Ungarisch Zwischen Intensivem Kontakt Und Puristischer Gegenwehr

Hungarians have lived in close contact with High German speaking people since over one thousand years. However, linguistic impact from Hungarian to literary German is rather pure; there is but a couple of lexical exotisms, e.g. Puszta, Palatschinken (a kind of pancakes). On the other hand, the Hungarian language underwent numerous phases of German influence, mostly lexical borrowings. At the beginning, during the middle ages, words like polgár ‘citizen’ (High German Bürger) or pór ‘peasant’ (Upper German Paur) enriched the Hungarian lexicon, but later on, after the Ottoman conquest of Central Hungary, borrowings from German turned out to endanger the Hungarian national identity. As a result, from the end of the 18th century on, language reformers strove to return to their roots either by substituting German lexical items by “native” words (e.g. paraszt instead of pór, but the native stock is often of Slavic origin, in this case *prost). Or totally new words were shaped for new concepts (e.g. gép ‘machine, engine’, which in fact is a truncated root from German Göpel ‘whim’). However, in spite of all efforts to eliminate Germanisms, the bulk of neologisms was shaped as calques after Western (German, Latin, French) patterns, e.g. vas-út ‘railway’ (Eisenbahn), munka-adó ‘employer’ (Arbeitgeber), teher-gép-kocsi ‘lorry, truck’ (Lastkraftwagen), idegen-forgalom ‘tourism’ (Fremdenverkehr) autó-pálya ‘highway’ (Autobahn), vendég-munkás ‘foreign worker’ (Gastarbeiter). Thus, the inner form of Hungarian words corresponds more or less to their German counterparts, which is facilitated by similar or identical devices of word formation. On the other hand, in conversational Hungarian as well as in slang there remains a lot of Germanisms, slightly adapted by native suffixes, e.g. gurt-ni ‘safety belt’ (Gurt), and even verbs like ejnstejg-olni ‘to enter, to board’ (einsteigen). The article aims at finding out traces of German impact in Hungarian. In view of strong structural contrasts between Germanic and Finno-Ugrian languages, mostly the lexicon is scrutinized.