On the Boundaries of Phonology and Phonetics

1.3.Language interactions in the Haskala

Concerning the first stage, when only a handful of followers of Moses Mendelssohn rejected the Jüdischdeutsch and started speaking Hochdeutsch, our model will correctly predict that the number of exchange particles is insufficient to affect German in a perceptible way.

The number of exchange particles increases dramatically when we reach the first half of the nineteenth century. However, the people changing language more or less consciously adopted the idea of their original idiom being an unclean and corrupt version of the target language. Consequently, by nature their language change consisted of not bringing any influence on the target language with them. By applying our vague physical model to this situation, we might say that although the two languages were indeed close - from the viewpoints of geography, linguistic similarity and social contacts - , Hochdeutsch was not “eligible” enough to be seriously affected.

What happened in the third stage of the Haskala? The following three case studies represent three possibilities. The first one, the influence of Yiddish on Hungarian, was actually a case where some elements of stage 2 Haskala were still present. The emancipation of the Jews was closely related to their assimilation into the Hungarian society, culture and language. As Jews wished to become an equal part of that society, let us call this case type e. Each of the many people brings only a very “light” quantum of influence, similarly to the very little mass, if any, of the electron neutrinos. The type mu designates a case when Jews migrated to a newly created Jewish “land, language and culture”, namely to Modern Hebrew. Here less people carry possibly more “weight”, that is why they can be paralleled by the heavier muon neutrinos. In the third case, that is the birth of Esperanto, only one person of Jewish cultural background wished to transform the entire word, with a total rejection of reference to any form of Jewishness, at least on a conscious level (type tau, referring to the probably heaviest type of neutrinos).

2.Three examples of weak interaction

2.1.Type e: Yiddish and Hungarian

In the social and economic fields, Hungary met a first wave of modernization in the 1830s and 1840s, which is referred to as the reform age, reaching its peak in the 1848-49 revolution. After the so-called Compromise with Austria in 1867, the consequence of which had been the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a dualistic system, the most urbanized parts of the country showed an especially remarkable economic and cultural growth.

Parallel to the phenomenon of general modernization, the Jewish population underwent a similar process to the one we have already seen apropos of the French and German Jewry that had gone through these social changes fifty years earlier. The second quarter of the century already witnesses a few Jewish thinkers, mainly rabbis arriving from Germany or Bohemia, and bringing modern ideals with them. Yet, their effect cannot be perceived on a larger social scale before the last third of the century.

A few differences should, however, be noted between German and Hungarian Haskala. First, for the larger society into which Hungarian Jews wished to integrate, Enlightenment was not so much the consequence of the Embourgeoisement, rather its catalyst. Enormous heterogeneities in the degree of development could be found within the country, both in social, as well as economic terms. This general picture was paralleled with a heterogeneous distribution of Eastern and Western type of Jewry. Thus, even if the most Europeanized Jews may have wished, they could not disown their pre-Haskala coreligionists living close to them.

Moreover, the modern Hungarian society and culture had to be created in spite of the Austrian occupation. Social constructs underwent huge changes, and any group of people identifying themselves as Hungarian - and not Austrian - could influence the new shapes of society and culture. Immigrants from all directions played a fundamental role in laying down the bases of modern Hungarian urban culture. These are the circumstances under which most of the Jews chose the Hungarian, rather than the German or Yiddish culture and language. This decision was far from being evident. Even most of the orthodoxy adopted Hungarian, though more slowly and by keeping simultaneously Yiddish.

By putting together the pieces, we obtain an image in which the dynamically changing Hungarian culture and society is searching new, modern forms, and is ready to integrate foreign influences - as long as the carriers identify themselves as new Hungarians. Further, a major part of the Jewish population is seeking its place in this new society, wants to adopt the new culture, but is still strongly connected - often against its will - to the pre-Haskala Jewry living not so far from them. Consequently, we have both a high “eligibility” for being influenced on the part of the Hungarian language, and a large number of “exchange particles” flowing from Yiddish to Hungarian._²⁵

What is the outcome of such a situation? Let us consider a few examples of Yiddishisms in Hungarian. I shall distinguish between three registers that Yiddishisms entered considerably: the Jewish sociolect of Hungarian, argot (slang), and standard Hungarian.

The vocabulary of Hungarian speaking Jews unsurprisingly includes a large number of words specific to domains of Jewish culture and religion.

In some cases only phonological assimilation takes place. The Hungarian phonological system lacks a short /a/, and the short counterpart of / is //. Therefore the Yiddish word [] (‘Rosh Ha-shana, name of the Jewish New Year’, from Hebrew [], i.e. [ in standard Hungarian Ashkenazi pronunciation) becomes optionally []. Although the original Yiddish pronunciation [] is still possible, the latter emphasizes the foreign origin of the word. An analogous example is the word barchesz ([] or [], ‘chala, a special bread used on Shabbat and holidays’), which is clearly from Yiddish origin, but is unknown outside Hungary; it may have belonged to the vocabulary of Hungarian Yiddish.

