Bonum matutinum, domine.

Count Szechenyi was briefly mentioned here back in 2002 when mark said he “was personally responsible for cutting the number of respect-related forms of address down from five to three”; now (courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti) we get a more sweeping claim by Priscilla Smith Robertson in Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton University Press, 1952):

In the period before 1848, the outstanding Hungarian was, undoubtedly, Count Stephen Szechenyi, who spent his handsome fortune and considerable talents to build up modern institutions in his country. He traveled extensively in Western Europe and in England, where he was well-known and got most of his ideas; but it was easier for the west to understand the practical changes he wrought than the psychological ones which were just as important in his eyes. Wishing to force his country to become both proud and rich, he appealed to every motive among his countrymen—public spirit, private gain, patriotism, the wish to be in fashion, the spirit of fun, the sense of noblesse oblige.

He first struck the public eye in 1825 by offering to give a year’s income to help endow an academy for the Hungarian language. This, interestingly enough, seemed the prime step toward making a modern nation, and it was largely owing to his efforts that Hungarian came back to the lips of his countrymen. The gentry had been gradually forgetting it, talking German in Vienna, often using Slovak to their peasants, and, odd as it seems, Latin in their Diet. In some parts Latin was a general language of communication. Dr. Tkalac remembered his Croatian mother using it in her household (though this was more unusual in a woman than a man) and other observers reported the strange effect of hearing a nineteenth-century peasant greet his landlord, “Bonum matutinum, domine.” Szechenyi raged at this decay of his mother tongue. His appeals succeeded so well that in 1847, for the first time in history, the Diet members spoke Hungarian, even though it still came haltingly to some lords’ tongues.

Someone more familiar with the history of Hungarian than I will have to judge the truth of the claim that it was thanks to Szechenyi that it “came back to the lips of his countrymen.”

Comments

  1. Trond Engen says

    I now wonder how widespread Slovak was among peasants in Hungary.

  2. J.W. Brewer says

    @Trond: well, at a minimum pretty widespread among the parts of Hungary that are now the territory of the separate nation-state of Slovakia …

    I can see Magyar-nationalists trying to push back against the dominance of German, but why take it out on poor Latin?

  3. These maps give a good idea of the ethno-linguistic makeup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire:

    https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=linguistc+map+austria+hungary

  4. Dictatortot says

    Irony alert: Latin could now use its own Count Szechenyi.

  5. Someone more familiar with the history of Hungarian than I will have to judge the truth of the claim that it was thanks to Szechenyi that it “came back to the lips of his countrymen.”
    I’m no expert in Hungarian history, but I doubt that one man single-handedly was responsible – promoting the national language was a main cultural trend everywhere in 19th century Europe, so what I think is that at most the Count gave a mighty push to a development that would have happened without him as well.

  6. Yes, that’s what I suppose as well.

  7. The Magyarization article on wikipedia states that Latin was the official language in the Hungarian diet until 1784, and agsin 1790-1844. Hungarian must’ve become official in 1844.

    Magyarization arose as a response to Joseph II’s efforts to modernise, centralise and Germanise the Habsburg monarchy. Instead it ended up being a Hungarian copy of Joseph II’s policy, with Magyar being imposed (with greater or lesser success) on everyone living in the lands of St Stephen’s Crown. Thankfully, since Croatia was a separate kingdom with its own parliament and government it was able to have a separate linguistic policy, persisting first with Latin, and from 1847, Croatian finally became official in the Parliament.

    Croatian estates (nobility and burghers) also had a tradition of using Latin in everyday speech.

  8. J.W. Brewer says

    Some deadpan narrative (from another wiki article): “Hungarians perceived Joseph’s language reform as German cultural hegemony, and they reacted by insisting on the right to use their own tongue. As a result, Hungarian lesser nobles sparked a renaissance of the Hungarian language and culture, and a cult of national dance and costume flourished. … The Hungarian national reawakening subsequently triggered national revivals among the Slovak, Romanian, Serbian, and Croatian minorities within Hungary and Transylvania, who felt threatened by both German and Hungarian cultural hegemony.”

    But perhaps more relevantly to one of the points above: In the 18th century “[u]nder Charles and Maria Theresa, Hungary experienced further economic decline. Centuries of Ottoman occupation and war had reduced Hungary’s population drastically, and large parts of the country’s southern half were almost deserted. A labor shortage developed …. In response, the Habsburgs began to colonize Hungary with large numbers of peasants from all over Europe, especially Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians, and Germans.” So you ended up for a while with plenty of internal-immigrant Slovak-speaking peasants living down around the Banat and the Vojvodina etc. etc., nowhere near the contiguous Slovak-speaking-majority region up north that those pretty maps based on later census data show. To what extent the descendants of those far-flung Slovaks got Magyarized over the course of the 19th century versus just ethnically cleansed in the 20th century is not clear to me.

