Last night my wife and I watched our favorite Yuletide movie, The Shop Around the Corner, which is set in prewar Budapest, and as always I was deeply pleased that all the signs were in actual Hungarian, from the “pengő” and “fillér” on the cash register to the “NAGY ÁRUHÁZ” ‘big department store’ on a building sign. Which prompts me to share some quotes from Victor Sebestyen’s Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West that Joel has been posting at Far Outliers.
From Liszt’s Languages:
Liszt had tried a few times to learn Hungarian and employed as language tutor a young academic reputed to be a brilliant teacher who had managed to get several dignitaries from the court in Vienna to at least utter a few sentences in Magyar. But, as he once admitted, he gave up the effort after five lessons when he encountered the word for unshakeability – tántorithatatlanság. Many of those trying to learn the language would have lost the will to carry on well before then. Liszt wrote to a newspaper after the National Theatre debacle: ‘Notwithstanding my lamentable ignorance of the Hungarian language, I am and shall remain until my end, a Magyar heart and soul.’
(Go to the link for a story about how he ended up making an impassioned Hungarian nationalist speech in French.) From Magyar’s Main Modernizer:
In 1801, after serving 2,387 days in jail for a minor walk-on part in the Jacobin movement, Ferenc Kazinczy was released from prison. He felt no bitterness. ‘Examples had to be made to frighten the people,’ he wrote to a friend shortly before he was freed. He was forty-one, an erudite polyglot – translator of, among others, Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière and Schiller – and proprietor of a modest estate close to Buda. He still burned with a zeal for radical change in Hungary, but during his years of incarceration he abandoned an overtly political programme and any ideas of rebellion against the Habsburgs as impractical gestures that were bound to fail. From prison he had been corresponding with a group of like-minded Enlightenment figures, who came to the conclusion that the way to modernize Hungary, to create a new nation, was through its language and culture. Out of prison, he withdrew to his estate, Széphalom, and for the thirty years up to his death he devoted himself to a single passion: the renewal of the Hungarian language and literature. […] A twenty-first-century Hungarian would be hard-pressed to understand the archaic, formal and inflexible Magyar used in the eighteenth century – they would feel it was almost entirely foreign, rather as though Chaucer’s English were still being used today. ‘Magyar is half dead, atrophied…worn out. It has lost all vigour and freshness of the centuries long gone,’ he said when he embarked on his undertaking. […]
Kazinczy and his collaborators created new words based on Hungarian roots, borrowed foreign words and ‘Magyarized’ them, or used image association. For example, the word secretary (tiktár or titoknok) was derived from an existing word for secret: titok. The Hungarian word for theatre was taken from two existing ancient words for ‘colour’ and ‘house’. The word for revolution came from the existing word to boil, ‘forr’, so revolution – a rather useful word in Hungarian as the country lived through so many of them – became forradalom, which translates as ‘on the boil’. The Hungarian word for isolation is taken from the ancient Magyar word for island. A beautiful Hungarian word for wife or female partner was invented: feleség, which literally means ‘my halfness’ – a noun, not an adjective. More than 8,000 new words came into common usage in colloquial and literary Hungarian within a generation.
And from Language Change in Budapest:
Demographics as well as politics were changing on both sides of the Danube, principally the rapid decline in the use of the German language – a victory for the cause of Hungarian nationalism. The German populations almost everywhere else in Central and Eastern Europe maintained their German heritage and their separation from the other, mainly Slavic, populations surrounding them – in the Czech lands, Galicia and parts of Romania. In Buda and Pest, if not the rest of Hungary, things progressed differently. The German-Austrian populations in Pest and Buda merged with, and then were absorbed by, the Magyars into a linguistic, political and cultural ‘Hungarianness’.
Another big demographic factor was the rapid influx of immigrants, mostly Jews, into Pest, who adopted the Hungarian language to assimilate into Magyar life.
(The post goes on to discuss the rivalry between declining Buda and booming Pest.)
And I will take this opportunity to mention the Christmas gifts I’ve received that might be of interest to Hatters: from my wife, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (one of those novels so often and so highly praised that I feel more and more deprived at not having read it), and from my brother, a slew of non-English-language movies from Criterion: Flowers of Shanghai, directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2, a boxed set containing works from the Philippines (Insiang), Thailand (Mysterious Object at Noon), Kazakhstan (Revenge), Brazil (Limite), Turkey (Law of the Border), and Taiwan (Taipei Story) — I’m looking forward to all of them, but especially the last, since Edward Yang is one of my favorite directors (A Brighter Summer Day, Yi-Yi) and he made so few movies.
And a boldog Karácsonyt to all who celebrate today!
I don’t understand. Is Sebestyen talking about creating an official/formal/literary language? Surely Hungarian was spoken all over, as the commoners’ language, with vigour and freshness aplenty.
‘Examples had to be made to frighten the people,’ [Kazinczy]
It’s not certain what will frighten the people. You’d think Trump would fit the bill. But one man’s fright is another’s delight.
I conclude that if Trump is a Democrat decoy designed to encourage tamer tendencies, by reverse psychology, it ain’t working.
What a perfect karacsónyi ajándék for me! Köszönöm szépen!!! We’ve been spending the morning telling Alexa to play Hungarian music and picking out a few words here and there.
the word secretary (tiktár or titoknok) was derived from an existing word for secret: titok
It’s titkár (male) or titkárnő (female), making the relationship to titok obvious. (Hungarian often makes up in gendered job titles what it lacks in gendered pronouns.) This is great, I knew those words but didn’t realize they were related — well, most English speakers don’t realize secretary is from secret, either. Checking on Google Books… this was Sebestyen’s typo, not Joel’s.
boldog Karácsonyt
Well done, you included the accusative case ending: it’s implied to be the object of kívánok (neked) ‘I wish (to you)’. Same with jó reggelt ‘good morning’. You made my day!
EDIT: titoknok isn’t a typo; it’s a redlink on en.wiktionary under titok (Derived terms), implying it exists but an entry hasn’t been created. No definition at hu.wiktionary either, but Glosbe finds it in some passages with English translations. Maybe it’s an archaic form?
Is Sebestyen talking about creating an official/formal/literary language?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Hungarian_words_originating_from_the_language_reform
A register for modern politics, economics, etc., is my beginner-level impression (I haven’t studied the linked post yet). Also, according to this page linked from many of the Wiktionary entries, replacements for Latin and German loans:
The replacement for ‘universe’: világegyetem, derived from világ ‘world’, egy ‘one’.
The replacement for ‘virtue’: erény, from erő ‘strength’ + noun-forming suffix. (But ironically, erő itself is a loan from an Oghur (branch of Turkic) language, according to Wiktionary.)
And költő ‘poet’ made a comeback.
Pretty successful as language reforms go, although of course there are still a lot of Latin and German loanwords left, e.g. iskola ‘school’ < Latin, vicc ‘joke’ < German Witz.
*raises hand*
That was to replace Latin as the language of the bureaucracy with German. Like half of his “enlightened absolutism” (“everything for the people, nothing by the people”) it was insensitive enough to be pretty quickly abandoned…
West Turkic, as opposed to Rest Turkic. Uncommon Turkic (Proto-East-Turkic is often called “Common Turkic”). Chuvash and ancient Bolgar. Hungarian has a thick layer of words from there.
If this is the Christmas thread, then Frohe Weihnachten to all the Hatters.
@DM: *raises hand*
I thought your family went from Croatia to Austria, and that’s it.
Never was in Croatia (…that I know of). Longer story later, I have to go to bed.
Liszt had tried a few times to learn Hungarian …
Compare Sibelius, whose first and most fluent language was Swedish.
kt:
Pretty successful as language reforms go, although of course there are still a lot of Latin and German loanwords left
Yes, and very many from Slavic and other sources too. My wife insists that all of them are ultimately from Hungarian. Latin columbus from galamb and so on. I can’t object. It’s Christmas, after all.
Great example of language purism.
As far as purism goes, other Habsburg lands & peoples were doing pretty much the same thing at more or less the same time – German, Czech, Slovene, Croatian, and about half a century later, Romanian. Interestingly, Romanians purged their language of foreign Turkic & Slavic words and introduced Latin & French replacements – almost the opposite of the Hungarians.
אַ פֿרײלעכן ניטל – אָדער קרעכצמאַך, אױב דו װילסט!
@rozele: קרעכצמאַך
Heehee! Did you come up with that?
rather as though Chaucer’s English were still being used today
The English are pretty unenterprising in such things.
Dafydd ap Gwilym (1315 to ca. 1350, vs Dan Chaucer’s ca. 1340 to 1400) counts as modern Welsh.
The Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (probably twelfth century, maybe eleventh) are a damn sight easier to read than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth.)
@Y: yes and no! i once malapropized the traditional קראַצמעך / kratsmekh and decided i liked it enough to keep using it – but i can’t imagine i’m the first person who’s come up with that version.
@rozele: It is no small thing to have independently discovered the theory of relativity, either.
And a boldog Karácsonyt to all who celebrate today!
No thanks. As long as Orbán is in charge Hungarians are free to go fuck off. Would be nice to see Hungary kicked out of the EU. Not fair to all Hungarians I realize, but the last time I was in Budapest on business a year ago the Hungarians I dealt with were loathsome. Ranting on about Biden, defending Russia’s invasion, attacking America as woke, etc. Not eager to go back. I get why some of America’s worst reactionaries love that country.
The Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (probably twelfth century, maybe eleventh) are a damn sight easier to read than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth.)
Italians are even better. It’s not a huge chore to read the archaic language of Dante or Boccaccio, easier for a 21st century Italian than reading Shakespeare for a 21st century Briton.
Sir Gawain ain’t fair. If you’re going for dialect, Uncle Remus is a lot more recent and is a slog.
Did Orbán do or say something horrible recently? It is Nth mention of him on LH these days.
Did Orbán do or say something horrible recently?
Yes, many things. They’re arguably not particularly more in quantity or more horrible than usual. But they should all be called out each time, lest they get accepted as normal. Search Hungary EU Ukraine.
(And reasonable to ask how EU is letting itself get fucked over by so many shitheads.)
The Hungarian word for theatre was taken from two existing ancient words for ‘colour’ and ‘house’.
If I understand correctly what what various recent Hungarian etymological dictionaries say, it seems that the szín in színház was originally not the word szín ‘color’, but a homophonous word meaning ‘stage, theater’ (however the szín in színház may be interpreted by your average speaker today). This szín ‘stage, theater’, attested in the 18th century, was extracted from earlier játékszín ‘stage, theatre’, a compound of játék ‘game, entertainment, play, theatrical play’ and earlier szín ‘hut, tent, canopy, shed, covered building with open sides’, of Slavic origin; cf. Slovak sieň ‘hall’, Ukrainian сіни pl. ‘entrance hall’ (Russian сени), all < earlier *‘shadow, shade, canopy’. I gather that there is the possibility of some influence from the family of Latin scaena as well as from Hungarian szín ‘color’ (in reference to the painted scenery?), though. (The etymology of szín ‘color’ is apparently unknown—I was wondering if this szín, too, can be connected to the family Old Church Slavonic сѣнь ‘shadow, shade’; compare English shade as in a shade of green, a meaning apparently developed only in Early Modern English. But the original meaning of szín may be ‘surface’, although it seems the earliest attested meaning is ‘beautiful appearance’.)
@zyxt
There is a bit of misunderstanding regarding language purism in Romanian. It was never at the level of Czech or Hungarian, or at least it was not as successful. There was one group very focused on it, funnily enough based in Transylvania so again in the Austro-Hungarian empire. They wanted etymological spellings and to remove all non-Latin origin words or at lest combine Latin with Slavic. The last part is the most famous of their ideas and the most funny one (they were being made fun of it even at the time). They wanted to replace words like război (war, Slavic origin) with răzbel ( first part of război plus the first part of “bellum” ). One of their combination did survive “moravuri” a combination of năravuri (the original slavic origin word) plus “mores” (Latin for ways, character, morals) .
