Hungarian 16Th-Century Hungarian Orthography Klára Korompay

Hungarian 16th-century Hungarian orthography Klára Korompay 0. Introduction Before embarking on this overview of 16th-century Hungarian orthography, we shall first of all present briefly the essential features of this orthography, and then outline some of the major aspects of its development. Hungarian has an alphabetic writing system, in which the relations between writing and sound are very regular: a grapheme corresponds to a single phoneme, and vice-versa, with very few exceptions. Although the phonemic principle is predominant, we should not, however, underestimate the importance of the morphological principle, since Hungarian, a member of the Finno-Ugrian family, is an agglutinative language. The story of Hungarian orthography begins around the year 1000 AD, with the adoption of the Roman alphabet. As was the case in many other languages, difficulties soon arose due to the fact that the Latin alphabet (21 letters at first, then 23, before reaching the present number of 26) was inadequate to represent the phonological systems of the various vernaculars that it was called upon to transcribe. In the case of Old Hungarian, the number of phonemes stood at around 35, and this number was to increase over the centuries. Several special graphic devices therefore had to be introduced in order to create new signs: this was achieved either by creating digraphs, or by using diacritical signs (mainly different types of accents). During the Middle Ages, both of these devices were adopted, and this led to the crea- tion of different models, whose parallel existence is significant in the 16th century. As Hungarian orthography was not fixed until quite a late date, its evolution during the period studied here underwent further modifi- cations, and this led to variation. Some elements of the orthographical system were not to be fixed until the 19th century; others not even until the 20th. The changeability of Hungarian orthography is one of its essential features, and this no doubt accounts for the fact that the orthography has, over time, managed to adapt and to retain close links with pronunciation. DOI 10.1515/9783110288179.321, ©2017 Klára Korompay, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs3.0 License. 322 Klára Korompay Today, the Hungarian alphabet consists of 40 characters. They are pre- sented below, with the phonemic value of each character given, so that the reader can gain a better understanding of the subject. These will provide the keys to the pronunciation of Hungarian, and also give us elements to allow us to understand some of the developments that took place between the 16th century and the present day. Of these 40 characters, 38 indisputably note phonemes: 24 consonants and 14 vowels (7 long and 7 short). The two remaining ones raise various questions: <ly> has been maintained out of respect for tradition, since, for a couple of centuries, <ly> and <j> have represented the same phoneme for the vast majority of speakers. As for <dz>, a very rarely-used element, there is some discussion at the moment as to its exact status (single phoneme or two-phoneme cluster?) We do not propose to enter into this discussion here. Table 1 shows the complete list of graphemes used to write present-day Hungarian, with their phonemic value: Table 1. Graphemes and phonemes of present-day Hungarian a /ɔ/ d /d/ f /f/ í /i/ m /m/ ö /ø/ sz /s/ ü /y/ á /a/ dz /dz/ g /g/ j /j/ n /n/ ő /ø/ t /t/ ű /y/ b /b/ dzs /dʒ/ gy /dj/ k /k/ ny /nj/ p /p/ ty /tj/ v /v/ c /ts/ e /ε/ h /h/ l /l/ o /o/ r /r/ u /u/ z /z/ cs /tſ/ é /e/ i /i/ ly /j/ ó /o/ s /ſ/ ú /u/ zs /ʒ/ Two further remarks need to be made here: firstly, for the phonetic transcriptions, we have adopted the IPA system for Hungarian, with just one minor modification: to render the palatal consonants represented by the graphemes <gy>,<ny> and <ty>, we have chosen the simpler transcriptions /dj/, /nj/ and /tj/. Secondly, in addition to the 40 characters described above, there are four further characters, <q>, <x>, <y> and <w>, which are used in loan-words and in some proper nouns. They are relics of old spellings, but may also be considered as part of the alphabet. Hungarian 323 1. The main types of orthography in the 16th century 1.1. The Chancery model The Chancery model is the oldest of all the models that existed in the 16th century: it originated in the 11th–12th centuries. 