Other words immediately underwent Hungarian morphological processes. In fact, it is a well known phenomenon in many languages of the world that borrowed verbs, unlike borrowed nouns, cannot be integrated directly into the vocabulary of a given language. This is the case in words like lejnol (‘to read the Torah-scroll in the synagogue’), lejnolás (‘the reading of the Torah-scroll’) as well as snóder (‘money given as donation’), snóderol (‘to donate money, especially after the public Torah-reading’), snóderolás (‘the act of money donation’). In the first case, the Yiddish verb leyenen (‘idem’)_²⁶ was borrowed and one of the two most frequent denominal verbal suffixes, -l, was added._²⁷ The word lejnolás is the nomen actionis formed with the suffix -ás. The expression tfilint légol (‘to put on the phylacteries’) originates from German and Yiddish legen, and has gone through the same processes. For snóderol, Hungarian borrows a Yiddish noun,_²⁸ which then serves as the base of further derivations.

The Jewish sociolect of Hungarian includes further lexical items, which do not belong to the domain of religious practice or Jewish culture. One such word is unberufn (‘without calling [the devil]’), which should be added out of superstition to any positive statement that the speaker hopes to remain true in the future. For instance: ‘My child grows in beauty, unberufn’ (Blau-Láng, 1995:66). Nowadays, many people of the generation born after World War II and raised already in an almost non-Yiddish speaking milieu judge this expression as having nothing to do with superstition, but qualifying a situation as surprisingly good, like ‘You don’t say so! It’s incredible!’ and definitely including also some irony._²⁹ Others of that generation say in the same surprising-ironic context: “My grandma would have said: unberufn…”, even if Grandma had used that word in a slightly different way. This second meaning of unberufn clearly lacks any reference to superstition, since the same people would use another expression (lekopogom) to say ‘touch wood! knock on wood!’.

Unlike the previous interjections, the adjective betámt (‘nice, intelligent, smart, sweet, lovely’) already enters the “real” syntax of the target language, even if morphological and phonological changes have not taken place yet - which happened in the case of lejnol and snóderol. The word betámt consists of the Hebrew root taam (‘taste’), together with the Germanic verbal prefix be- and past participle ending –t. The resulting word denotes a person who “has some taste”: somebody who has some characteristic traits, who is interesting, who has style and some sense of humour, which is kind, polite, and so on. It is typically used by “Yiddishe mammes” describing the groom they wish their daughter had.

So far, we have seen examples where the language changing population has kept its original expression to denote something that could be best expressed using items of their old vocabulary. This Jewish sociolect has become an organic part of modern Hungarian, acknowledged, and partially known by many non-Jewish speakers, as well. But do we also find influences of Yiddish outside of the Jewish sociolect?

The register that is the most likely to be affected under such circumstances is probably always slang: it is non-conformist by definition, and, therefore, it is the least conservative. Slang is also the field where social norms, barriers and older prejudices play the least role. This may be the reason why Hungarian slang created in the nineteenth century borrowed so much from the languages of two socially marginal groups: the Gipsy (Roma) languages and Yiddish. In contemporary Hungarian slang, one can find well-known words from Yiddish origin such as: kóser (‘kosher’, meaning ‘good’ in slang); tré (‘bad, crappy, grotty’, from Hebrew-Yiddish-Hungarian tréfli ‘ritually unclean, non kosher food’); majré (‘fear, dread, rabbit fever’, from Hebrew mora ‘fear’ > Ashkenazi [] > Yiddish moyre [] > Hungarian []), further derived to majrézik (‘to fear, to be afraid of sg.’); szajré (‘swag, loot, hot stuff’, from Hebrew sehora ‘goods, merchandise’), and so on (Benkő et al., 1967-76). An interesting construction is stikában, meaning ‘in the sly, in secret, quitely’. Its origin is the Aramaic-Hebrew noun ] ‘remaining silent’, which receives a Hungarian inessive case ending, meaning ‘in’.

Through slang, some of the Yiddish words have then infiltrated into the standard language and become quasi-standard. Thus, the word haver - from the Hebrew ] ‘friend’ - is used nowadays as an informal synonym for a ‘good acquaintance, a friend’. Similarly, dafke means in spoken Hungarian ‘For all that! Only out of spite!’. Furthermore, there are words of Yiddish origin which did not enter Hungarian through the slang, but through cultural interaction: macesz (‘matzo, unleavened bread’, from Hebrew matzot, plural form of matza; its ending clearly shows that the word arrived to Hungarian through Yiddish) or sólet (‘tsholent’, a typically Hungarian Jewish bean dish, popular among non-Jews, too)._³⁰

To summarize, the high amount of “exchange particles”, that is, Jewish people gradually changing their language from Yiddish to Hungarian, has affected the target language in three manners. One of them has been the creation of a special Jewish sociolect. This was not a secret language though, and non-Jews have borrowed quite a few expressions. This fact led to the second manner of influence, namely to the high amount of Yiddish words entering the slang. Some of these words have infiltrated even into the relatively more informal registers of the standard language. The third manner is cultural interaction: the exchange of cultural goods - for instance in the field of gastronomy - inevitably has resulted the exchange of the vocabulary designating those goods.