Their approach did not win, one contributing factor being that they were not in power anywhere. A more subtle approach won out. This approach was based on not extending the meaning of existing words to new realities, instead preferring Latin or Romance loan words. The old roads were unpaved dirt roads, so the existing word for them (uliță -slavic origin) continued to mean that. The new, modern, paved ones instead were called șosea or stradă (from French and Italian). The old unpaved square (maidan – turkish origin) was replaced by the modern paved piață (from Italian). Now maidan just means some open, vacant lot at the edge of the city. The herbal remedies that you get from old woman in the village? That is leac (Slavic). The modern, scientific things you get from a doctor? That is medicament (from French). Now leac is only something you find in fairytales, a potion prepared by a witch.
This approach was very successful, even original Romanian words of Latin origin fell victim to it (vână was replaced by venă, both from latin).
However this approach did not work when trying to apply it to things that did not change. “Amic” did not replace the Slavic “prieten”, it barely survives because it managed to carve out a small separate meaning. Prieten can mean both friend and boyfriend, while amic is only friend.
the szín in színház… (also színész ‘actor’)
Thanks, Xerîb! I had naively assumed that it was simply Latin scaena, so I’m glad to be disabused.
@Zeleny Drak
Thanks for that insight. Romanian is very interesting.
@Xerîb, note Greek σκηνή – the source of modern “scene”.
Apart of possible connection to сѣнь and shadow, this word appears in the Bible (“tent, tabernacle”) and – alongside with similar Greek shadow-words – was translated with Slavic сѣнь.
Seems actually more parseable than some other examples of Daunting Hungarian I’ve seen presented; I had to look up tántorít ‘to shake (tr.)’ (parallel to tántorog (intr.) — lots of these -Əg / -ít verb pairs, and FWIW curiously often also their common root is of obscure etymology), but then it’s all common and distinctive suffixes: -hat ‘-able’, -atlan privative, -ság qualitative adjective, ‘-ness’.
…come to think of it, also Finnish -ma-ttom-uus ‘un-X-ableness” also happens to have a relatively high morpheme-to-phoneme ratio and as such is an easy source of cumbersome derivatives.
The Oghur loans really are many and deep enough that they’re a load-bearing part of what makes modern Hungarian into what it is, and as such felt entirely native. Often enough these have indeed no other modern descendant than in Hungarian (after all all the Oghur languages besides Chuvash are gone by now).
@Zeleny Drak
Thanks for that insight. Romanian is very interesting.
Heartily seconded!
Words of affection in Romanian remain largely from Slavic in spite of the language reform: dragoste ‘love’, a iubi ‘to love’, milă ‘compassion’ (and its many derivations), etc. Probably because this vocabulary was reinforced weekly in church services; liturgical Romanian remains replete with Slavic loans in spite of some attempts here and there at updating it. I wonder if prieten is part of that list too, there must be at least some liturgical texts where the abstract noun prietenie is heard.
That coinage răzbel does sound silly. But there were previous examples of that Slavic prefix being added to inherited Romance lexicon (e.g. a răzbuna ‘get revenge’) or Hungarian loans (a răzgândi ‘change one’s mind).
@Christopher Culver
I’m not sure if religion played that big of a role in this. There are plenty of Slavic expressions in liturgical Romanian that are fossilized or completely gone in the regular language. I’ve only realized what many of them mean once I moved to a Slavic speaking country (“Bogdaproste” “Doamne miluieste”, “Preacistita”). Nobody knows what “miluiește” means even though some other related words surive (milă). It’s just in the fixed expresion “Doamne miluieste”.
Slavic words are very overrepresented in Romanian vocabulary connected with feelings or states of being. Rich (bogat), poor (sărac), sick (bolnav), dear (drag), week (slab) are all of Slavic origin. Overall, there are a lot of basic words of Slavic origin, usually the oldest layer of Slavic influence in the language. These are very hard to replace words as they just too well integrated. The words from this layer have been quite stable although some did become archaic, for example healthy is now only sănătos (latin origin) while the slavic zdravăn is much more limited in use.
The biggest layer of Slavic words that were lost was the one connected to goverment, administration or “educated” language used in the middle ages. All the older noble titles/administrative roles like clucer,ispravnic, postelnic, vornic, sluger are gone. If the equivalent position exists today it’s very likely that it’s called using a Romance word.
Răzbel sounded funny because it was a new coinage and the proponents were viewed as a bit over the top in their attempts of purification. If the political climate would have been different, then probably today răzbel would sound like a perfectly regular word. I think they partially lost because they were not based in the future Romanian state and were not Orthodox (they were Greek Catholic). Even their names did not help. The main proponent and the most active one as well, was called August Treboniu Laurian, which sounds as pompous as somebody being called Tarquinius. Archibald
Is “zelený drak” a Slovak expression meaning “green dragon” ?
@ZD: is there a good source you can recommend on the slavic component in romanian? i’d love to be able to compare it to the yiddish situation!* (i’ll have the easiest time with something in english or french, though i think i could struggle through academic romanian or another romance lect)
.
* partly to see if the comparison is helpful for the massive pile of unknowns around the emergence of [eastern] yiddish, where we don’t know what language(s) it replaced/absorbed/was absorbed into, or much of anything about that process.
@Stu Clayton
It’s czech, but same meaning.
@rozele
This short summary is the first thing I found. I will have a look if there is something more detailed https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/14425734.pdf
I don’t have access to this one, but it does seem more detailed https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-slavic-languages-and-linguistics-online/romanian-and-slavic-contact-COM_032134
And reasonable to ask how EU is letting itself get fucked over by so many shitheads.
Two reasons, basically – the first part is that voters have taken to elect shitheads in several countries, and the second is that it’s the flip side of rules preventing a bunch of big countries to ride roughshod over the smaller ones; they give individual countries the possibility to block common actions, and to hold them hostage to get their demands fulfilled. Luckily, Orban and his cronies, and their brothers in spirit in charge of other countries, all want their share of EU funds, so they can be brought around if the EU really wants it. But it’s a tedious and unappetizing spectacle.
The fact that Hungary and Poland were both experiencing antidemocratic backsliding around the same time made it particularly difficult to obtain the otherwise unanimous consensus it typically requires for the EU to take harsh action against a member state.
Although Google seems to be reluctant to back me up on this, I believe we get a brief chance to see that the whole sign says “HUNGÁRIA NAGY ÁRUHÁZ” which is interesting for Hungaria / Magyar and because perhaps the producers thought the famous Párizsi Nagy Áruház (Andrássy út 39) would confuse viewers.
(Here we prefer Bell, Book and Candle for our Jimmy Stewart Christmas romantic comedy, with its inimitable supporting cast.)
Interesting indeed! But it’s Párisi Nagy Áruház (not Páriszi).
if you have “antidemocratic” (Brett) backsliding because “voters elect” (Hans) shitheads, you’ve got a problem.
But no need to call everything which is right “democracy”*.
I think everyone’s problem with Orbán is not as much that he is “antidemocratic” as his and his voters’ position.
And it is a bit disturbing that convincing people is not an option.
* which reminds me a certain ISIS fighter. He joined soe small and poorly known group and when it was disbanded they sent emissaries to other groups. The emissaries asked: “what will you do if you win?”
An-Nusra said: “well, we will ask Syrians what they want”.
“Hey, it is nonsense. This is not Islam, it is democracy!”
And they joined ISIS.
@Vanya:
True, but perhaps a bit of an unfair comparison. I was taught in school that Italian was created as a literary language based on Petrarch and Boccaccio (and to a much lesser extent Dante), and pretty much only existed in this literary form until a century ago. Surely this is an over-simplification, but it still seems to be a reasonably well grounded one. It is then unsurprising that the models the language was based on remain tolerably accessible to educated readers.
Oh, indeed, you’re right, although it seems enough Hungarian speakers are confused that
párizsi nagy áruház
gets 2.5x as many gits — including the FR of that WP page — as the correctpárisi nagy áruház
(sz
gets corrected).Yes, it’s a very understandable error.
párizsi nagy áruház gets 2.5x as many gits
Not if you do it properly by putting the search string in quotes, which is what holds the string together instead of dealing with each of its words as a separate item. Radically different results when using quote marks (which also stops Google from making “corrections”):
párizsi nagy áruház
párisi nagy áruház
Results will differ by your location and other factors. And in any case, the number of hits reported is often just a wild guess on Google’s part; not so much when using the quote marks, though.
This short summary is the first thing I found. I will have a look if there is something more detailed https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/14425734.pdf
Thanks, ZD, we were just wondering about the time and place of the interinfluences of Slavic and Romance in the Balkans in the “Avar” megathread
https://languagehat.com/they-perished-like-avars/#comment-4569604
and the references cited in the link confirm that it is assumed to date back to the 800s-900s to Bulgaria.
The discussion basically follows ancient DNA-based observations that Gothic and Sarmatian military settlers of the old Roman Danube border disappeared with the arrivals of Avars and Slavs, probably along with the Latinized local Illyrian militarized class, which played such an outsize role in the Roman Empire in III-VIth c. Yet Romance speakers, the future Vlachs, remained in the Balkans and continued to form hereditary military castes of frontier settlers such as the Martolos in Byzantine and early Ottoman times, and during the rebirth of the 2nd Bulgarian Empire. Were they direct descendants of the Roman frontier settlers from above the Jireček Line? Were they simply cut off from the ways to escape West when their brethren from Upper Moesia and Roman Pannonia took off during the era of the collapse of old Roman frontier? Or the escape from the crumbling Lower Moesian frontier went to a different direction, towards Constantinople?
In the 1400s and 1500s, as the Turkish frontier expanded to Belgrade and Buda, the Vlach military settlers went with it (and many, beyond the Ottoman border, to join the Austrian Grenzers in Croatia and Slavonia or to settle in Maramures). These new border settlements of the ex-Martolos tended to be mixed Vlach and Serbian, but it appears that the Slavic influences in Romanian is derived from a half a millennium older era?
Yup. Orbán Viktátor has managed to make all the surviving media financially dependent on himself.
thanks, ZD!
Dmitry, careful with your searches. That PDF article you link to is of very low scholarly quality. (The author’s institution Spiru Haret University is also infamously disreputable.)
Any discussion of Slavic influence on Romanian needs to take Aromanian into account. That is, the two languages seem to share an earliest layer of Slavic loans. Aromanian evidence is rarely wielded competently in modern publications from Romania. This is partly a matter of simple ignorance of that much smaller people, and partly that its implications could put Romanian itself in the Central Balkans at an earlier date in history, which is anathema to the Romanian national mythology.
@DM, well, in Russia media (government control of TV) play a huge role.
Basically, the situation is that everyone thinks […] because everyone thinks […] and most people just don’t want to think something else.
It is like thinking that the earth is flat [if you do, you don’t share the myth everyone else shares] or like thinking that al-Qaida is good [if you do, you will look like an asshole]. So everyone just says what everyone says, and TV is telling everyone what “everyone” says.
@Christopher Culver, yes, that’s why I posted without investigating in more details, precisely because I was sure that the LH collective mind will send me in a more reliable direction faster. It immediately occurred to me that for a politically correct Romanian source “interaction with Old Bulgarian” will come across as “yes, Dacia, somewhere near Danube”, while to me it might sound like “right, South-Central Balkans far from Danube” … but the quality of the analysis itself may be suspect because of the nationalist implications.
I am struggling with understanding the chronology of the Sprachbund, especially given the conservativeness of Old Slavonic which obscures the changes in Bulgarian, so I got momentarily excited thinking that Romanian might have retained an additional dateable footprint of the influences…
My understanding is that Orbán was kept in the EU through the lone country that would object to kicking him out, Poland. Now Poland changed its leadership, but so did Slovakia, and the scatocephalic count remains the same.