  9. The Resurrection of Hungary is a founding text of Sinn Féin and points to Szechenyi et al as a model for Irish nationalism. While Griffith’s eccentric text gave good space to the language question, Irish history schoolbooks synopsise the model as abstentionism.

  10. J.W. Brewer says

    Ah, but what language did Griffith write in to tell the Irish about the Hungarian model? Not Gaelic, and not even Latin!

  11. David Marjanović says

    To what extent the descendants of those far-flung Slovaks got Magyarized over the course of the 19th century versus just ethnically cleansed in the 20th century is not clear to me.

    Ah, some are still there in the Vojvodina, enough to have their language officially recognized there (among a pretty long list of others).

  12. J.W. Brewer says

    I suppose it helped that post-Trianon Hungary lost control of the Vojvodina to an officially multi-lingual new polity and that Slovak irredentism/separatism probably ranked pretty low on the list of ethnically-linked threats to national unity perceived by the various Yugoslav governments over time.

  13. David Marjanović says

    Of course.

    Only the Germans are gone from Vojvodina – but there are still some in southeastern modern Hungary.

  14. the first two volumes of patrick leigh fermor’s travelogue of his 1933 trip from the hook of holland to constantinople are a pretty fascinating window into the post-hapsburg linguistic situation. he finds peasants and smallholders from the austrian/hungarian/czechoslovak tripoint through oltenia speaking magyar, slovak, romanian, german, and turkish (and maybe bulgarian, croatian, and serbian – it’s been a few years since i read the second part) on a town-by-town / valley-by-valley basis, with romanes/romani and yiddish speakers throughout. his account makes it very clear how much the territorialization of languages in central & eastern europe was a product of WWII and the postwar expulsions and assimilation policies (which then get rewritten as the ‘natural’ course of National Destiny and projected backward a century as putative victories of whichever habsburg-era nationalists a given state decided to canonize*).

    .
    * i’d guess that comparing central & eastern european countries’ highschool textbooks and popular atlases from 1930 and 1950 would give basically the same narrative of National Revival [sic], but choose different protagonists during the Springtime of Nation(alism)s as its True Prophets.

  15. David Eddyshaw says

    Szechenyi’s son Ödön was an interesting fellow too, by the look of it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96d%C3%B6n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi

    (Unfortunately the latter part of this seems to have been GT-mangled out of Magyar …

    The Turkish-Greek War, then the First World War and Trianon wore it, but found joy in the fire department. Even in his old age, he went out to the fires, directing the vaccination. He was esteemed by the alternating Turkish sultans

    Still, not everyone has it in him to be esteemed by the alternating Turkish sultans.)

  16. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    Maybe an older version of Google Translate, but the current version does better. The relevant passage seems to be this:

    A török–görög háború, majd az első világháború és Trianon megviselte, de örömét lelte a tűzoltószolgálatban. Idős korában is kijárt a tüzekhez, irányította az oltást. Az egymást váltó török szultánok megbecsülték, több kitüntetést, rangot kapott, állítólag ő volt az első keresztény, aki a pasa címet úgy kapta meg, hogy nem kellett hitét elhagyva a muzulmán hitre áttérnie. Ödön pasa a legnagyobb rangú tábornokok közé tartozott.

    which Google Translate renders as follows:

    The Turkish-Greek war, then the First World War and Trianon took a toll on him, but he found joy in the fire service. Even in his old age, he went to the fires and managed the extinguishing. He was respected by the successive Turkish sultans, he received several awards and ranks, he is said to be the first Christian to receive the title of Pasha without having to abandon his faith and convert to Islam. Ödön Pasha was one of the highest-ranking generals.

    Maybe not the most elegant piece of English I’ve seen, but intelligible.

    We’re having a rash of major fires in France at the moment, but no one has suggestion vaccination as the remedy.

  17. J.W. Brewer says

    I was reading Fermor earlier this year and was struck by the same thing rozele mentions – and the same is true in the third volume where he has gone beyond territory that was ever Hapsburg-ruled, yet Bulgaria in 1934 is still full of plenty of folks whose L1 is not Bulgarian. I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me but did — the point I guess is that while 1918 marked the conceptual/theoretical triumph of the new-fangled idea of replacing creaky-old multi-lingual/multi-ethnic empires with new nation-states based on ethnolinguistic/chauvinist nationalism, the actual ethnolinguistic facts on the ground did not change particularly quickly in most places (massive reciprocal ethnic cleansing between Greece and Turkey would be a notable exception), and it was the even-more-brutal post-WW2 settlement that finally made the facts on the ground conform more closely to the concept/theory of 1918.

