearance of Heltai’s text as I have set it:
Bodog az, ‘a ki oluafsa, es bodogoc kik hallyac e prophetalafnac bef36edit… (Rev 1: 3)
An additional problem was that each of the three texts I was dealing with used different orthographic conventions. Karolyi’s and Heltai’s texts were quite similar in their spelling; there is considerable evidence that Karolyi was influenced by the works of Heltai Gaspar — Heltai’s press in Kolozsvar (now Cluj, Romania) was incredibly prolific and influential. Sylvester’s New Testament (the first Hungarian text printed in Hungary) was printed in Transdanubian Hungary instead of Transylvania and used fraktur type imported from Germany instead of the roman type faces Heltai and Sylvester used. Sylvester’s spelling shows a very different approach to Hungarian orthography, as can be seen by comparing his New Testament title, Vy Teftamentu Magar nelwen, with Karolyi’s title WY Teftamema…Magyar Nyelsere forditotta.
My final conclusion is that Latin (instead of Greek) continued to have a strong influence in Hungarian religious vocabulary during the Reformation, at least as seen in the Apocalypse of John, despite the Reformation’s emphasis on the use of the vernacular tongues of each land. I think this can be traced to two main reasons: first, the Latin church vocabulary was well ingrained in Hungarian, despite the relatively short time of contact (less than five hundred years) between Hungarian and Latin. Second, the majority of Hungarians remained Catholic so the reformers had to use the idiom the Catholic population was used to. Despite this the three Biblical translations I used showed a practical bent and used native terms for those occasional terms which could be better expressed without use of latinate terms.
References
- Molnar, Nandor. 1985. The Calques of Greek Origin in the Most Ancient Old Slavic Gospel Texts, Akademiai Kiado, Budapest.