WP Hungarian_withdrawal_from_the_European_Union says “it has been proposed…” and “it has been suggested…”, but then lists right Hungarian politicians who proposed this.
Would that be good for (a) Europe (b) all those causes over which everyone here disagrees with Orbán?
Hat:
Interesting indeed! But it’s Párisi Nagy Áruház (not Páriszi).
A minor point, discovered with the native assistance of Mrs Noetica: the correction should be from MMcM’s Párizsi, not from Páriszi.
For completeness, a quote-flanked Google search on Páriszi Nagy Áruház gets just two hits where I’m located – once we override Google’s correction to “Párisi Nagy Áruház”. Interesting to search also on “Párisi Nagyáruház”, etc.
Some such issues are touched on at the Hungarian Wikipedia talkpage.
Good catch! A gold star to Mrs Noetica.
@ZD: Thanks very much for that article on Slavic influence in Romanian. I’ll give it a thorough read.
During my postdoc year in Romania in 1983-84 (after studying Sprachbund effects during fieldwork in Papua New Guinea) I found considerable reluctance among Romanian academics to discuss Slavic influences in Romanian, or Sprachbund effects in general. I was assigned to a timid Albanianist, because pre-Slavic substrates were more promising for territorial claims.
One of the most interesting books I found during my year there was Probleme de sinonimie, by Onufrie Vințeler (Bucharest, 1983), looking at the wealth of synonyms from all directions in Romanian. I translated and blogged several passages from it back in 2007.
https://faroutliers.com/2007/02/04/romanian-synonymy-horse-traders-and-maize/
https://faroutliers.com/2007/02/07/romanian-synonymy-latin-and-slavic/
https://faroutliers.com/2007/02/14/romanian-synonymy-romanian-and-french/
Would that be good for (a) Europe (b) all those causes over which everyone here disagrees with Orbán?
As has been mentioned, Orbán is not the only authoritarianoid shithead. Now we have Fico in Slovakia, we soon may have some government including Wilder in the Netherlands, and maybe Le Pen in France. We’ve been lucky that Meloni has turned out less of a wrecker than feared. So a Huxit wouldn’t solve the issues, and I wouldn’t be happy at an ever shrinking EU, with the shithead-led countries leaving one by one. It would also be bad for those countries, because we have seen the shitheads’ playbook – come to power over popular discontent, and then grab the commanding heights of all institutions until it becomes impossible to dislodge them from power. PiS in Poland didn’t quite manage that, but Orbán has, and the others will try. Outside the EU it will become even more difficult to retain a fair and competitive playing field and the rule of law in these countries.
The Tory authoritarian shitheads who actually managed to perpetrate the only secession from the EU so far appear to have failed to grab the commanding heights of all institutions, though you wouldn’t think so from the way the leadership of my own Party is running scared of the Daily Fucking Mail and and their presumed ability to gavanise the highly sought-after Racist Shithead vote.
In fact, you can make a good argument to the effect that our UK authoritarian shitheads have done the EU a huge favour by so convincingly demonstrating what a massively stupid idea secession from the EU actually is. Rule Britannia!
One source I see cited is
Schramm, Gottfried. Ein Damm bricht. Die römische Donaugrenze und die Invasionen des 5-7. Jahrhunderts in Lichte der Namen und Wörter 1997
… but can one reliably tell apart the borrowings from Old Bulgarian at the time when it was spoken from the latter centuries borrowings from Church Slavonic?
To a degree. Namely, the earliest Slavic loanwords into Balkan Romance still show nasal vowels, while later loans have already undergone denasalization. In general, however, Slavic loans into Aromanian and Romanian are quite late by Slavic standards, that is, they already show the loss of the yers, the rounding of short *a, etc.
So was it ever /iʃi/ and not /iʒi/? Sources like this give the older (correct in the case of the building / signage) but don’t indicate whether the change was orthographic only.
An excellent question.
Things have improved since the 80’s (Joel was in Romanian in the worst of period, both for studying and for living) but unfortunately there is still not that much focus on the Romanian-Slavic connections or on period before the founding of the medieval states. There are some understandable factors, the period is a real Dark Age, with almost no written records about what was happening north of the Byzantine border, but there is a also a lack of coordination. I remember reading an article about a researcher saying that he found some words were marked as of Bulgarian origin in Romanian dictionaries and as loans from Romanian in Bulgarian dictionary. The main reason however is still ideological in nature. Each country in the region still uses history as important part of the national myth making so there are some “fixed” assumptions that are taken as a given. Sometimes this leads to interesting results. Albanians claim they are descendent from Illyrian tribes leaving in the present day Albania, while Romanians claim they are descended of Romanized Dacian+Thracians living on both sides of the Danube, but 100% living north of the Danube (south is not that important). The problem is that Albanian and Romanian share some vocabulary (looks more like of Albanian origin although Romanians say it’s of Dacian origin) plus common evolution of Latin vocabulary. Overall it seems that they lived close and where in contact in the early stages of the languages. Of course, if the Albanians are right then it means that Romanians had to be from somewhere in the Central Balkans. If the Romanians are right, then Albanians had to be also somewhere far north of current Albania. Both claims could be wrong, as well.
What I think is a bit more clear is that the early speakers of Romanian lived in a militarized and rural area. There are some interesting evolution in meaning. Village (sat) comes from Latin fossatum (ditch around the camp), groom (mire) from Latin miles (soldier), old man (bătrân) from Latin veteranus (veteran), man(bărbat) from Latin barbatus (bearded) and earth, ground (pământ) from Latin (pavimentum – pavement). Words connected to city life in Latin are gone. Some basic Christian are of Latin origin like church (biserică – basilica). There is no real Greek influence so the language was for sure spoken North of the Jireček line.
The earliest Slavic influence happened after the 6-7th century, once proto-Romanian was already formed as some changes from Latin to Romanian did not impact Slavic loans. The most visible is the fact that “h” which was gone from Romanian reappeared from Slavic loans. This early Slavic loans also had to happen before around the 9th-10th century, before the split with Aromanian. Some basic words are of Slavic origin in both languages. The nature of the loans shows a sustained contact and provides some potentially interesting insights. For example the word for plow (plug) is of Slavic origin while the action, to plow the fields, is of Latin origin (a ara). This repeats with other agricultural activities, the action is Latin, the tools used are Slavic. Names of cereals and fruits are mostly Latin, while vegetables are mostly Slavic. Words for love(dragoste), to love (a iubi), wife (nevastă) are all Slavic. Rarely mentioned in books about Slavic influence in Romanian, there is also an interesting split between the basic (but now vulgar) words for penis (pulă – Latin) and vagina (pizdă – Slavic). So very close contact indeed. The words from this first layer of Slavic words are the ones that surveyed the most in Modern Romanian.
Slavic speakers started moving through current Romanian territories after 600 but, as Christopher Culver mentioned, the loans in Romanian appear to be from a later stage in the evolution of Common Slavic, so that leaves a bit of gap. Where were the proto-Romanians living between 600 and 800 when Slavs were practically everywhere around the Balkans and also North of the Danube?
The next wave of Slavic influence is of a more clearly Bulgarian source and mostly happened as Church Slavonic was adopted as the religious and later administrative language
@Dmitry Pruss
I don’t think Ottoman influence is an explanation for the Romanian expansion in Maramures, it’s too late for it. And I’m not saying this because I’m Romanian. However, Maramures was already inhabited by Romanians before the Ottomans had any significant presence in the Balkans. The medieval state of Moldavia was founded by Romanians from Maramures moving in the power vacuum left by the retreating Mongol influence, first under Hungarian authority (around 1345), but then as rebels. At the same time, by the 1400., Romanian origin settlers where already in the Polish Carpathians and soon also in east of present day Czech republic (still called Wallachia by Czechs). The Ottoman invasion is responsible for movement in the West Balkans though. There were Romanian/Aromanians in that part of the Balkans at some point ( the name of the Durmitor mountain in Montenegro is very likely of Romanian origin meaning “sleeping place or the sleeping one” (dormitor). They got assimilated by Serbs (common religion) but are the source of the name Vlach for Serbs in Bosnia (which is an insult as far as I know).
My personal theory (I have no professional background in linguistics or history) is that eary Proto-Romanians lived in some mountainous area north of the Byzantine border, hard to say if also north of the Danube or just south, maybe in the old Roman province of Dacia Ripensis and around (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_Ripensis). Some research showing when the highlands of the Carpathians were first regularly exploited by humans in the middle ages would help better determine the timelines.
Somehow this early proto-Romanians where separated from the Slavs, maybe there were other people living between them (Albanians?), maybe there just not a lot of settlements around them. At some point around the late 8th century – 9th century they started to be very much in contact with Slavic speakers. Maybe it was population growth and moving more into the lowlands or Slavs moving higher? One thing is that a traditional Romanian lifestyle, indeed the most strongly associated with Eastern Romance speakers, was transhumance pastoralism (nice map showing it https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Transhumance_ways_of_the_Vlachs.jpeg It’s Romanian so take with a grain of salt the size of some of the claimed Romanian areas). The standard way was to move between a summer pasture (in the mountains) and a winter one somewhere in the lowlands. As the map shows, one of the preferred places was the Danube floodplain, but I don’t think that area was as accessible the early middle ages, a lot of steppe nomads also liked it. The fixed village was somewhere in the lower mountains.
The lower villages would be partially Slavic or more exposed to Slavic contact (would explain why wife is “nevastă” of Slavic origin). At some point some men would move in search of other pastures and setup up new routes for the movements. The highlands were probably mostly free for the taking which would explain why Vlachs appear all of a sudden across a wide range in the Balkans when Byzantine sources become more detailed. All of a sudden there is Great Wallachia in the mountains of Thessaly and Vlachs are all over Bulgaria. The 10th century would be around the time Romanian split form Aromanian. Outside of written sources something similar was probably happening all across the Carpathians. The probably small population of Slavs living in present day Romania was being assimilated. There is an interesting clue in the name of a river in northern Romania. At the source in the mountains the river is called Repedea while lower down it’s named Bistrița. Both names have the same meaning (Fast) with the first being Latin and the second Slavic. By the time this migration reached Northern Carpathians, the lower areas probably had much larger Slavic populations so the assimilation went the other way around, creating the various East Slavic highlander population (Hutsuli, Lemkos) and the Polish Gorals.
I would date the main expansion from 1000 to 1300, with some small expansion until that 1500 (Moravian Wallachia). This would match the Medieval Warm Period, explaining the growth in population, interest in new settlements and making the highlands better for human usage.
This would also match a similar expansion taking place in the Alps, the Walser migration (https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2022/11/the-walser-migrations/). Alemannic speakers started moving into the high Alps and appearing on the southern slopes of the Alps. Ironically while the Eastern Romance speakers were expanding, the Walser migration lead to the fragmentation of the Romansh area and started the decline.
My understanding is that kicking a country out of the EU isn’t even possible. The closest is Article 7 allowing denial of voting rights; that’s currently being looked at.
Orbán doesn’t want to quit the EU at all. He wants the money. I don’t know how badly Hungary needs the money, but the EU has stopped the very worst 1% of Orbán’s excesses, so leaving the EU would definitely be counterproductive for Hungary – Orbán would mutate into a copy of Lukashenko.
Rather, [h] was gone and remains gone; Slavic loans established a [x] which had never existed before and is now spelled h.
BTW, that is probably the case for plow itself: *plug is all over West Germanic, nowhere else in Germanic, and its *p desperately needs an explanation…
Village (sat) comes from Latin fossatum (ditch around the camp)
In northeastern Libya, this word yields the name of a major tribal grouping of the Nefusa Mountains: Fassato (properly Fǝṣṣaṭu IIRC). I think it was originally the name of a village.
Gothic may have the pattern
plow (verb) = arjan (see Wulfila, Luke 17.7) from Latin
plow (noun) = hoha (see Wulfila, Luke 9.62) from native/other (is this the same as English “hoe”?).
plóg is pretty rare in Old English in the tool sense, versus as a land measure; the tool being sulh (“nan mann þe hys hand asett on hys sulh”).
