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

ISTVÁN ORMOS considered Hungarian his national language because he was Hungarian, no matter whether it was the language he had first learned from his mother or that which he would use in family circle; it has been mentioned above that in those days the indication of a mother tongue was in many cases more a declaration of national loyalty, a declaration of personal identity, rather than a mere statement of fact.

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5 Such a use of the expression "mother tongue" is not without parallels.'"

9 The members of the Zsolnay family, of Hungarian origin, the founders and owners of the prestigious ceramics factory in Pécs (Germ. Fünfkirchen) in southern Hungary, were proud of their Hungarian-ness, yet spoke German in the family well into the first decades of the twentieth century. The family's founding father came to Pécs in 1776 from Szombathely (Germ. Steinamanger) in western Hungary. Thus it can be assumed that, originating from a multilingual but predominantly German-speaking area and settling in Pécs, a town with German-speaking inhabitants, predominantly craftsmen, and intermarrying with them, the first Pécs Zsolnay, who had also spoken German in Szombathely, did not feel compelled to change his habits in the new environment, where everybody spoke German. Teréz Zsolnay (1854-1944) wrote in her memoirs about her early education in the 1860s: "Madlon [the French governess] taught us everything in French, in the family we spoke only German, thus for a while a Hungarian teacher visited us regularly so that we could master our mother tongue".

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1 It is evident that here the term "mother tongue" does not mean the language acquired first from the mother but has the meaning of "national language", i.e. the language of the nation one belongs to. Another example, where "mother tongue" is used simultaneously with two different meanings, is from the present day: in a recent Hungarian broadcast on the literary activities of Gypsies in contemporary Hungary, an expert said that "a number of Hungarian-speaking Gypsies started to learn their mother tongue so that they could master the language they had failed to learn as mother tongue"."

1 In connection with the doctoral thesis of his younger son, Goldziher refers to Hungarian as "our language": "Da sie in unserer ungarischen Sprache abgefasst ist, entzieht sie sich vorläufig dem Urtheil weiterer Kreise. [Since it is written in our Hungarian language it is not accessible to the judgment of wider circles for the time being.]'"

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2 1

5 Karády, Egyenlőtlen elmagyarosodás..., 11, 15-16,28-29. 12

9 Cf. note 25 above. 13

0 Teréz Zsolnay-Margit M. Zsolnay, Zsolnay. A gyár története [Zsolnay. History of the Factory]. 2nd ed., Budapest 1975, 34. My translation from the Hungarian. My friend József Sisa informs me that the original of the memoirs is in German; this is not indicated in the edition. 13

1 Kossuth Rádió, Budapest, 10 February 2001. My translation from the Hungarian. 13

2 Simon, Ignác Goldziher..., 250. 230