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 one language at home and another at school, but they also may have switched from one to another in a single conversation, even within one sentence. They may also have made abrupt switches of register: we can assume that the teacher at the Jewish elementary school taught his pupils how to read and write in literary German, Hochdeutsch, but switched to local Jüdisch-Deutsch when he had to explain the meaning of certain words or to keep discipline in class. With the progress of buoyant Magyarization, which affected many people at a deep emotional level as well, things became even more complicated. Ethnic Germans, Slovaks etc. would declare themselves Magyars in their own respective original national languages, without having acquired even a working knowledge of Hungarian, as is well illustrated by the case of Franz Liszt: his mother tongue was German and he became a fervent Hungarian nationalist as an adult, subsequently also acquiring a good knowledge of Hungarian. "Mother tongue" did not necessarily mean the language one learned from one's mother: it could also denote one's national language, the normal language of one's ethnic group (which one may happen not to speak at all), or even that of one's chosen nation (which again one may happen not to speak at all). And because of the emotions involved in changing one's national and/or religious allegiance and language, the memory of this process is rapidly blanked out: those who managed to assimilate would stop mentioning the language of their ancestors or any change in their linguistic habits because it was no longer important, and may even have been embarrassing. For many such people the language of their ancestors and its corollaries belonged to a different world, a world devoid of any current interest and potentially discomforting. Given names are a good example of the subject just referred to. 1' In connection with my research on Herz Pasha, some time ago I cursorily checked the Jewish birth-registers from the south-eastern area of present-day Hungary. I found that in the 1850s and '60s mainly German and Hebrew given names appeared, while in later decades Hungarian names predominated. In a very few cases I managed to trace present-day descendants, and discovered that the person who had been entered under a Hebrew or a German given name was later known in the family under a different, Hungarian given name, and the original given name had been completely forgotten. When told this, the descendants were uniformly taken aback, some were even offended, and seriously questioned the accurateness of the identification which was beyond doubt. The explanation is simple and plausible: with the rapid progress of Magyarization, people adopted Hungarian names in the place of German and Hebrew ones, without taking official steps, and did not speak of it any more: they were so happy to have become Magyars! 17 5 How widespread this phenomenon 1/ 7 Of course, surnames also played an important role in this process, but we will not consider them here. 17 5 This statement is not intended as propaganda: it merely aims at explaining the phenomenon that people simply never talked of these things any more. 242