That is, if they really mean the same thing. And if it isn’t just that taxes and inheritance are more important than husbandry
The Germanic *plug versions are more productive than the Slavic.
fealh ‘fallow’, kind of an antonym, but also a land measure, being equally hazy back far enough, and just close enough in form, is an invitation for the unwary.
Always treated as native in IEist works, i.e. as a cognate of the Latin form.
Should be.
With a long vowel?
is this the same as English “hoe”?
Hah! Obviously from proto-Oti-Volta *kũ- “hoe” (clearly borrowed before the period of Grimm’s Law.)
[The English word actually seems to be from Frankish by way of French.]
Cf. Songhay kuumu “hoe” (found even in Korandje, though I think the Zarma cognate is irregularly kumbu.)
“the word for plow (plug) is of Slavic origin while the action, to plow the fields, is of Latin origin (a ara).”
Well, PS *orati, Lith. árti…
“As other Visegrád Group leaders, Orbán opposes any compulsory EU long-term quota on redistribution of migrants.” (WP)
Well, these countries don’t have their own “immigrants from colonies” and even their own Muslims (historically there are Polish Tatars…).
P.S. Western Europe treats questions of immigrants who’re already there and refugees around Europe very differently. I’m not sure if Fico with his “there is no place for Islam in Slovakia” is worse (than paying to Sudan so that it sends people whose profession is “fighting with blacks” – RSF that is – to stop refugees. I mean, I understand : we need to stop them away from Europe. And we want to stop them by force. So we need tot talk to the military. And local military is bloodthirsty. So we need tot talk to bloodthirsty military. ).
@ZD, yes, I understand that Maramures predates Ottoman expansion in Europe, but may have been settled during internal power struggles in the 2nd Bulgarian empire, when both Vlachs and Cumans from the Danube played big military roles.
there is also an interesting split between the basic (but now vulgar) words for penis (pulă – Latin) and vagina (pizdă – Slavic)
This suggests to me that women were Romance-speaking and men were Slavic-speaking, which is a common pattern of immigration/invasion.
@Hans
As has been mentioned, Orbán is not the only authoritarianoid shithead
Orbán is a symptom of what‘s wrong with Hungary, not the problem. Hungary is a deeply illiberal anti-Western society. Unlike Poland or Slovakia, or the US (or Austria). Hungary is far closer to Russia in that many people carry a permanent anger at being unjustly punished by history, misunderstood and abused by the West, deprived of their historic greatness and literally deprived of historic lands. There is also a strain of Messianic national purity among Hungarians and Russians, convinced that their culture is the final repository of the old European/Christian values and destined to be the vanguard of some restored pre modern Europe. You find some of that in Poland but not so much among young people. I don’t see that vision of national redemption playing any role in Austrian or Slovak politics.
While it is certainly salutary to be reminded that authoritarian shithead leaders only gain power in a democracy because of the support of significant numbers of shithead voters, it is reassuring to note that these authoritarian shithead leaders are highly dependent on shameless lying to win and consolidate their support. From this one can draw the comforting conclusion that many of those who vote for them are probably merely very gullible rather than hardcore shitheads in their own right.
Vanya: Orbán is a symptom of what‘s wrong with Hungary, not the problem. Hungary is a deeply illiberal anti-Western society. Unlike Poland or Slovakia, or the US (or Austria). Hungary is far closer to Russia in that many people carry a permanent anger at being unjustly punished by history, misunderstood and abused by the West, deprived of their historic greatness and literally deprived of historic lands. There is also a strain of Messianic national purity among Hungarians and Russians, convinced that their culture is the final repository of the old European/Christian values and destined to be the vanguard of some restored pre modern Europe. You find some of that in Poland but not so much among young people. I don’t see that vision of national redemption playing any role in Austrian or Slovak politics.
Yes and no, I think. Hungary was loudly and proudly the most liberal of the countries of the new Central Europe after 1989, and young Orbán Viktor was a loud and proud part of that. History has been unjust to every nation in the world*, and this can be translated into resentment and harnessed by anyone willing to risk peace and prosperity for consolidation of power. What’s new is that the threshold for that move seems to be lowered, both among politicians in the established parties (like Orbán) and among voters, who are now willing to vote for authoritarian movements in numbers not seen since between the wars. No original analysis, but this has everything to do with the “prosperity” element. The first thirty years after WW2 were characterized by broadly shared and steadily increasing prosperity and opportunity, and in the western sphere increasing cooperation and trust based in the European vision of community and the American project of international institutionalism. The latest forty have seen a drift towards diminishing real incomes and decreasing opportunity in many countries, in parallel with continuing internationalization of the economy and liberalization in culture, but also with increasing American insistence on exceptions from international law. The time was ripe for parties blaming the liberal/libertarian elite (and America, where suitable) and promising a return to a better and more just world by reversing the plot against hard working families/the working class.
Unless mainstream politicians get their act together and find a way to scale back the owners’ share of the profits to a long-term sustainable level**, I’m seriously afraid that the authoritarians will take country after bloody country until we’re back in 1937, and unless the U.S. rediscovers the importance of international law, there will be nothing to stop them. The owning class, of course, has realized this a long time ago, which is why the more cynical of them fervently support authoritarians that blame culture (“liberals”) rather than economic choices (“libertarians”).
* With the possible exception of the young anglo-colonial ones, but that doesn’t make them immune against national messiah complexes of their own.
** Or in lieu of that, at least some alleviating measures. The Kaczyńskis may have dressed the Law and Justice Party up in a shroud of anti-modern demagoguery, but they also knew that the Polish population were tired of empty promises, and they delivered on their promise of a universal child support — a simple, cheap and efficient benefit, which is now widely supported by the former opposition. More optimistically, we can argue that Polish voters accepted the demagoguery for a while so they could use the Law & Justice Party as a means to move the mainstream to where it should have been all along.
…in large part, I would guess, because Orbán has made all the media financially dependent on himself.
Polish media were never all Radio Maryja.
I agree with Trond’s analysis. It’s not anything particular to Hungary, it’s a tide we all have to fight.
Trond Engen : “The first thirty years after WW2 were characterized by broadly shared and steadily increasing prosperity and opportunity” If you mean west of the iron curtain, yeah, if not I don’t know in what bizzaro world you live in.
@V: Yes, I certainly do. I first wrote something about the road to xeno- and europhobic* authoritarianism being similar but different in the old eastern bloc, where ethno-nationalism has been respectable as an integral part of the opposition to communism, but I realized that there are huge differences and nuances I can’t describe. A can of worms, that’s what it is. Anyway, I see that the qualifier “in the western sphere” ended up after the comma.
* I find no generic term for the fear of specifically neighbors. Geitophobia? Geitonaphobia?
@TE, I don’t understand how economical preferences, cultural preferences and, say, freedom of press are connected.
Or are “owners” interested in promoting migration and all these things that are offence to family values and do we people need dictators because else “owners” will just control the public sphere?
Are progressive ideas (like anti-racism) a mere weapon of corporations? And do Jews take a part in it?
@Hans, the way you put it about houses, sounds scary.
Not because I intend to have one, just because my difficult relations with urbanisation:)
Unless mainstream politicians get their act together and find a way to scale back the owners’ share of the profits to a long-term sustainable level
The problem is that this is actually another bug-bear used by the new right. There are lots of middle-income people who, when they see that proposition, don’t go “Yay, justice!”, but fear that the Left is coming to tax away their well-earned incomes and family homes, in order to give the money to “undeserving loafers and immigrants”. The new right in Germany is small-state and low-taxation to a degree traditional German conservatism never was, certainly partly under influence from the U.S. And if one sees how many measures proposed by our current left-of-center government seem to make life more expensive or complicated for middle-class voters (fast phasing out oil and gas heating, phasing out internal-combustion engines, talk about how single-family houses are energy-inefficient and shouldn’t be built anymore), one can get the impression that this government has specifically set out to confirm these fears of middle-class voters and drive them into the arms of the AfD. (I voted Green at the last election and still think that the general direction the government takes is right and necessary, but could they perhaps be less stupid about how they implement their policies?)
There are lots of middle-income people who, when they see that proposition, don’t go “Yay, justice!”, but fear that the Left is coming to tax away their well-earned incomes and family homes, in order to give the money to “undeserving loafers and immigrants”.
Yes, this is the basic motor of the Brainless Right the world over. And of course you’re correct about the self-defeating righteousness of the left in power: “Who cares if it’s popular? We know best!” And then they whine about not being appreciated when they’re voted out.
Of course Brecht is relevant here.
@drasvi: They are and they aren’t. It’s perfectly possible to have one or more but not all modern freedoms.
I meant to say that the allure of authoritarian politics (in the west) is — in my not very original political analysis — connected with the failure of politics-as-usual to deliver increased prosperity and opportunity to large parts of the population. This is in turn — in my not very original economic analysis — closely connected with the increasing return on capital (ownership) rather than work.
Short, many will think that an authoritarian regime may be the only way to change a miserable deal.
Increased returns on capital means that those who own gain political power, and some of them a lot of power, which can be wielded through controlled media, campaign financing, extortion, corruption, or whatever. One way to protect those returns is to deflect the popular anger over on neighboring countries, or immigrants, or feminists, or modern schoolteachers, or whichever group can be made out to have grown in cultural importance in the years of private economic stagnation.
Short, if you have wealth, support the authoritarian who blames someone other than the rich.
Actually, I don’t so much blame the well-meaning and self-serving left as the morally indignant center-right. It’s their dream of a society of self-sustained self-owners with equal opportunities through individual choices that suffer the most under all-CAPS capitalism. If money don’t go where it makes the most for all, it doesn’t work as you say it will.
High returns on capital don’t just decrease labor’s share. It paradoxically reduces the incentive for active investment, and governments have to offer more and more money in subsidies and tax deals to get things going (see “Bidenomics”). In a social-capitalist society, private capital should be frantically hunting for investment opportunities just to be maintained, and citizens with purchasing power and a maslowian pyramid of needs should offer those opportunities. Passive fortunes should be eaten up in a generation* by decay,
* or two, or three, or four, if that works better, but you get the point.
Oh, there’s plenty of blame to go around. But the “eat your spinach and shut up” attitude of the left bothers me more than the greed of the morally indignant center-right, because the lefties are supposed to be my people.
Heh. One difference is that I can see a non-greedy center-right, the one that makes (used to make) great compromises with the non-revolutionary left on huge issues like safe and sufficient pensions, healthcare, labor laws, and membership in international bodies. That may well be a parochial European view.
It seems difficult to keep outsiders consistently upset about the government of Hungary over long periods of time. In order to serve the needs of an affluent left-of-center readership that needs a constant and varied stream of Frightening Foreigners to worry about, the Guardian is this week instead trying to get them concerned about the menace to the European status quo posed by the German Reichsbürger and their eccentric King Peter, who is reportedly inter alia some sort of manifestation of the Archangel Uriel. Highlighting these rather exotic and marginal personalities suggests some mild implicature that the AfD is no longer sufficiently frightening to be cast as villain in the desired narrative, but maybe they’ll be back in a future episode.
the German Reichsbürger and their eccentric King Peter, who is reportedly inter alia some sort of manifestation of the Archangel Uriel.
This would make a hell of a television series. Might help those left bereft by the end of Game of Thrones to satisfy their cravings.
The Reichsbürger do sound more like powerless fantasists who deserve mention at the Hattery for their tinfoil headgear rather than in the Guardian as an existential threat to human civilization*. But we used to think that about Michigan’s militias as well.
* Or what the message is supposed to be. I’m really annoyed by that person quoted saying the Reichsbürger will use those rural properties to “create unsafe spaces” for vulnerable groups. I suppose it sounds really serious to the right sort of left, but it’s just bullshit. Describe the actual problem, you poser.
