HOMAGE TO THE MEMORY OF THE FOUNDERS

• Authors: Benko Lorand
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

The second half of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth were the golden age of the foundation of scholarly societies in Hungary. Approaching the millennium of the Hungarian Conquest (895-896) and that of the foundation of the Hungarian State (1000), increasingly more attention was devoted to what can be called national branches of scholarship: history, ethnography, linguistics, and literary scholarship. Following the foundation of the Hungarian Historical Society and the Hungarian Society of Ethnography (but prior to that of the Society of Hungarian Literary History), linguists in this country founded their own scholarly society, the Society of Hungarian Linguistics, in 1904. The publication of the journal of the Society, The Hungarian Language, started in 1905. Representatives of adjoining fields of scholarship had an important share in the foundation of both the Society and the journal, as well as in keeping them going. Therefore, a fundamental principle of modern scholarship, interdisciplinarity, was attained from the very beginning. The foundation of the Society and of the journal also signalled the appearance of a new generation of linguists. Zoltán Gombocz, János Melich, József Balassa, Vilmos Tolnai, etc., continuing the endeavours of their predecessors but working with a more up-to-date methodology and wider international outlook, raised Hungarian linguistics to the level of the period. - The program of the Society can obviously only be measured against the circumstances, possibilities, and demands of the given period. But even seen from today, the plans and intentions laid down in the various documents and declarations can be deemed as being ahead of their time. In particular, these included general ambitions like publishing the results of linguistics for a wider audience, in a comprehensible form and in terms that are clear for all, as well as taking up a fight against dilettante pronouncements on language. With respect to the internal themes of the world of linguistics, the program included the investigation of various branches of historical linguistics, that of literary language and style, of the Language Reform, of specialised terminologies, of the dialects of Hungarian, and assistance in the practical tasks of language cultivation.

Keywords

EN

SOCIETY OF HUNGARIAN LINGUISTICS

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Society of Hungarian Linguistics
• Journal: Magyar Nyelv (Hungarian Language)
• Year: 2005
• Volume: 101
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 4-7
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Benko Lorand

• Lorand Benko, for postal address contact the journal editor; www.c3.hu/~magyarnyelv/;

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09HUAAAA07091