Abstract

While the Hungarian language is spoken in the heart of Europe, both scientific and pseudoscientific explanations trace its origins to the East. Also structurally, Hungarian shows many structural features more reminiscent of more Eastern languages. This paper examines the relationship of Hungarian, genealogically and contact-linguistically, with more Eastern languages, both related (e.g., Mansi, Khanty, Mari) and unrelated (i.e., the Turkic languages).

Historical records strongly imply that a variant of Hungarian, East Hungarian, was spoken in the Volga-Kama Region of European Russia until the 13th century, lexical evidence (i.e., borrowings) also strongly imply that historic migration took the linguistic ancestors of modern Hungarians through this area. Yet, much remains unknown about these processes: there are no written records of East Hungarian or of Hungarian predating the arrival in the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century, hence, all evidence is indirect.

In this paper, we give a brief overview of what is known and what is not known about the relationship of Hungarian with the languages of the Volga-Kama Region: What evidence do we have of historical contacts, from lexicon and language structure? For which structural features of Hungarian have scholars postulated a possible contact-linguistic explanation, possibly showing linguistic heritage Hungarians brought from the Volga-Kama Region to the Carpathian Basin?

Abstract

The study claims that contemporary Udmurt has two main strategies for expressing a ‘constituent negation reading’. Standard Udmurt makes use of inverse-scope constructions involving sentential negation, i.e. a morphosyntactically negated predicate and a pragmatic focus in the scope of negation. The other strategy involves the negator ńe borrowed from Russian, which immediately precedes the negated constituent and combines with a predicate in the affirmative form. Ńe-constructions are analysed as instances of focus negation, with a FocP dominated by a right-branching NegP. The evolution of transparent-scope constructions and of a head-initial NegP are analysed as concomitants of the SOV-to-SVO change of Udmurt.

Abstract

Guild migration in Hungary in the 16^th to 18^th centuries can be best captured by exploring the migration of young artisans. Peregrination and the migration of young artisans were a process of learning and making contacts in a foreign environment over several years. We will be looking at the life, tasks, objectives and, not least, knowledge acquisition and career strategy of one age group, young men roughly between the ages of 16–20, who in the early modern period were the main depositories of local economic and political power in Europe, including the territories of the former Kingdom of Hungary – especially in the towns – and who were entering local economic and political power after half a decade or so of studying.

This highly mobile way of acquiring knowledge abroad through university and guild migration provided an experience of leaving the familiar home base. What these young men had in common was that their learning process took place in a foreign territory, far away from their home, in the unfamiliar environment of another country, using a different language. In the case of both groups of learners, the existence of a network of family ties, which can be traversed in several directions, proved to be a key organising factor. This link between the – mainly German-speaking – urban and rural citizens in Western Europe and the Hungarian (and Transylvanian) citizens in the early modern period was always evident in the guild organisation, both economically and culturally.

Abstract

Although studies on the pagan past existed in Slovenia prior to the publications of Pavel Medvešček, his writings on pre-Christian religious practices (Staroverstvo) in the Western part of Slovenia caused some disruption within the Slovenian academic sphere. Medvešček allegedly collected the material (oral narratives on spiritual and healing practices and objects) from the 1950s to the 1980s and published it as uninterpreted material. Although some academics were often criticized for their perceived indifference towards Medvešček's works and lack of interest in the topic of this one-of-a-kind discovery of local spiritual practices, others later initiated intriguing debates. The article outlines the life and work of Pavel Medvešček as well as the broader reception of his works among Slovenian academics and the general public. Due to the frequent questioning of the research methods of Pavel Medvešček, the article highlights the longstanding question of what makes a material credible, and tries to show how this is unveiled in Medvešček's “discoveries.” The article focuses on the different approaches to studying Medvešček's materials employed by two ethnologists, Katja Hrobat Virloget and Miha Kozorog.

Abstract

Diachronic changes in phrase or clause structure are vectored rather than oscillating. A century ago, E. Sapir identified a drift towards fixed word order and another one towards the invariant word (including the levelling of the forms for subject and object marking). What is still missing is a theory that predicts such drifts. As will be argued, the theory that explains Sapir's observations and, in passing, makes the concept of Universal Grammar dispensable is the theory that grammars are targets and products of cognitive evolution. Sapir's drifts are shifts from systems based primarily on the consciously accessible declarative network to systems based on the consciously inaccessible procedural network. This also explains why the [S[VO]] clause-structure is a point of no return and why languages do not change in the reverse direction, starting from a grammar like English and eventually moving to a grammar like Sanskrit.