@hat
It took me a while to find this online, and I could not remember it word for word, but it is from the same collection and I think also relevant:
Bei der Lektüre eines spätgriechischen Dichters
In den Tagen, als ihr Fall gewiß war
Auf den Mauern begann schon die Totenklage
Richteten die Troer Stückchen grade, Stückchen
In den dreifachen Holztoren, Stückchen.
Und begannen Mut zu haben und gute Hoffnung.
Auch die Troer also …
Trond, so is this what you mean:
1. the current system is associated with certain economic and cultural developments.
2. people dissatisfied with these developments believe they can’t confront them withing the system.
3. they see authoritarian and illiberal rule as the only alternative
?
I meant to say that the allure of authoritarian politics (in the west) is — in my not very original political analysis — connected with the failure of politics-as-usual to deliver increased prosperity and opportunity to large parts of the population
There’s a fair bit of actual hard evidence supporting you (as I imagine you know very well): for example
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4160971
There’s little doubt in the UK but that the murderous* austerity policies of those lovely moderate Tories Cameron and Osborne caused enough of the support fro Brexit to make it actually happen.
* In the sense of having produced tens of thousands of actual excess deaths. (As reported in the notoriously Communist British Medical Journal.)
“I’m really annoyed by that person quoted saying the Reichsbürger will use those rural properties to “create unsafe spaces” for vulnerable groups”
I don’t know what bothers you, but I strongly associate fighting against “parallel societies” with totalitarian states. The article reads like pure evil*.
But it is true that I do identify certain German practices as totalitarian (attitudes to home-schooling).
*I usually look at the means, and only then the goal and person.
“There is also a strain of Messianic national purity among Hungarians and Russians, convinced that their culture is the final repository of the old European/Christian values and destined to be the vanguard of some restored pre modern Europe.‘
This is quite the opposite of what I’m seeing in Russia.
This is quite the opposite of what I’m seeing in Russia.
That’s encouraging then. Putin and TB1 propaganda certainly seem to try to promote the “Russia is unique” message, and that also tends to be what Putinversteher in the West profess to believe.
@drasvi: the problem with the Reichsbürger is simply that they think laws don’t apply to them, and that, in the last couple of years, some of them have gone from harmless tin-foil-heads setting up Imperial governments consisting of their drinking buddies in their living rooms to armed tin-foil-heads that actually have killed people. I don’t think that there’s a real danger that their plots to take over Germany will ever succeed, but there similarly was never a chance for the RAF terrorists in the 70s to cause a Communist revolution in Germany; they still were a public danger and had to be fought.
MMcM said: “plóg is pretty rare in Old English in the tool sense”
Isn’t attested at all in the tool sense as a standalone word in Old English, according to the OED (2006); their earliest citation for that sense is the Ormulum. Their etymology for plow n. is very long, detailed, and pessimistic about any conclusion even about whether the English word is inherited or borrowed from another Germanic language, let alone any further origin:
I was surprised that the origin of a word for something so old and familiar is so hard to find. As MMcM indicated, plow isn’t the original word, it’s a replacement, and the plow as we know it today doesn’t go back to antiquity. The word plow must have originally been a name for a new version, perhaps the one mentioned by Pliny, one of his hapaxes: “There has been invented, at a comparatively recent period, in that part of Gaul known as Rhætia, a plough with the addition of two small wheels, and known by the name of plaumorati.”
@Hans, thank you! I reacted at the article, and the author is concerned with “creating communities independent of the state”, “parallel societies” and buying property to use it for birthing houses etc.
Reichsbürger are basically Germany’s version of sovereign citizens.
“The majority of sovereign citizens are not violent.[2][12]”
…If it’s a Wanderwort of Rhaetic origin, we’re not going to find that out anytime soon. At least the /p/- is not an obstacle.
@drasvi: There’s a line between a) living a non-mainstream lifestyle and b) disregarding laws and trying to overthrow a democratic order. That line has to be monitored. It comes down to whether you trust your government to weed out dangerous movements while giving harmless non-mainstream groups space to exist. In my experience, the German authorities have been rather cautious to interfere, often ignoring dangerous developments until people were killed.
There’s a well-known (by now) rabbit hole that starts with looking for alternatives to the boring/bourgeois/corrupt “mainstream” narrative and ends with antisemitic/racist conspiracy theories. I don’t know how people stop their own slide; I guess it depends on native good sense.
starts with looking for alternatives to the boring/bourgeois/corrupt “mainstream” narrative and ends with antisemitic/racist conspiracy theories. I don’t know how people stop their own slide; I guess it depends on native good sense.
i don’t see how “good sense” could prevail against a rethink that makes sense. When you don’t like something, you negate it. Boring/bourgeois/corrupt becomes exciting/rebellious/pure-of-heart – that’s you of course. It’s been about you from the start. What’s not to like ?
As for anti-semitism and racist conspiracy theories – these are just fast food off the shelf. Franco American spaghetti with meatballs. Comfort food for the resentful. Bad for you and dangerous for others, but familiar.
There are lots of alternatives – TIL about the sovereign citizen bowel movement. Or Sufism, from Idries Shah’s first book (1964) that I had picked up somewhere and found today in my apartment. It has serious hippie drop-out appeal, along with Esalen etc. For those of a scientific bent there was, and is, eugenics.
You’re a decade or so behind the times. It used to be fun and fashionable to dismiss anti-semitism and racist conspiracy theories as comfort food for silly people, but it turns out (as with the denial of such a thing as “facts” and “reality,” even more fashionable not so long ago) that these things have actual real-world consequences for large numbers of people. If you believe in the real world, of course.
“Bad for you and dangerous for others, but familiar.” Seems like you overlooked that sentence of mine. I don’t see where fashion comes in. Except that fashionable people accuse other people of being behind the times.
Do you believe that I am conspiring to conceal
my “true views” ? Or that my failure to show outrage means I am indifferent ?
No, I just get the feeling you’re still in postmodern “it’s all a crock” mode. If I’m wrong, I apologize. Your forms of discourse are not always perspicuous.
I never said anything of the kind. I get along in the world just like everyone else does. I merely have no use for the notion of Reality used in an attempt to clinch arguments.
That does tend to rock the boat of many an intellectual, but they have plenty of other ruses to keep it afloat.
PlasticPaddy: “Gothic … plow (verb) = arjan (see Wulfila, Luke 17.7) from Latin”
Who says that’s from Latin? Kroonen and Ringe both say it’s native, with many Germanic cognates, including archaic English ear; the OED’s etymology for ear, v.1 also gives the Gothic verb as a Germanic cognate. It’s cognate to Latin arō at the PIE level, not borrowed. (See previous discussion of the verb ear and its replacement by plow in Germanic languages.)
Plow is one of Venneman’s claims of Punic in Proto-Germanic — which shows that it’s a famous mystery, making it a target for anybody with a new! iconoclastic! theory.
@kts
I said may; I should have asked it as a question. Maybe I had the idea that Germans became agriculturalists after and under the influence of Celts and Latins, and the traceability to P-G could be a case like “firewater”. Does one have to plow to cultivate grain and hops for beer?
Already the Indo-Europeans had agriculture; pure pastoralism is a later development. The earliest plows were scratch plows or ards (derived from the same root as arjan).
And IIRC, there is ample archeological evidence for agriculture among the Germanic people.
Stu:
I never said anything of the kind.
You may not have uttered “It’s all a crock” exactly, but that does often seem to be the message lightly concealed under your frequently obscure responses. An apparently automatic nihilation of whatever has been offered for consideration, as when I pointed out that a thread was really about metonym rather than metaphor (tongue being a metonym for language, rather than a metaphor) and you chose to undermine this, cryptically, as being an advance of any sort.
But we accept that from you – and I’m among the others here who proffer impenetrabilia, often gratuitously. (In my defence, I usually accompany any gnomic contribution with more considered and comprehensive analysis. Long-windedly? Yes. Quot commentatores, tot modi comminiscendi.)
grain and hops for beer
Hops is a newfangled addition to beer, “first mentioned in Europe around 822” says Wikipedia.
There’s a well-known (by now) rabbit hole that starts with looking for alternatives to the boring/bourgeois/corrupt “mainstream” narrative and ends with antisemitic/racist conspiracy theories.
Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle.
Me: I’m really annoyed by that person quoted saying the Reichsbürger will use those rural properties to “create unsafe spaces” for vulnerable groups. I suppose it sounds really serious to the right sort of left, but it’s just bullshit. Describe the actual problem, you poser.
In fairness, the actual quote:
I stand by my annoyance. “Creating spaces of fear” is bullshit. But I’ll allow that she may have been quoted selectively and that the article left out elements that are told by other means later in the article.
Also: Die Linke are the left wing authoritarians of Communist DDR heritage (and those willing to run with them). They have reportedly been contemplating the upside of broadening the appeal to anti-semitic and xenophobic voters themselves lately.
During the period when our Labour Party had an actual socialist as leader, not so long ago, the Tory propaganda machine mounted a highly effective campaign (much aided by useful idiots of various kinds) to besmirch the Party as institutionally antisemitic, especially the left wing thereof. While this was mostly black propaganda of the sort to which such people increasingly resort, unfortunately the propagandists were able to point to some quite real unequivocally antisemitic comments (and individuals); my daughter and I encountered evidence of this ourselves. (One such individual actually known to me has since gone back to the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Trotskyite organisation from which he sprang.)
Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle, indeed, but there are also some pretty stupid actual socialists out there.
drasvi: PS *orati (‘to plow’, from the same PIE source as Latin arō)
There was an excellent discussion of that, including its Russian descendant рало and its PIE ancestor, here under ONE SHLYAG PER RALO, with an erudite exchange between TR and Piotr Gąsiorowski — who pointed out that the Proto-Germanic noun *arþrą was also borrowed by Finnic languages.
I see that refugees again became a critically important political issue in Europe.
Can someone explain what happened?
The crisis was in 2015.
But Scholz is trying to stop the influx of refugees (and speaking of “the crisis”) now, Netherlands vote for I-hate-islam-not-Muslims cutie’s party now, and the same all over the place now…
As I grumble at Europe, I’ll calrify why.
First, I grumble at the European left. I don’t think Europe is worse than others – and no, I’m don’t like the European right.
Second, THE problem for me is situation of people (and refugees in particular) outside Europe. I mean, it is their problem, not Europe’s problem. I don’t see a solution for this problem (though I think a number of Very expensive things can be done about it) and I’m of course not going to tell Europe “just open the border”.
What I want is a more or less humane and serious discussion of this problem. Their problem.
And this is what I did not see back then and what I don’t see now.
Instead Europe focused on a much lesser issue and people began yelling at each other about refugees already in Europe. It seems the left treats this as an extension of the issue of immigrants in general (like, we should not be racist) and believed that its victory over the right in this question would mean preserving good moral character of Europe.
And I don’t think so, because the reaction with respect of the larger issue was ignoring it completely and instead focusing on the issue “people keep coming, Europe has a problem” and attempts to stop them. Well, that is a problem too (how you stop refugees), but it is Europe’s problem, and the way it was solved (like when the Sudanese RSF is doing it for Europe) is hardly compatible with good moral character.
As result Europe arrives to adopting the stance promoted by Russia, but manages to be very proud of itself.
Meanwhile the sort of discussion I want to see – which does NOT imply opening borders – perhaps could help with other issues.
Die Linke are the left wing authoritarians of Communist DDR heritage (and those willing to run with them). They have reportedly been contemplating the upside of broadening the appeal to anti-semitic and xenophobic voters themselves lately
To be fair to them, the most prominent group advocating that, led by Sahra Wagenknecht, has now left the party and begun the process of founding her own.
Ironically, the Left party is actually less doctrinaire and more pragmatic in the East, despite the continuity with the SED, as they actually have been involved in state governments there, than in the West, where their membership mostly consists of radicals for whom the SPD wasn’t left-wing enough.
I see that refugees again became a critically important political issue in Europe. Can someone explain what happened? The crisis was in 2015.