1181 is an important historical date, because in this year King Béla III founded a Royal Chan- cery, independent from the capella regia, on the lines of the one that existed in France, and made compulsory the recording of legal proceedings in writing. Legal acts written in Latin were produced in their thousands during the Middle Ages, and the Roman alphabet also gradually came to be used to write Hungarian, since these legal acts often contained proper nouns or words that had to be set down in their “vernacular” form. This eventually led to the elaboration of a whole set of sign–sound correspondences for the vernacular as a whole. Chancery orthography, which remained very phonemic and occasionally developed new notations, evolved slowly over the centuries. This was the main model that authors copied when they had to compose texts in Hungar- ian. The first texts in Hungarian, composed from the second half of the 12th century onwards, were translated from Latin and were intended as supports for the teachings of the Church. However, they remained rare for quite some time. This situation changed in the 15th century when, following a series of monastic reforms, an effort was made to reinforce discipline in the Francis- can and Dominican orders. A number of texts in Hungarian were produced for this particular purpose (cf. Horváth 2005 [1944]: 550–560). Extracts from the Scriptures, lives of saints, sermons and prayers were translated and set down in written form to provide spiritual nourishment for one group in particular: nuns in convents, who did not have access to Latin culture, and who were the main audience for these vernacular texts. Indeed, some of these nuns themselves were also copyists, such as the Dominican nun Lea Ráskay. There are around fifty manuscript books (codices) surviving from the 15th–16th centuries. As far as their orthography is concerned, many of them faithfully follow the Chancery tradition: this is especially true for manuscripts which were produced in Dominican scriptoria. It is, moreover, very likely that some of these texts were copied or adapted from older manuscripts, which have been lost. What, then, are the structural characteristics of “Chancery orthography”? As the Roman alphabet was inadequate to note the phonemes of Hungarian, two types of adaptation had to be made. In some cases, two 324 Klára Korompay different phonemes were noted by a single grapheme: for instance, <z> was used to note both /z/ and /s/, <s> was used to note both /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, etc. The same notations could be used both for long vowels and for short vowels (in a few rare cases, the reduplication of graphemes was also used to mark long vowels). Another solution, a more elaborate one, consisted in using digraphs. Phonemes that had no equivalent in Latin (affricates, palatal consonants, rounded front vowels) were, most often, noted by combinations of letters (<ch> for /tʃ/, <cz> for /ts/; <ty>, <gy>, <ly>, <ny> for the palatal equivalents of /t/, /d/, /l/ and /n/; <ew> was used for /ø:/). One of the most striking features of this early orthographical model is its wide range of digraphs (cf. Kniezsa 1952: 9–78, 1959: 5–9, Korompay 2003: 281–291). Needless to say, this system spawned a large number of internal vari- ants: the relations between phonemes and graphemes left a certain amount of room for manoeuvre, which was inevitable at the time. In some cases, variation was conditioned by more or less precise rules, often dictated by the pronunciation of Medieval Latin. For example, there were two ways of noting /k/: either by <c> or by <k>, the latter being preferred before <e> and <i>. Some letters could also stand either for a vowel or for a consonant: this was the case with <i>, <y> and <j>, which noted either /i/ or /j/. Simi- larly, <u>, <v> and <w> could correspond either to /u/, /y/ or /v/. This fluc- tuating use was of course a widespread phenomenon in European languages as a whole, during the Middle Ages. Besides the Roman alphabet as such, other vernacular languages also made significant contributions to Hungarian orthography. During the foun- dation period of Hungarian orthography (11th–12th centuries), three Euro- pean languages in particular seem to have played a part in the adoption of certain orthographical elements: German, Italian and French. According to language historians, the dual value of the graphemes <z> and <s> which note, respectively, the two sibilants and the two palato-alveolar fricatives, is one of several features that can be attributed to the influence of the German language (cf. Kniezsa 1952: 69). As for Italian, this language no doubt played a part in the curious fact that the palatal consonant /dj/ is written as <gy> in Hungarian, as the pronunciation developed from a former /dʒ́/, similar to the consonant noted by g in Italian. Finally, the digraph <ch>, pronounced /tʃ/, was borrowed from Old French. The parallel which exists on this point between Old Hungarian and English is therefore no coinci- dence, for both languages borrowed the device from Old French at around the same time.

Load more