The art collection of István Marczibányi (1752–1810), remembered as the benefactor of the Hungarian nation, who devoted a great part of his fortune to religious, educational, scientific and social goals, is generally known as a collection of ‘national Antiquities’ of Hungary. This opinion was already widespread in Hungarian publicity at the beginning of the 19th century, when Marczibányi pledged that he would enrich the collection of the prospective Hungarian national Museum with his artworks. But the description of his collection in Pál Wallaszky’s book Conspectus reipublicae litterariae in Hungaria published in 1808 testifies to the diversity and international character of the collection. In the Marczibányi “treasury”, divided into fourteen units, in addition to a rich cabinet for coins and medals there were mosaics, sculptures, drinking vessels, filigree-adorned goldsmiths’ works, weapons, Chinese art objects, gemstones and objects carved from them (buttons, cameos, caskets and vases), diverse marble monuments and copper engravings. Picking, for example, the set of sculptures, we find ancient Egyptian, Greek and Ro man pieces as well as mediaeval and modern masterpieces arranged by materials.

After the collector’s death, his younger brother Imre Marczibányi (1755–1826) and his nephews Márton (1784–1834), János (1786–1830), and Antal (1793–1872) jointly inherited the collection housed in a palace in dísz tér (Parade Square) in Buda. In 1811, acting on the promise of the deceased, the family donated a selection of artworks to the national Museum: 276 cut gems, 9 Roman and Byzantine imperial gold coins, 35 silver coins and more than fifty antiquities and rarities including 17th and 18th-century goldsmiths’ works, Chinese soap-stone statuettes, ivory carvings, weapons and a South Italian red-figure vase, too. However, this donation did not remain intact as one entity. With the emergence of various specialized museums in the last third of the 19th century, a lot of artworks had been transferred to the new institutions, where the original provenance fell mostly into oblivion.

In the research more than a third of the artworks now in the Hungarian national Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest could be identified, relying on the first printed catalogue of the Hungarian national Museum (1825) titled Cimeliotheca Musei Nationalis Hungarici, and the handwritten acquisition registers. The entries have revealed that fictitious provenances were attached to several items, since the alleged or real association with prominent historical figures played an important role in the acquisition strategies of private collectors and museums alike at the time. For example, an ivory carving interpreted in the Cimeliotheca as the reliquary of St Margaret of Hungary could be identified with an object in the Metalwork Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (inv. no. 18843), whose stylistic analogies and parallels invalidate the legendary origin: the bone plates subsequently assembled as a front of a casket were presumably made in a Venetian workshop at the end of the 14th century.

There are merely sporadic data about the network of István Marczibányi’s connections as a collector, and about the history of his former collection remaining in the possession of his heirs. It is known that collector Miklós Jankovich (1772–1846) purchased painted and carved marble portraits around 1816 from the Marczi bányi collection, together with goldsmiths’ works including a coconut cup newly identified in the Metalwork Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (inv. no. 19041). The group of exquisite Italian Cinquecento bronze statuettes published by art historian Géza Entz (1913–1993), was last owned as a whole by Antal Marczibányi (nephew of István) who died in 1872. These collection of small bronzes could have also been collected by István Marczibányi, then it got scattered through inheritance, and certain pieces of it landed in north American and European museums as of the second third of the 20th century. Although according to Entz’s hypothesis the small bronzes were purchased by István’s brother Imre through the mediation of sculptor and art collector István Ferenczy (1792–1956) studying in Rome, there is no written data to verify it. By contrast, it is known that the posthumous estate of István Marczibányi included a large but not detailed collection of classical Roman statues in 1811, which the heirs did not donate to the national Museum. It may be presumed that some of the renaissance small bronzes of mythological themes following classical prototypes were believed to be classical antiquities at the beginning of the 19th century. Further research will hopefully reveal more information about the circumstances of their acquisition.

With the advance of the Ottoman Empire the Archiepiscopate of Esztergom was forced to leave its seat and move to Nagyszombat. The buildings of mediaeval origin on Castle Hill, first housing royalties and later the archbishop, were appropriated by the military forces and suffered considerable damage from sieges and the Ottoman domination. The rule of the Turks ceased in Esztergom in 1683, but the archbishopric did not return before 1820. Nonetheless, the archbishops of the 18th century were also preoccupied with the fate and future of the buildings on Castle Hill.