Here’s a searchable hint: Angela Merkel saying “wir schaffen das!” at a press conference.
If the idea is that Germany was supposed to do something, but failed to do it, I simply don’t know what.
The criticism I heard in 2015 was such that M. would have to make them all female and blonde.
I’m sorry, but I really don’t want this to turn into a general discussion of politics and the refugee problem. There are many places to engage in that sort of thing.
Joel’s Budapest-history posts have just gotten up to 1920 and the dismemberment of historical Hungary as punishment for being on the wrong side of the Great War. A linguistic topic the prior 19th-century posts did not reach that might be of interest is what impact that political/historical rupture had on the Hungarian language. To the extent there were post-Trianon changes in Hungarian as commonly/spoken and written in the new rump Hungary-Proper, were those followed more or less automatically by the Hungarian speakers now living across the border in Romania or Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavija or various successor states thereof, or not? Did any innovations start in these now over-the-border communities and then spread back the other way into Hungary proper? Did the cross-border spread or non-spread of innovations depend on whether or not they were perceived as politically motivated versus apolitical change/drift?
Excellent questions! I would guess they have been studied.
@LH, those people come from the region of my primary linguistic interest.
It is not an excuse, it is the actual reason why I prefer talking about them when the left starts bashing the right.
Well, feel free to talk about your primary linguistic interest. I do not care how you or anyone else feels about the left bashing the right.
You would expect more divergence in the dialects in what is now Ukraine and Romania as those were more isolated from the mother country under Soviet hegemony than the Slovak and Serbian communities. I would assume the Carpathian and Transylvanian variants of Hungarian differed significantly from Budapest standard even before 1918 simply because of geography.
I agree, that would make sense.
I have no prior acquaintance with the subject, but I happened to read about the Czángós and the Székelys just the other day, so here’s my expert testimony: The Czángó dialect of the Moldavian plain is archaic and full of Romanian loans, which makes it incomprehensible to most Hungarians. The Székely dialect of Transylvania is much closer to the standard — except for a large number of Romanian loans. There’s a middle dialect between the two, Székely Czángó or Moldavian Székely, which I think is spoken by Székely societies who ended up on the Romanian side and was left untouched by the Hungarian school system and standardization.
Székhelys! (That comment leads to a whole discussion of the Szekelys/Szeklers in a great thread that’s now almost twenty years old…)
I should have thought about checking that thread.
I guess I should quote a relevant bit (from zaelic):
I’m not an expert on this, but I have talked to Hungarians from Romania in the past. Both those that identify as Hungarian and those that identify as Székely Hungarian living in former Hungarian territories have had access to education in Hungarian ever since they are part of Romania. The language used was always the one from Hungary and they have been in contact with Hungary even during the communist period( with the biggest restrictions after the uprising in Hungary). Dialectal differences exist before Trianon, with the Szekely one having a bit more Romanian loans then the non-Szekely Transylvanian Hungarian dialect. The loans are mostly related to animal husbandry and some plant names.
Csángós are in a very different situation, the biggest group living in the region of Moldova, have not been a part of any Hungarian state since they moved there at some point in the Middle Ages. There was never formal Hungarian education there so their language miss most of the words created in the 19th century by people like Ferenc Kazinczy. There has been a lot of assimilatory pressure starting in the last 200 years, so the dialect(s) are both very archaic for Hungarians and also much more influenced by Romanian. The north Czango dialect is the most influence by Romanian as it seems the oldest in the region. Romania has in general very good minority rights but the situation regarding Csángós and their language is an exception(Aromanian is ironically the other big exception). Their language is not recognized so there is no education either in their dialect or Hungarian. They are Catholic but the Catholic Church in Moldova has been historically mostly opposed to the use of Hungarian, both in the past (when it was controlled by Italian priests) and later one when they were Romanian speakers.
Going by Hungarian dialectology and philology, both Csángó and Székely are meanwhile still surprizingly modern — they look like they might’ve split from the Pannonian mainline as late as circa 1500–1600 (though we know they’ve been there longer). The late-medieval vowel chain shift applies in full, apocope applies in full, several consonant innovations are shared with eastern Pannonian dialects, neo-cases are around in about their full extent… most of the archaicity is just due to missing out on all the 19th century reforms of literary Hungarian.
I still keep wanting to do a dig for actual early medieval Proto-Hungarian archaisms some day, since it looks to me like there’s not been a lot of looking for them happening, despite e.g. sociolinguistics-based claims going sometimes as far as treating Csángó as a distinct sister language.
Strange! I would have thought Hungarian linguists would have been looking for those for as long as there have been Hungarian linguists.
I too find it odd how little interest Hungarology shows in reconstructing anything else about Old Hungarian than the pronunciation of its meagre attestations (a repeatedly rehashed topic); somehow the Germanicist, Slavicist, Fennicist etc. fervor to comb over The Dialects for little hints about history never took hold there, and most dialectology work has been content to just list synchronic differences from Standard Hungarian.
Perhaps one reason is because it is quite fast clear that on most topics, comparative dialectology of Hungarian doesn’t get you as far back as the study of the oldest medieval literature, but surely this cannot be the whole of it! Probably a story to be written by someone more proficient in the development of linguistics in Hungary.
Is Hungarian suffering the same misfortune as Greek and Turkish (per Nick Nicholas) — dialects that have been left underresearched for nationalistic reasons?
(I’m trolling for a bulbulous rant here.)
For an Englishman ‘poet’ is a natural English word – only educated people knew that it is derived from the Latin poeta.
Except it isn’t: it’s from Middle French, and has been part of English since at least 1382. The name Baldewinus le poet first appears in the 13C, but it’s unclear if it is Anglo-Norman or Middle English. Back then it might have been quite alien-seeming to good old Englishmen.
The good archaic (and grandiose) English word for “poet” is maker/makar, which may have lasted longer in Scots, as see Dunbar’s famous https://poets.org/poem/lament-makaris.
The *really* old English word for poet was scop, which is in Beowulf.
A good English word would be leethwright, which was apparently actually adopted for Anglish.
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s 2022 film R.M.N. is a pretty accurate replaying of an incident in 200 in the Székely town of Ditrău / Ditro, in which the local Székely Hungarians (informed by a diet of Viktor Orban state-controlled imported cable Hungarian TV propaganda preaching about the evil of “migrants”) attacked and attempted to drive out some Sri Lankans hired by a local bakery. The bakery was pressured by the mayor to keep its wages low so as not to attract outsiders – Romanians – to work in the predominantly Székely Harghita county, thus diluting the Hungarian majority.
The film takes full advantage of the multilingualism of Transylvania, with characters speaking Romanian and Hungarian to each other simultaneously, with plenty of Székely accents on parade. My only qualm was that as far as I know, you wouldn’t find that many Romanian speakers in Ditró (the film was actually filmed in the much prettier town of Torocko in southern Transylvania.) Székely doesn’t actually have more Romanian loans in its vocabulary than the Hungarian of other Transylvanian regions, in fact, it probably uses loans even less. Some terms are widely identified as “Transylvania-isms”: ‘murok’ for ‘sargarepa’ (carrot) and ‘pityoka’ for ‘krumpli'(potato), ‘laska’ for noodles for example
Last Saturday I chanced to stop by the Grolier Club, as one does. After seeing the exhibit I had come to see, I noticed in the lobby a case full of club-sponsored publications, one of which was titled _Iter Ungaricum_, which is apparently an account of a 2014 “bibliographical” tour of Hungary undertaken by various members and/or associates of the club. Googling suggests there aren’t a whole lot of copies floating around out there, but it seems like the sort of book that would be of interest to those who are interested in that sort of thing, who might be more numerous at the Hattery than in most other settings. Whether the tour was confined to the current borders of Hungary or also took in relevant libraries/archives/private-collections in the more far-flung pre-Trianon provinces is not known to me.
“Membership [in the Grolier Club] is by nomination, and recommendations for membership are made on the basis of a candidate’s passion for books, as demonstrated by his or her outstanding activity as a collector, scholar, librarian, printer, or participation in some other bookish pursuit.” Historical linguistics is certainly a bookish pursuit. However, the nomination must be by a member, and in writing (naturally), and supported by at least three other members. No mention of money is made publicly, nor is there any talk of what is done at the dark of the moon.
Zaelic: “Transylvania-isms”: ‘murok’ for ‘sargarepa’ (carrot) and ‘pityoka’ for ‘krumpli'(potato), ‘laska’ for noodles
Interesting! Per Wiktionary, murok is a Slavic loanword (so is répa), and the Slavic source is “Of uncertain cognateship” to the Germanic family that includes German (regional) Möhre and English more; OED: “Originally: an edible root, as a carrot or parsnip. Later gen.: the root of a tree or plant; the fibrous roots of a tap root, etc. Also: tree stump. Now chiefly English regional (south-western) and Newfoundland”.
Is there any etymology for pityóka? Krumpli is from a Bavarian form of Grundbirne.
Laska is a well-traveled word that radiated out from Persian in various directions; see Charles Perry’s description quoted here under DAVIDSON’S COMPANION TO FOOD. Hungarian might have gotten it via a Slavic or Turkic language.
At least it’s not likely to have dialectologists that can’t fucking hear the phonetic innovations or retentions of the dialects, a misfortune Greek has (per Nick Nicholas, under the headline “Pantelidis”).
That looks like German Schöffe “juror” – one who creates (schaffen ~ schöpfen) judgments instead of poems, I guess.
That looks Slavic, BTW.
Murok:
Croatian is “mrkva” (fem.) with the Croatian Encyclopaedic Dictionary giving the etymology *mbrky (note: b = yer).
Bulgarian & Macedonian is “morkov” (masc.).
Serbian is “šargarepa”.
Slovene is “korenje”.
Re Orban & Orbanites.
A thing that really frightens me is the widespread promotion and use of the pre-1914 map of Hungary. This is the map that wipes Vojvodina and Slovakia off the map and includes large parts of Croatia and Romania inside a Revived Hungary.
No one in the EU institutions (or in “The West”) seems to be particularly bothered by this revisionism and revanchism.
Well, what is Orbán going to do? Start a war?
@DM
Well, what is Orban going to do? I’d defer to others who know a lot more about him.
The question to ask though, when you see Orban and other government officials stand in front of pre-1914 maps, is why?
Perhaps conquering Austria would be a good first step to restoring the Empire.
@dm
Re Orban I defer to our host’s request to avoid further debate, re pityoka, have you considered borrowing of *patát, followed by vowel change and re-suffixing, say, *patát > *pitát > *pitóka > pityóka? Bulbul could say if this is possible.
Is there any etymology for pityóka?
In addition to the entry here in the online Új magyar etimológiai szótár, there is some more explicit speculation on this page here.
Well, what is Orbán going to do? Start a war?
After Kickl becomes Bundeskanzler and Austria leaves the EU this year, presumably Austria, Hungary and Slovakia will team up in some sort of populist right wing “European Confederacy” and live off cheap Russian gas forever. Maybe Serbia will join them. So Orban has a clear path to getting Felvidek, Őrvidék, Bacska and part of Banat back.
That would arguably mean not getting them back and instead organize potential enemies into a transnational system where formal national sovereignty of/over any piece of land or ethnic group is of minor significance. It’s a brilliant idea, and I wish someone had thought of it before.
For various reasons of history and perhaps national character, Austria is not and never has been a member of NATO. So reacquiring the stolen so-called “Burgenland” therefrom would seem the least risky opening move for Trianon revisionism. Ukraine is also not a NATO member, so maybe reacquiring the formerly Hungarian territory stolen by Stalin* and currently under Ukrainian occupation on that basis would seem more straightforward than any such move involving e.g. Transylvania or Slovakia, but I expect there could be other risks there. Serbia is likewise friendless in NATO, but since Vanya suggests a potential alliance maybe the future of the Vojvodina/Vajdasag can be politely deferred for some future negotiation.