  18. J.W. Brewer says

    (I should perhaps clarify that the “post-WW2 settlement” as I meant it as shorthand certainly also includes various brutal alterations of local ethnolinguistic facts-on-the-ground that had already occurred during the war …)

  19. I mean, in actual fact neither world war ended when the various peace treaties were signed; people went on killing each other for years.

  20. “while 1918 marked the conceptual/theoretical triumph of the new-fangled idea of replacing creaky-old multi-lingual/multi-ethnic empires with new nation-states based on ethnolinguistic/chauvinist nationalism, the actual ethnolinguistic facts on the ground did not change particularly quickly in most places (massive reciprocal ethnic cleansing between Greece and Turkey would be a notable exception),”

    After World War One, at least in Poland and Lithuania, facts on the ground did change for the Jews, who in the Russian Empire had been one minority among many others whereas now they were by far the largest minority (in Poland and Lithuania) and thus easily became the new targets of Polish and Lithuanian extreme nationalists (who before the war had taken the Russians as their targets).

    See the history of the Jews in Poland and Lithuania during the interbellum.

  21. I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean that nothing changed but that where people lived didn’t (by and large) change. That has nothing to do with persecution (which was not new anyway in either place).

  22. J.W. Brewer says

    @M, that’s an entirely fair point re how changes of national borders could lead to changes in alliances/coalitions/rivalries/enmities even if the same sorts of folks were living in the same geographical locations. Put another way, the *gap* between the 1918 ideal of ethnically homogenized nation-states and the leftover-from-ancien-regime demographic reality created a tension that could lead to various difficulties even before the gap was forcibly closed through barbarity.

  23. @ J. W. Brewer. Agreed.

  24. After World War One, at least in Poland and Lithuania, facts on the ground did change for the Jews, who in the Russian Empire had been one minority among many others whereas now they were by far the largest minority (in Poland and Lithuania) and thus easily became the new targets of Polish and Lithuanian nationalists (who before the war had taken the Russians as their targets).

    That is an interesting point. Arguably this was true in Germany as well. Before World War One Germany had a substantial Polish minority (in the Ruhr as well as eastern Germany) as well as a smaller French speaking minority in Alsace. The Jewish minority was German speaking and generally viewed as more loyal to the Kaiser and the German cultural world than the Slavs or the French. After the war the Jewish minority was left exposed as the sole internal “threat” to German unity. In the many discussions of the history of German anti-Semitism I have read, I don’t recall ever seeing this point addressed explicitly.

  25. J.W. Brewer says

    FWIW, I am advised by wikipedia that the immigrant mother of my wonderful Slovak-American college teacher (as well as quite eminent scholar in his field of the history of Christian theology and things adjacent thereto), the late Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006), was one of the from-the-Vojvodina sort of Slovaks.

  26. @Vanya

    There were still Slavs in interwar Germany, albeit in lesser numbers than the Jewish minority.

    Most notably: the Sorbs aka Lusatians, who were subject to intense germanisation and discrimination.

  27. @M

    Ethnic cleansing c 1918:

    There was massive cleansing in southern areas of Serbia and parts of Montenegro.

    It started just before WW1 in the aftermath of the Second Balkan War in regions ‘liberated’ from Turkey. The Muslim population was expropriated and expelled. This was halted because of WW1, but proceeded at a fast pace after 1918.

    The muslim Albanians of Kosovo suffered greatly, with many being massacred or left landless, while politically suitable colonists were given subsidies to settle on their land.

  28. And the even earlier expulsion of Bulgarians from what is now Northern Greece after the Second Balkan war. The Greeks of the Black Sea coast mostly decided to stay in Bulgaria, despite the offer of population exchange. The homes of the expulsed Bulgarians were later given to Anatolian Greeks in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

  29. And there’s also the Muslim Bulgarian speakers of the northern Aegean hinterland, who were stranded on either side of the border during the cold war, who were migratory shepherds. The Greek state teaches them, in schools, that their language is a dialect of Greek. I’m not joking.

  30. David Eddyshaw says

    During the Japanese occupation of Korea, Japanese scholars who not only should have known better, but did know better, maintained that Korean was a dialect of Japanese.

  31. John Cowan says

    Un armey un flot, no?

  32. David Eddyshaw says

    Indeed.