Archbishop Ferenc Barkóczy (1761–1765, fig. 4) commissioned the Vienna-based architect of French origin, Isidore Ganneval (1730–1786) to plan a centre of ecclesiastical management on Castle Hill. Unfortunately, it is hard to glean from the fragmentary archival sources what exactly Ganneval was asked to design. His extant survey drawings are only about the renaissance Bakócz chapel which survived the vicissitudes of the centuries relatively intact. Ganneval’s fairly modest fee and his stay of a few months only permit the assumption that he was contracted only to draw up a sketchy proposal. The wooden model (fig. 5) only known from a photograph and possibly perished by now, which can hardly be fitted among the subsequent plan variants, might as well reflect the ideas inspired by his planning work in Esztergom. The conception documented by the wooden mock-up does not take into account the existing, mostly ramshackle buildings and fortifications. The “Navis Ecclesiae” idea represented by the model shows the cathedral flanked by wings of the archiepiscopal palace, the buildings of the theological college are situated lower, and the main road to Visegrád is lined by the canons’ houses. The sanctuary of the cathedral faces west breaking with the tradition of the eastern apse. The groundplan is a fusion of centralized and longitudinal plans, its basic element is the Bakócz Chapel (fig. 6) the mass of which is reiterated and enlarged in it.

This proposal ignored the possibility of preserving the mostly mediaeval buildings and fortifications on Castle Hill. In December 1761, however, Archbishop Barkóczy was compelled to sign the obligation by the War Council to undertake the maintenance of the Castle Hill fortifications and in case of enemy attacks to accommodate imperial troops there. It was only through the intervention of the Queen, Maria Theresa, that Barkóczy could be exempted from this obligation in 1763.

The next plan of a church administration centre was elaborated by Franz Anton Hillebrandt (1719–1797) whose first plan series was made during the validity of the military obligation from December 1761 to March 1763. It is quite possible that the style of the architect of the Hungarian royal chamber was closer to the taste of the baroque art patron Barkóczy than that of Canneval twenty years his junior, representing the progressivity of revolutionary architecture. The latter was also commissioned by Anton Christoph Migazzi to design the cathedral of Vác, whose style did not attract followers in Hungary.

Apart from the principal plan known in the copy by Anton Hartmann (fig. 7) only four pieces of the first plan series survive, including the first floor plan of the seminary building (fig. 8). This baroque conception keeps the fortified walls and bastions around Castle Hill but demolishes the military buildings on the plateau (barracks, hospital, stalls, etc.). It is like an architectural counter-proposal to Ganneval’s wooden model, taking into greater consideration the relief features than the perfunctory mock-up. Hillebrandt delivered these plans to Archbishop Barkóczy on 10 March 1763 and forwarded the queen’s message at the same time: the financial obligation to maintain the military defences of Castle Hill had been abrogated. It immediately invalidated the plans just presented, and obstacles from the path of planning were removed. That was probably the stimulus behind the free-handed amateur linear drawing of a groundplan made perhaps by the archbishop or his representative for the architect in 1763 (fig. 9) in which the functions of the buildings are defined. In a sense it returns to Ganneval’s model which handled Castle Hill without any restrictions.

Only few – a mere six sheets – of Hillebrandt’s plans are known from after the sketch. (A part of the plans were probably taken by architect István Möller to Budapest in the first decades of the 20th century and possibly perished during the siege of the capital in 1945 or during the reconstruction.) Anyway, it must have been on the basis of this second series of plans that the demolition of mediaeval remains, soil levelling and the laying of foundations began in 1763. In 1764, the collapse of an Ottoman minaret built using a mediaeval stair-tower caused the crushing of Porta Speciosa, the main portal of the mediaeval St Adalbert cathedral. Mainly preparatory construction went on until the death of Archbishop Barkóczy in 1765. That interrupted the building of a baroque church administration centre for good.

Building commissioner János Máthes (1785–1848) summed up in his work published in 1827 how far the construction had arrived and what was built later. Maria Theresa requested Hillebrandt to plan a church dedicated to King Saint Stephen for the garrison reinstated on Castle Hill, which was constructed in 1767–1770. It was – on a smaller scale – on the site of the planned baroque cathedral, certainly not using its foundation walls. About the situation a layout drawing (fig. 12), groundplan and design plan (fig. 13) are included in Máthes’s book. In addition, a now latent or extinct, mock-up (fig. 14) made by Máthes also reflects the situation on Castle Hill in the last quarter of the 18th century. In the lower part of the model made in the early 1820s groundplans of the buildings on Castle Hill could be seen (fig. 16). One of the specialties of the church was the copy of the Hungarian royal crown placed on the spire as the crowning ornament. On the façade on top of the stairs adjacent to the broad ramp leading to the basilica of today the statues of Saints Stephen and Ladislaus carved by the Pest sculptor József Hebenstreit were erected. Surviving items include side altar pictures painted by Anton Karl Rosier of Pozsony which are today in the Esztergom church of the Sisters of Mercy of Szatmár. The later rebuilt garrison church was pulled down in 1821 to make room for today’s cathedral. One of the first moves of the new construction was the transfer of the Bakócz Chapel to its present place. The cathedral, the construction of which started on plans by Pál Kühnel (1765–1824) and János Packh (1796–1839) fitted into a conception of a church government centre the model for which might have been provided by Ganneval’s plan of nearly sixty years before.