*Stalin to be precise stole it from Czechoslovakia, to whom it had somewhat randomly been given at Versailles at Hungary’s expense, but Czechoslovakia no longer exists, and neither Czechia-as-such or Slovakia-as-such has IMHO a particularly good irredentist claim to the territory in question.
You’re all thinking too small here. A true Hungarian irredentist would be trying to liberate their Khanty and Mansi brothers in western Siberia, thus making Greater Hungary self-sufficient in energy production and obviating the need to appease Putin, while extending the EU past the Urals. After that essential first step is completed, they can move on to freeing the Magyarab of the upper Nile.
Tomorrow the world!
the formerly Hungarian territory stolen by Stalin* and currently under Ukrainian occupation
I had a colleague who, if he were still around, would object strenuously to at least the phrase “under Ukrainian occupation.” He was descended from members of the sizable majority of Podkarpatskie (?) that speak Ukrainian.
@Rodger: there was and is a sometimes strongly-held diversity of opinion among the relevant ethnolinguistic group (leaving aside the residual number of Magyar-speakers etc. in the territory in question) as to whether they are just a regional variety of Ukrainians or their own thing. This often correlates with political opinions, although obviously between the two World Wars many might have held to the opinion “I would be happy to be part of a Ukrainian nation-state not controlled by Moscow and not controlled by Communists, but since that’s not currently on offer rule from Prague seems the least-bad option.”
Suffice it to say that I do not think “Stalin took the territory away from some other country and reallocated it to our predecessor-in-interest” is ever a morally legitimate basis for sovereignty over territory. There are, of course, often good prudential arguments why undoing a particular historical injustice cannot be done at this late date without creating new troubles and injustices which make it better on net to just leave things alone.
It is passing strange that Stalin and his henchmen (not excluding some Ukrainian nationalists who had previously had a very negative relationship with Stalin) did not ethnically-cleanse Magyars from relevant parts of the territory newly allocated to the Ukrainian SSR with quite the same thoroughness as they ethnically cleansed Poles from other parts of ditto. Perhaps an oversight?
I suspect it’s a continuation of the traditional Russian prejudice against Poles that I discussed here; I don’t think Russia has ever cared very much one way or the other about Hungarians. Also, Poland was literally right next door and thus presented a clear and present danger; Hungary was separated from the USSR by Romania, so Soviet citizens of Hungarian descent had no easy way to betray the Soviet Union.
@hat: there was between the end of WW2 and the dissolution of the USSR a short (about 85 miles long) direct Soviet-Hungary border, now a Ukraine-Hungary border, with some Hungarian-speaking villages stranded on the Soviet/Ukrainian side of it rather than forcibly removed. I expect that back in ’56 the Soviet tanks rolled right across that border rather than seeking to transit Romania or some other vassal state.
The failure of the border to match up perfectly with ethnicity has been of some recent geopolitical relevance, because the current Ukrainian government, being nationalists, have not consistently respected the traditional national-minority rights of the residual along-the-border Magyar population (e.g. regarding the treatment of Hungarian-medium-of-instruction schools in relevant communities), thus giving the current Hungarian government an excuse for being unsupportive of the Ukrainian cause. (Orban may well have had independent reasons to be unsupportive, but this was an issue where a less “controversial” Hungarian government would probably also have felt obligated to complain, making it imprudent of the Ukrainians to give Orban such a cover story for his other possible motives.)
One possible theory is that the Kyiv government really just wanted to crack down on any alleged minority rights of L1 Russophones along their eastern border but thought it would be a better look if they cracked down equally on other groups like the Magyarphones along the western border who were not posing any equivalent political/security headache.
a continuation of the traditional Russian prejudice against Poles
I would argue otherwise. The Czechs and Slovaks of Subcarpathia were similarly exchanged for the Ukrainians of Slovakia under a reciprocal optation agreement of 1945. In contrast, Soviet Union’s Germans, Hungarians, or Bulgarians weren’t sent to the respective Eastern Block countries, because there weren’t resident Eastern Slavic populations there for such a population exchange. It sounds like Stalin was largely motivated by the grand plan of gathering all the “greater and lesser Russians” under one tent, and used “optation” as a passable pretext for deporting the “East Slavic brethren” to the USSR. (And if he really disliked a specific ethnic group, then he’d generally send it to Siberia or Central Asia rather than to a different country)
Tellingly, some Poles had to stay (specifically the rural Poles of the Wilno Strip, who are still there), clearly because they were too hard to replace under the rules of “titular nation replacement”.
That makes sense.
PS: the Soviet “gathering-under-one-roof” policy was largely modeled after the Reich’s population-exchange agreements with the USSR which followed the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. The Nazis sought to bring the Volksdeutsche into the fold, and it was framed as a population exchange, in which over 300,000 ethnic Germans from the former Polish, Romanian, and Baltic nations lands were sent to Germany “in exchange” for a much smaller population of the German-occupied Poland (including up to 20,000 Jews; it is reported that Moscow was entitled to receive more, but wasn’t interested). A very large German population of Northern Bukovina was uprooted then.
The scale of the 1945-1946 Soviet population exchanges with Czechoslovakia was comparably small, but not at all trivial. It involved about 25,000 Ukrainians and Rusins vs. 33,000 Czechs and Slovaks (not just from Subcarpathia but also from Volyn).
https://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/analit06.php
@J.W. Brewer: The big Soviet armies in the Carpathian Military District were indeed the ones that were sent directly to pacify the rebellious Soviet vassals in both Operation Whirlwind in 1956 and Operation Danube in 1968. However, in 1968, the Soviets were also accompanied by nominal forces from the other surrounding Warsaw Pact countries, and they also moved some of their forces south from East Germany to Prague.
I appreciate Dmitry’s clarification. Which of course suggests that “Czechoslovakia” may have a better irredentist claim to Podkarpatská Rus than I had imagined, but we still have the potential problem that the claim does not clearly belong either to Czechia or to Slovakia (although he does not break down the 33,000 who were expelled between C’s & S’s and I suppose it’s quite possible that the records of the time didn’t either).
>> Stalin was largely motivated by the grand plan of gathering all the “greater and lesser Russians” under one tent
>The failure of the border to match up perfectly with ethnicity has been of some recent geopolitical relevance… giving the current Hungarian government an excuse
For me, it was interesting to realize the degree to which the post-WWII adjustments to the borders of Belarus and Ukraine did match pre-WWI rural language communities (at least where they were contiguous), since I’d had a simplistic belief that it was merely “stolen by Stalin” as someone put it above. Also, that the Polish presence in these lands helped align Russian chauvinism and communist class analysis, since the Poles in these lands were not only different linguistically, but typically present as aristocrats and to a lesser degree townspeople.
How to define the mixture of reason and excuse that provided, I think everyone has to judge on their own.
What were the reasons/excuses for keeping a handful of small, inconsequential Magyar-speaking regions contiguous with Hungary as part of Ruthenian/Ukrainian/Little Russian Subcarpathia, since it does stand out. The demand for autonomy had always been a thorn for Moscow. Why create a new problem? Were there strong administrative motives for keeping the district together? Just difficult to be bothered defining the line more rigorously from the vantage of Moscow, London and Washington? To what degree did the Russians consider their SSRs different from their vassal states in 1945?
but we still have the potential problem that the claim does not clearly belong either to Czechia or to Slovakia
Czechia and Slovakia have a nice west-to-east division of the long thin strip that was Czechoslovakia, fairly cleanly separated by
Jožin’s swampsthe Biele Karpaty. As it happens, Podkarpatská continues the far eastern edge of the Slovakian half, so it presumably would have belonged to Slovakia.Another motivation for expelling Poles more thoroughly than Hungarians from territory being reallocated to the Ukrainian SSR might have been that it may have seemed less certain to Stalin et al. as of 1945 that Poland would definitely have a Soviet-puppet government than that Hungary would – Stalin had made some promises to the U.S. and U.K. about free elections in Poland that he of course had absolutely no intention of honoring but he would still have been aware that the political future of Poland was of some continuing interest to the West in a way that the political future of Hungary (for a variety of reasons, including the failure of the Horthy regime to side with the Allies ..) was not. Maybe the difference was overdetermined because there are multiple sufficient reasons for it? At a minimum there were stronger motivations to be thorough with the expulsion of Poles and whether someone would actually put in the effort to be equally thorough with the Magyars could have gone either way.
>>What were the reasons/excuses for keeping a handful of small, inconsequential Magyar-speaking regions contiguous with Hungary as part of Ruthenian/Ukrainian/Little Russian Subcarpathia, since it does stand out. The demand for autonomy had always been a thorn for Moscow. >>
I’m not sure they cared that much about it. They probably just went with the existing borders. For example, in 1940 the Soviet Union demanded and later occupied a number of regions from Romania. All of them are now either part of Ukraine or the Rep of Moldova. The arguments used where historical (former Russian empire province of Bessarabia)and ethnic (North Bukovina, not part of any Slavic state since at least the 1300’s but majority Ukrainian since around the late 18th century). At the same time a small area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertsa_region) that was almost entirely Romanian(still is 93% Romanian) and never part of the Russian Empire was also occupied. There was never any real arguments provided on why they did it. The legend in Romania is that they used a thick pencil to draw the borders and claimed everything covered by the thick line.
It means he wants to keep his supporters angry; if they’re not angry, they’re not supporting him. I won’t automatically default to “he just wants to keep his supporters angry and doesn’t believe his own bullshit”; that’s after all pretty much what I believed about Putin. Still, so far, he’s neither doing anything in that direction, nor could he as far as I can see.
Plausible, alas.
No way. A majority for a blue-turquoise coalition is one thing; a majority for Öxit is quite another.
The Internationale of the Nationalists is already a thing in the EU parliament. Kickl’s FPÖ is a member.
The proximate reason is very simple: Austria’s constitution doesn’t allow it to join NATO. Neutrality means joining any military alliances, even purely defensive ones like NATO, is forbidden.
The proximate reason for neutrality is equally simple: it was the price for the Soviet occupation of the northern and eastern part of the country to end in 1955.
I’m not saying national character doesn’t fit it; but currently it sounds more like an attempt to justify the neutrality rather than like a cause of it.
Fun fact: last millennium, the very same FPÖ wanted Austria to abandon neutrality and join NATO. I guess they wanted 1) to fight per se, like the Proud Boys, and 2) to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Germany.
At this point, one more army fighting in Sudan and/or South Sudan wouldn’t make much of a difference to the general level of suffering there, I guess.
That looks Polish. 🙂 The current область is called Закарпаття, widely and accurately translated as “Transcarpathia”.
Yes, the deal struck in 1955 was that Austria would be more or less, as we call it in English, “Finlandized.” However, Finland proper has now officially stopped being Finlandized and joined NATO, in one of Putin’s more striking-if-unintended foreign policy accomplishments. I don’t know if the Finns had to amend their constitution or not, but if they needed to, they did.
(This is not to imply that I think that the post-Cold-War NATO or its semi-random expansion in recent decades make any particularly coherent sense – it would IMHO have been better to declare victory in the early Nineties, shut the thing down, and then come up with new mutual security arrangements for new circumstances. But I don’t want to turn the thread in that direction.)
Whether “Trans-” is the right preposition for -carpathia sort of depends on which direction you’re viewing the area from, which is why the East Slavic names don’t calque cleanly into the traditional Hungarian/Slovak/etc. names. The respective namers were on different sides of the mountains.
@ZD, Hertsa wasn’t the only Soviet land grab beyond the historical boundaries of the annexed historically Ukrainian / Ruthenian historical provinces, which created compact minority-population areas abutting the borders with their national homelands. A 12-village belt of Slovakia was included in Soviet Transcarpathia in 1945 despite its being on the Slovakian side of the traditional Subcarpathia-Slovakia border.