  33. You overstated a bit Széchenyi’s effect on the language. The MTA (Hungarian academy of sciences) was a great thing, and Széchenyi was a real statesman. But there were earlier, long lasting pursuits to modernize the language.

    The Hungarian language reform – called nyelvújítás, google it and let DeepL run free – started with Ferenc Kazinczy. Some of their neologisms live on, some are only mentioned as a joke. But the real effect was to reuse suffixes and affixes like there’s no tomorrow. Thus we got irat (means document, and yes there’s the dokumentum word too in hungarian) from the verb ír (to write).

    This may serve as a starting point.

    And of course the Hungarian gentry was a real special kind of conservative scum mostly. I’m an offspring of Rusyn peasants, and as such a Hungarian 😀 so I have the right to call them that, I think.

  34. Thanks, and I have no problem with calling the gentry names!

  35. David Marjanović says

    Some of their neologisms live on, some are only mentioned as a joke.

    Same in German: since the 18th century there’ve been a few waves of neologisms, of which some caught on and some were promptly forgotten (a few of the latter are indeed recurrent jokes among language nerds). The difference is that no academy was involved, only self-proclaimed reformers and in one case the railway company.

    This may serve as a starting point.

    …not quite, because you managed to squeeze two URLs into a single link: mek.niif.hu and a PDF on ResearchGate about “the Hungarian language reform in European comparison”.

  36. An interesting counterfactual would be what if Josef II had decided to make Latin the administrative and educational language of the Habsburg Empire? Could he have succeeded, and if so would Czech, Slovak and Hungarian have all disappeared as literary languages? Would there have been tremendous opposition from the German speaking nobility? Maybe Latin could have unified the Habsburg domains creating a very different 19th century.

  37. A different history altogether! Clearly a Habsburg empire unified by Latin would have attracted the world’s best minds and dominated Europe; people from New York to Tokyo would have flocked to Vienna to absorb the latest trends in art and scientific discoveries, there would have been no world wars, and the world would be flourishing under the benign rule of Franz Josef VI.

  38. J.W. Brewer says

    Latin could be a little fussy for practical use as e.g. a language of command in the Army. I would propose a “Dual” approach in which the Hapsburg regime also sponsors/universalizes a modern Romance vernacular (with comparatively simplified/analytical grammar) of its very own. The obvious approach would have been to keep Dalmatian (related to Italian but with a few Sprachbundish parallels to Romanian and with substantial lexical influence from FYLOSC) from going extinct and build it up in a fashion where it would naturally incorporate additional loanwords from German and Magyar and the other languages of the empire, like a somewhat organically-grown Esperanto.

  39. Latin could be a little fussy for practical use as e.g. a language of command in the Army.

    Kind of a funny thing to say about a language that was introduced to generations of schoolchildren through the history of a war of conquest written by a military commander.

    Late medieval Latin was probably already sufficiently analytic for most Slavic and Magyar speakers, I assume the Germans would have put up most of the resistance.

  40. @David Marjanović

    And yet you managed to untangle the links. Thanks, it was late and I was a tool.
    Anyways the effects of the language reform are ambigous. The vocabulary that remained is great. Yet the relative success of the reform gave birth to a language fixer mentality with a strong urge to prescribe how to use the hungarian language. I of course am more of a descriptivist.

    @J.W. Brewer

    I helped a german military historian translate a few passages from the first world war. Language is one thing. But the shortening mania of the military makes these texts interesting puzzles even for the native speakers. Who would think that vzkpság hides vezérkarparancsnokság which is some sort of military command site. And that’s only the magyar side of it, i don’t know what might be in the diaries of the other soldiers of the Common Army.

  41. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    the world would be flourishing under the benign rule of Franz Josef VI.

    Surely Franciscus Iosephus VI (imperator et rex)

  42. David Marjanović says

    Given how long the First ruled, I don’t think we’d have made it to the Sixth yet. More like the Third or Fourth.

  43. January First-of-May says

    I’m guessing OTL Otto von Habsburg would have been TTL Franciscus Iosephus III, and we would now be barely into the reign of Franciscus Iosephus IV.

    DVODECIM LVSTRIS GLORIOSE PERACTIS

  44. PlasticPaddy says

    Franz Joseph the First, by the grace of God, Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, Galicia, Illyria Etcetera and Apostolic King of Hungary ( that means: successor of St. Stephen, patron saint of Hungary). Does this mean that the Hungarian king had some kind of theocratic role or that the succession was confirmed by the Church or is this just some kind of archaic “Floskel”?

  45. David Marjanović says

    That’s what I mean, modulo Sarajevo.

    I didn’t even know the coins were completely inscribed in Latin. Can’t say I’m surprised, though.

