From Free media library

An essay of Dr. József Végvári, in his own translation. Publicated in Hungarian in the work below.

TAKE UP THE CUDGELS IN DEFENCE OF HUNGARIAN!

In the sixteenth year after the change of regime the corruption of our mother-tongue as well as our national consciousness has reached an extent for which it is no longer sufficient to declare resounding slogans – we must take action. The academic societies for the promotion of Hungarian do not fulfil their task, first because they do not even recognize the increasing contamination of our language through linguistic refuse glutting our mother-tongue every day from the direction of Anglo-Saxon countries, secondly because they make use of soft and ineffective means, reducing their activities to minor grammatical and stylistic corrections, and thirdly because they separate artificially the cause of language improvement from national consciousness, trying to cultivate the language from an „ideologically neutral” aspect of which we want no more. We can hardly hope to get any support from the political leadership or the media since (with few exceptions) they continue to cooperate in destroying the most sacred values seriously damaged during Communist rule: our national consciousness, family life, faith in God, self-respect and folk traditions. We now appeal to all who cannot and will not resign themselves to these proc-esses, who believe that we can put a stop to them.

The first thing is to become aware of what exactly we want to defend. For unique (and deplorable) historical and ideological reasons neither formal education nor scientific research are capable of presenting the peculiarities and special values of our mother-tongue (and folk-culture) that mark them off sharply from the neighbouring Indo-European languages and cultures, whose systems and traditions are entirely different. These values are not recognized even by students and teachers of Hungarian, who cannot for this reason be expected to defend or argue for them or bring them home to others. It is owing to the so-called „research in organic culture” begun thirty years ago and ever since performed outside of universities and the academy that it has been possible to explore these values and popularise them on a small scale. It is extremely important to make peo-ple realise them as the first step taken by a movement for genuine language improvement. What exactly are these values?

First of all we must point out the extremely flexible word-order of Hungarian, which enables us to speak with a wide range of nuances, without all the rigidity, fixed word-order, quantification, formalism, cleft sentences etc., introduced under the pressure of ne-cessity in English, German, and many other languages. Closely related to this is the co-ordinative and analogical character of our mother-tongue and frame of mind, which makes us capable of grasping reality directly without any kind of abstractions and “defini-tions” that the lack of the former have compelled those living west or east of us to invent. By realising this we can prevent Anglo-Saxon syntax from spreading like epidemic in both colloquial Hungarian and the registers, which is characterised by an exaggerated use of relative clauses, cleft sentences and articles. Though distorted by external forces and in-ternal dismay, this coordinative-analogical character has been dominating essentially our history, public administration, our attitude to the landscape and to other peoples, our cos-tumes and behaviour. This freedom, flexibility and analogic principle come across in our relationship with God, in our rich folk-art unparalleled in Europe, in our folkdance, in the design of our Holy Crown, and even in the original manners of farming. This characteris-tic of ours was shaped by our nomadic ancestors creating wonderful golden objects, hav-ing a very high intellectual and moral standard, living in unconfined space and infinite time, who bequeathed it to us as their number one legacy to be preserved for ever. This legacy must not be thrown to the dogs!

Again, this coordinative-analogical thinking manifests itself in Hungarian homonyms like méh, szűr, fog, nyúl, ég, sír, nő etc., whose meanings are linked in close organic relation-ships rather than by coincidence as declared in the dictionaries; as it were these meanings explain one another. The same holds for the word-families which – essentially unlike other languages – organise and integrate our word-stock into a unified, organic system, and which are recognised neither by research nor by education, probably for that very reason. The English and Latin loanwords galore in spoken Hungarian as well as the regis-ters are used largely unnecessarily to oust beautiful words of our mother-tongue and to destroy these word-families. What these word-families inherently model is the functioning of the universe and the Creator's work in it.

The movement to efficiently defend and promote Hungarian naturally involves the attempt to abolish or at least curb the hegemony of the capital’s pronunciation not only in the media but also in education, on the stage and on the screen. Speakers of dialects should be allowed and encouraged to appear in public with a daily regularity; people ought to be made proud of speaking in a dialect, therefore all kinds of support should be given to the propagation of dialectal peculiarities especially the close ë vowel, which used to be widespread in the Carpathian basin and represents a particular asset of the vernacu-lar. This should be accompanied by analogous efforts at restoring the rapidly diminishing self-esteem of our compatriots, their religious faith, the status of maternity and the chas-tity of family life, for the respect for one’s sweet mother-tongue cannot be separated from the self-esteem of the nation and the family.

Finally we will take steps to get the Parliament to reconsider the Language Bill re-jected two years ago; we need an Act as strict as the corresponding Polish one in order to stop external contamination, internal despair, and the spreading of attitudes and forms of behaviour aimed at disregarding our traditions, rich folk-culture and sweet mother-tongue, directed against our future, the family and the nation. What Hungarians suffer from is not „lack of information” or money but the fact that for the past two or three hundred years they have been gradually deprived of their ancient culture, which used to protect and nourish them for thousands of years. Nor is our survival guaranteed by the European Union or shoddy „globalization processes” but by a return to our Scythian spiritual traditions and faith in the God of Hungarians.

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Dated Debrecen, 5 February 2005.

Dr Végvári József English teacher, Debrecen, and dr Máthé Lajos, Napvilág Foundation, Budapest

References

• Végvári József: „És mégsem mozog ...” - tanulmányok anyanyelvről, hitről, tudománytörténetről és nevelésről, világképről, szerves műveltség és hivatalos tudomány viszonyáról. Főnix Könyvműhely, 2005. ISBN 963-7051-05-8 .