But it played out very differently than in Hertsa, both because of Czechoslovakia’s allied-nation status and because of the “optations” which ensued. First, the Soviets transferred one Subcarpathian village to Slovakia to structure the land grab as a “territory exchange” (however lopsided), and then, of course, the villagers were uprooted and sent across the border in population exchanges.
@JWB – there were compact areas of settlement of Polish peasants within the post-WWII Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian borders. In Lithuania and Belarus, Polish peasants were generally ordered to stay during the optation, because there weren’t enough potential settlers of the titular ethnic groups to take over. Only urban and upper-class Poles ended up deported. In Ukraine, however, Poles of all social layers had to go.
Transcarpathian Hungarians seem to have been very well off and influential in the Soviet times, a subject of envy rather than a suspect of disloyalty.
The only “optation” in the OED (entry revised 2004) is (Now rare) 1.a. The action of wishing; a wish, a desire. Now literary; 1.b. † Rhetoric. An exclamation expressing a wish. Obsolete; 2. † An inclination, a preference. Obsolete. rare. Is there some non-English word you’re rendering that way?
оптация is supposedly “expressing a desire for a country of citizenship and residence when a territory passes from a nation to a nation” except that during and after WWII the “voluntary choice” was done under the muzzle of rifles. The Russian wikipedia page says that “optation” is an English equivalent.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%BF%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F
The word may be googled alongside with citizenship, e.g. https://immigrantinvest.com/blog/citizenship-by-naturalization-en/, but mostly in Eastern European sources.
The concept is known historically in the U.S. E.g., the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the Mexican War via Mexico ceding lots of territory to the U.S., gave Mexican citizens in the ceded lands the right to choose to relocate to still-Mexico (where the Mexican government would supposedly give them land) or to stay put,* become U.S. citizens, and have the U.S. recognize (subsequent practice may have not always perfectly matched the theory here) whatever rights to whatever real estate they had held under Mexican law. But I would be mildly surprised if even scholarly discussions of how this shook out post-war as the various affected individuals made their choices used the word “optation” to describe it.
*Most stayed put and there was no particular pressure to drive them out, perhaps in part because the U.S. authorities correctly predicted that in most areas (parts of New Mexico being a notable exception) the formerly-Mexican-citizen population would soon be demographically swamped by newly-arriving Anglos.
I can add a rambling family story where the poor optants play a big role. It’s from the time when the Prusses were still watchmakers. One branch of the clan, with aunt Dasha and her growing family, was on the run from the 1937 Terror and finally outran the henchmen, but lost everything along the way. They were just starting to put down roots in Pushkino in the far suburbs of Moscow and their house was still unfinished when the war broke out. They fled on the Black Day October 16 1941 when Moscow was supposed to fall to the Nazis but hung by the thread. They lost the youngest of the kids to infection on the “evacuation” transport East. When they were finally allowed to return, only a foundation was still left of the house. The neighbors stole everything.
But Dasha’s oldest daughter married a Polish People’s Army officer and was moving to Poland, and she reported that Western Ukraine’s Poles are being “optated” out and they sell their properties and belongings for a pittance. So Dasha sold the suburban plot with the half-broken foundation of the house, went to Lvov and discovered that they could buy a mansion there with this money. And the prices were falling by the day. Alas, they shopped for too long, and the long arm of the Soviet government caught up with them with yet another monetary reform (read, confiscation of cash). But even after losing most of their savings, they were still able to buy a nice 2 bedroom apartment midtown from a destitute optant.
I love your family stories! And yes, it looks like “optation” is one of those words used only by people whose native language includes a word that would be cognate to it if it existed in modern English.
“It is passing strange that Stalin and his henchmen (not excluding some Ukrainian nationalists who had previously had a very negative relationship with Stalin) did not ethnically-cleanse Magyars…”
One of the striking things about Zakarpatska oblast during the Soviet era and beyond is that the ethnic Hungarians and Romanians often used Russian as the language of interethnic community. That Stalin did not immediately drive the Hungarian and Romanian population across the border is curious. However, perhaps the multiethnic mix that ensued, with Russia as one of the main languages spoken, was eventually viewed as a check on Ukrainian nationalism?
That’s what I used to think, and it seems to be what the original plan was. But apparently the Baltic countries and perhaps Poland came begging to Clinton to keep NATO up and let them join it because they were afraid that the end of communism had uncorked Russian nationalism (as was already happening with the Yugoslav nationalisms), so Russian imperialism was about to make a comeback.
Indeed, in the 1991 referendum on independence, only 93% of Zakarpattia and Chernivtsi (the other region with Romanian-speaking places) voted for independence, compared to 95% upwards in the rest of western Ukraine… evidently there were people who figured Moscow was at a relatively safe distance while Kyiv was potentially too close for comfort.
family stories
I omitted the best part of this tale because it didn’t relate to Poles (although aunt Dasha’s husband, Misha the watchmaker, was originally Polish national … but he escaped as a teenager during Polish-Russian War of the early 1920s, fleeing the nationalist government’s crackdown on Jewish leftists. They met in Vitebsk attending college preparing Yiddish teachers for grade schools). Anyway the craziest part happened when they were hiding in a shed in late summer and fall of 1937, waiting for the hunt for more Terror victims to subside. Uncle Misha strongly felt that he was unjustly accused and that he must go to the authorities to appeal. In fact their nephew Isaac Pruss had just done so, and paid with his life for his naiveté. But Misha was dead set to go fight for justice, and to stop him, his wife took away his pants. They lived to tell.
My god, the stories you have! You should write a book.
All glory, laud, and honor to Aunt Dasha’s superior understanding of the actual political topography and what courses of action were accordingly sensible versus foolish. I may cut-and-paste this and forward it to my wife, to encourage her to take away my pants before I do anything excessively self-destructive.
I’ve already passed the instructive anecdote on to my wife, who is authorized to take such measures as needed.
an interesting anecdote on the Subcarpathian annexation, from L’incorporation de l’Ukraine subcarpathique à l’Ukraine soviétique, Vasyl Markus, by way of Magocsi’s A History of Ukraine:
>They brought us in long lines to the Victory movie house (it was called Scala at the time) to look at films.
>We arrived. The hall was quite full, because they had brought in people from other organizations. First the mayor of Mukachevo, comrade Dragula, greeted us. He opened the so-called meeting with the words: ‘Comrades, we have gathered here together for a very important purpose; we want to break away from bourgeois Czechoslovakia and unite Subcarpathian Rus’ in the framework of a great country, the Soviet Union, with its peaceloving capital Moscow. Whoever is for this, raise your hand.’
>The hall was stunned. And since it was so quiet, the mayor said: ‘Comrades, silence means approval. We have unanimously adopted the manifesto for the union of Transcarpachia with the Soviet Union. We will address a telegram to that effect to comrade Stalin.’
(Transcarpachia is direct from the book. Is that a French transliteration?)
When I copied from the Kindle book of Magocsi, it brought a formal citation with it. Claudine Gay and Bill Ackman’s wife might both have been better served if they were compiling their dissertation notes from Kindle books.
Really.
No. It might be an English rendering of -ття [tːɕa], but in that case I don’t know why the prefix is translated…
Mayor Dragula was a Ruthenian of Russophile orientation
…huh.
I later googled and decided Transcarpachia was just a typo. Magosci’s book was one of only 4 or 5 hits.
hail aunt dascha!
“Transylvania-isms”: ‘murok’ for ‘sargarepa’ (carrot) and ‘pityoka’ for ‘krumpli'(potato), ‘laska’ for noodles for example
and just throwing in the yiddish parallels, which as far as i know hold for transylvania: מער / mer [carrots] and לאָקשן / lokshn [noodles]. i assume “mer” passed through german on its way from something slavic.
and regarding orban’s maps:
my travelling buddy and i realized far too late (late july in sofia, i think) in our 2002 trip to eastern europe that we’d screwed up by not immediately starting to collect irredentist map postcards. they were everywhere, especially in hungary and bulgaria – and we didn’t even make it to anywhere in former yugoslavia (where, judging by the t-shirts that show up to brass shows in nyc, there are more varieties of irredentist map per nationality than anywhere else).
I would definitely go to a hipster NYC gallery exhibit of irredentist maps, whether on postcards, t-shirts, or more conventional map-paper. It’s been a long time since you could get many American voters riled up with a slogan like “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” but we are of course a very old country by European standards. Although maybe there are some Reconquista-of-Aztlan t-shirts out there?
I wonder if there is potential for irredentist maps of Wales?
England, Scotland and France, obviously … bits of Spain … all of north Italy* … Austria … Turkey …
Not Ireland. We just converted them.
* We still honour that great Welsh poet Virgil.
@rozele, children memorialized Dasha Zigelman nee Pruss as Hadassah, like Smart Queen Esther, and I quit trying to tell them that no such Biblical name was in circulation in the ancestral Lubavicher shtetle of Gorodok. There was no ketubah obviously, and birth records are all lost, but there were other Dasha’s in the local community, and when a Hebrew name connection can be made, it’s invariably Judith (Yudasa). But the myrtle tree legend is too sweet to give up.
DE: Anywhere anyone called Vlachs exist, or is rumored to have existed, is fair game.
Well, a Danish king was also king of England, so all of Britain, the US and the Empire should rightfully recognize our future King Frederick X as their monarch. (Declamation is scheduled for this Sunday, so we don’t expect complications to arise). I think I had something lined up for the hispano- and luso-phones back when I had more time to spend on ideas like that, but it’s lost now. Except that the US obviously regards Latin America as their vassals-at-need.
The deal in 1917 whereby the then-King of Denmark sold all rights in and to the former Dansk Vestindien (now the U.S. Virgin Islands) to the U.S. for $25 million in gold might plausibly be thought to have waived any extraneous Danish claims to other U.S. territory. It doesn’t say so explicitly in the text of the treaty, but some sources say that it was understood (although it likewise doesn’t say so explicitly) that various prior U.S. objections to Denmark’s claim to exercise sovereignty over the entirety of Greenland were withdrawn as part of the bargain.
I have no counterargument ready to hand to offer to Danish irredentism on behalf of the British, though.
I’m fairly sure DE will explain that they can’t have Wales.
Hmm. Now I’m curious as to whether Welsh contains any lexemes that are ultimately loanwords of Old Norse origin. I’m pretty sure the Q-Celtic languages do (as does English, of course).
Wiktionary has a category for “Welsh terms derived from Old Norse”. Some are modern and some are borrowed via English (or could come from one of several Germanic languages), but some may be direct; notably _marchnad_ for ‘market’ where the -n- only seems explicable from there. Iarll for ‘earl’ also seems plausible.
Well, there’s sgert, for a start, though counting loans from modern English is probably cheating.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are older loans, though I can’t actually think of any offhand. There are a fair few loans from MIddle English, and (surprisingly) even from Old English (you’d have thought that the Britons would have been too busy fighting the English at that point to borrow vocabulary from them.)
[ninja’d by Gwenllian. I should have thought of iarll. GPC traces marchnad to Latin, as you’d expect, but does indeed say “cf H. Nor” about the -n-. I think the rch for *rk thing is pretty old in Brythonic, so I suspect that the Welsh is a sort of blend or contamination with the Old Norse rather than a simple loan; that would explain why GPC is noncommittal about it.]
Iarll is certainly old in Welsh, too:
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iarlles_y_Ffynnon
(There doesn’t seem to be an English WP version, though there is a French one for the benefit of all you Russian-speaking Hatters.)
Cornish had marghas and Breton has marc’had for “market”, incidentally, which goes with the notion that it’s a Latin loan that has got altered by analogy with Norse rather than a Norse loan as such. (Even that strikes me as rather speculative: my forebears were quite capable of mangling their loanwords on their own initiative, without outside help.)
you’d have thought that the Britons would have been too busy fighting the English at that point to borrow vocabulary from them
They probably took the vocabulary as spoils of war 🙂
I should have specified loanwords from ON directly into Middle-or-whatever Welsh, rather than via one or more indirect conduits, since the former might suggest something about historical contact that the latter wouldn’t.