  46. David Marjanović says

    Does this mean that the Hungarian king

    First of all it means that Hungary had to be mentioned separately since 1867. Secondly, I’m not sure what role the king of Hungary had, but being the successor of a saint, who moreover “christianized the country” and may therefore be regarded as the “apostle to the Hungarians”, certainly deserved special mention on a coin, especially a commemorative one. On the Austrian side, the closest thing to a saint must have been Heinrich Jasomirgott…

  47. The coin is one thing, but the guy’s still on our money. 🙂

    https://www.mnb.hu/bankjegy-es-erme/bankjegyeink/megujitott-10-000-forintos-bankjegy

    But at least there’s one banknote with Count Széchenyi too. And Ferenc Deák, one of the main architects of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.

    https://www.mnb.hu/bankjegy-es-erme/bankjegyeink/megujitott-5000-forintos-bankjegy

  48. J.W. Brewer says

    British coins (at least some of them) are still inscribed in Latin* unto this present day, and AFAIK that’s not motivated by any desire to create a neutral “level playing field” between English and the various Celtic tongues spoken on the fringes of the U.K.

    *Often heavily abbreviated Latin, such as “Elizabeth II D G REG F D, which you may need insider knowledge to decode as “Elizabeth II Dei Gratia Regina Fidei Defensor.”

  49. Given how long the First ruled, I don’t think we’d have made it to the Sixth yet.

    I thought about that, but then I decided the First was a Fluke and some of his successors might not last very long for any of a number of reasons.

  50. I mean, how long is Elizabeth’s successor likely to last?

  51. David Eddyshaw says

    Barring some startling innovation in gerontology, one can at least safely say: Not as long. (Probably not even if they skip Charles, which currently seems unlikely.)

  52. QED.

  53. Lars Mathiesen says

    With long-lived monarchs you often get heirs apparent that spend most of their lives as such (hi, Charles!) and when they finally get their hands on the state seal the sheer excitement quickly does them in. In the long view, the average length of a reign should approach the average generation time, unless some crown prince along the way is in a plane crash and the grandson succeeds directly (cf Sweden).

  54. Austriae Est Imperium Orbis Universi!

  55. In the counterfactual world Franciscus Iosephus only takes the throne upon the death of Ferdinand III (the third Holy Roman Emperor of that name) in 1875. While Austria prospered under his 40 year reign, his son Rudolphus III is better remembered.

  56. J.W. Brewer says

    The previous British length-of-reign champion (Victoria), had a reign which lasted longer than those of the next four monarchs combined, comprising three generations of her descendants. Admittedly there’s a bit of an asterisk there since the abdicated Edw. 8 outlived his younger brother and successor Geo. 6 by a full two decades.

  57. January First-of-May says

    In the long view, the average length of a reign should approach the average generation time

    Unless the heir dies before the ruling monarch; though this might be somewhat counteracted by the cases where the ruling monarch is childless and is succeeded by their sibling.
    In particular, France had a sequence of consecutive long reigns in Louis XIII, Louis XIV, and Louis XV, followed by Louis XVI, whose reign was artificially cut short by the French Revolution.

    Of course, what counts as an “average generation” is itself unclear, as is what qualifies as a “long view”. Grand Princes of Moscow from Ivan II (d. 1359) to Feodor I (d. 1598) were a father-to-son succession, but there were only seven generations in that period, for an average of 34 years, well above the usual figure. If we don’t count Feodor I, we get an average of 37.5 years over six generations.

     
    EDIT: in any case, the ridiculously long “reign” of Otto von Habsburg was probably an extreme fluke, and consequently probably would not have happened in an ATL.

    I recall it being mentioned somewhere that if Otto had actually reigned for the entire period of his title-in-pretense, he would have been by some margin the longest reigning non-legendary monarch since Pepi II of Egypt. (Apparently there are some other disputed reigns that would have been longer.)

  58. Lars Mathiesen says

    I often pass a statue of Frederik VI where the inscription says that he governed for 56 years — but the first 24 of those was as the regent for his mad father, so his reign proper was only 31 years.

  59. J.W. Brewer says

    My maternal grandfather lived to be 99 (a marginally longer life than that of Otto von Hapsburg) and outlived his own father by over 73 years. Which would be a pretty impressive “reign,” except that his father was the second son in his generation and his older brother (who did not leave surviving issue) survived him by another 18 or so years. So I guess Granddad’s reign, assuming some sort of monarchical title brought across the Atlantic by his paternal grandfather, would only have commenced upon the death of his oldest uncle and thus lasted a mere 55 years and change.

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