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 say anything definitive about Goldziher's purpose in writing this diary. Perhaps he was unsure of it himself and vacillated between various possibilities, his main need being to give himself an outlet for all the tensions of everyday life. Yet if we consider that very often Goldziher explains the causes of and reasons for his actions with a view to justifying himself and accounting for those actions to future generations, one cannot discount the possibility that his aim was to have the diary published soon after his death. If this were true, then of course German was the obvious choice, because it would give his scholarly colleagues access to this most important key to his life. One has the impression that with the progress of time Hungarian gradually gained in importance in Goldziher's life. He wrote his highly personal will (Végrendeletem [My Last Will and Testament]) in Hungarian in 1901."'" This deals exclusively with personal and spiritual matters, avoiding any discussion of the financial subjects that one would normally expect to find in a will. And when his beloved daughter-in-law died at the end of 1918, he recorded his grief in the Tagebuch in Hungarian: it was as if the impact of the tragedy had caused him to forget that he was writing the diary in German, and he expressed his despair in the language that first occurred to him, the language that was closest to his heart.

11,

1 This is the way Alexander Schciber interpreted the event."'

2 Patai accepted this interpretation."'

1 An alternative interpretation is that Goldziher's use of Hungarian here may have been prompted by the fact that it was the language he and his daughter-in-law used in everyday conversation; it is not unlikely that Mariska, who was from a younger generation, spoke mainly Hungarian and that her mother tongue was genuinely Hungarian. It can also be assumed that - no matter what his mother tongue had originally been Goldziher mostly used Hungarian in later years. It may be worth noting here that a post-card has surfaced recently, written by Goldziher to one of his favourite pupils, Bernát [Bemard] Heller, in May 1917. The text deals with everyday matters and is in Hungarian.

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4 (Heller was born in 1871, at Nagybiccse on the river Vág in Trencsén county, Upper Hungary,"'

5 close to the Moravian border, where the 16

0 Seen. 159. 16

1 Goldziher, Tagebuch..., 311. Cf. ibid., 10. 16

2 Ignác Goldziher, Napló [Diary], Ed. Sándor [Alexander] Scheiber. Transl. Dr. Lívia Scheiber-Bernáth, Budapest 1984, 407 (n° 532). 16

3 Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary..., 55. 16

4 It was put up for auction as item n° 245 by the Judaica Center-Biblical World Gallery at the "Judaica Auction in Hungary (Books and Manuscripts)" in Budapest on 11 November 2001, but was unsold. It was subsequently acquired by the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 16

5 Present-day Bytca on the river Váh between Povazská Bystrica and Zilina in Northern Slovakia. 238