É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.

ORMOS, István: Goldziher's Mother Tongue: A Contribution to the Study of the Language Situation in Hungary in the Nineteenth Century

GOLDZIHER'S MOTHER TONGUE westernmost region of what was then Hungary - the area became an Austrian province in 1921, under the newly-coined name Burgenland. Adolf Goldziher's wife, Katharina (Gütl) Berger, came from neighbouring Rajka (Germ. Ragendorf or Rakendorf).

u

l Moses Goldziher, Ignaz Goldziher's grandfather's grandfather, had come to Köpcsény from Hamburg in 1735. Adolf Goldziher moved to Székesfehérvár in 1842.

11

8 There can be no doubt that as members of a family originating from Hamburg and living in a German-speaking environment, Adolf Goldziher and his immediate ancestors spoke Jüdisch-Deutsch, and of course standard German as well. The same is probably true of Goldziher's mother. It is known that the Jews' adoption of Hungarian was considerably slower in German speaking environments such as this area than in neighbourhoods where all the population spoke Hungarian only, as was the case in the eastern parts of the Hungarian Great Plain."'' An inscription by Adolf Goldziher appears in the family Bible, in which he recorded the birth of his sons "Wittus" (modem Hung. "Vitus" / German "Veit") and "Ignatz" in Hebrew and German.

1"

0 We can assume that Adolf 11

7 Köpcsény was a market-town with German and Croatian population in the middle of the nineteenth century. Landlords possessing lands both in western Hungary and eastern Croatia (areas to the west of modern Belgrade) resettled the ancestors of the Croatian minority in modem Burgenland in their present-day settlements in the course of the sixteenth century in order to save them from the Turks and from the ongoing battles and skirmishes in the border region, where they had been living. Rajka was German in the nineteenth century. The ancestors of the German population in western Hungary - modern Burgenland - gradually settled there beginning from the eleventh century, although some sort of continuity with the earlier Carolingian population may have existed. After the Hungarian Conquest in the ninth century the Magyar element predominated and there were also some Slavs in these areas, who had arrived in the preceding centuries. The new German-speaking settlers came mainly from the adjoining regions of Austria and Bavaria, and after the fifteenth century they made up the majority of the population. Fényes Elek, Magyar országnak, 's a' hozzá kapcsolt tartományoknak..., vol. I, 186, 188; Id.. Magyarország ismertetése..., vol, I, section 1, 262, 282-283; Ernst, Geschichte des Burgenlandes..., 248-253; István Polány, Nyugatmagyarország néprajzi története [The Ethnographie History of Western Hungary] I—

II, Szombathely 1936-1938 (offprint from Vasi Szemle 1935-1936, 1937-1938); Elemér Moór, Zur Siedlungsgeschichte der deutschungarischen Sprachgrenze I-II, Berlin-Leipzig 1929 (offprint from Ungarische Jahrbücher, vol. 9, fasc. 1-2); Ernst, Geschichte des Burgenlandes..., 27-30; Die burgenländischen Kroaten im Wandel der Zeiten. Ed. Stefan Geosits, Vienna 1986, 3-28; Josef Breu, Die Kroatensiedlung im Burgenland und den anschließenden Gebieten. Vienna 1970. 11

8 Sándor Büchler,'A Goldzieherék családfájáról [On the Goldziehers' Family Tree], Múlt és Jövő 1938,18-20,51-52,82-83. "'' Karády, Egyenlőtlen elmagyarosodás..., 18. 12

0 Reproduced in facsimile by Sándor [Alexander] Scheiber, Folklór és tárgytörténet (Folklore und Motivgeschichte), Budapest 1977-1984, vol. III, 538 (fig. 72). Cf. 227