Magyar's Main Modernizer

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 109-111, 115:

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. There were many others involved in what amounted to a cultural revolution, but Kazinczy was the practical genius and chief organizer of the so-called ‘Revival Movement’. Antal Szerb in his magnificent History of Hungarian Literature described him as ‘a dictator of literary life’ – though another twentieth-century admirer, the writer László Németh, called Kazinczy ‘the telephone switchboard’.

The revival of the language was the focus of his life. Kazinczy was the leader of the ‘neologists’ who invented modern Hungarian. They transformed the grammar, standardized the syntax, enriched the vocabulary, produced dictionaries and lexicons, and gave new life to a moribund tongue. 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.

There had been a few brilliant exceptions from the Early Middle Ages onwards, but Kazinczy and his collaborators knew that in reality, at this point, there was very little literature in Hungarian. The literary language was German. Few in the poorer classes were literate. Most of the nobles and the tiny middle class, those who were literate, read in German and spoke in German within their family or social circle – and governed in Latin. Alone in Europe, Latin was the official language in Hungary, used in the courts and the bureaucracy. In the rest of the Habsburg Empire, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the official language was German – ‘We don’t govern the Empire, we administer it, and we do so in German,’ said Metternich. In Buda and Pest, Hungarian was the language of the poor and of some townsfolk – which gave them access, if they could read at all, only to a limited and largely folkloric literature.[See Note.] Hungarian was also the language of the minority of the 8.5 million people living in Hungary; only about 37 per cent of the population, according to the first census conducted in Hungary in 1787, were ethnic Magyars.

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.

NOTE: One language reformer, the writer Izidor Guzmics, was a well-known salon wit in Pest and sent a note to the palatine, reminding him of one of his distinguished Habsburg forebears, the sixteenth-century Emperor Charles V, who according to legend spoke French to his friends, German to his horse, Italian to his mistress, Spanish to God and English to the birds. ‘Had he known Magyar doubtless he would have spoken Hungarian to his enemies,’ Guzmics wrote.