Linguistic Theories and National Tmages in 19Th Century Hungary'

Pragmatics5:2.155 -166. InternationalPragmatics Association LINGUISTIC THEORIES AND NATIONAL TMAGES IN 19TH CENTURY HUNGARY' SusanGal 1. Introduction ln 1191,Johann Gottfried Herder commented: ...asfrlr the Hungarians or Magyars,squeezed between Slavs, Germans, Vlachs and other peoples,they are now the smallest part of theircountry's population and in centuriesto comeeven their language will probablybe lost (cited in Puk6nszky1921: 35). We are used to understandingHerder as a fbunder of western philology and anthropology,os one of those who helped put into place the great discursive oppositionin 19th century European thought betweenthe Aryan and the Semitic races (Olender 1992: 37-5I). He is usually cast as a precursor of Europe's "orientalist"project (Said 1978).Herder's commenton the Magyarsforms a single subordinateclause in a four volume work, Ideen zur Philosophieder Geschichteder Menschheir;he has little more to sayabout them. Yet in Hungary,Herder's name is popularlyknown mainly for this prophecyof nationaldeath, and throughout the 19thcentury Hungarian writers repeatedlyargued with the prophecy,and tried to vitiate it through linguistic and educational reform.2 Its effect on Hungarian thinking concerning language is by no means over. A book entitled Herder 'ln anry€kdban Herder'sshadow,' warning yet againof the dangersof languageloss, appeared1n 1979in a popular paperbackseries. The differencein magnitudebetween Herder's comment and the Hungarian responsehighlights the power disparitybetween regions and scholars,and is part of my story.In sympathywith writers on colonialdiscourse and orientalismwho have criticizedrecent rvork as overly focusedon the European center (e.g.Dirks 7992), I proposeto reversethe perspective,viewing German metropolitan thinkers on languagefrom a distinctlyperipheral, that is, Hungarian point of view. Much of easternEurope can be consideredamong Europe'sfirst colonies- agriculturalproducers for the Prussiansand the Habsburg Empire - part of that "east"which European scholarshipand administrationcreated to define itself. As ' Many thanks to Kit Woolard for her stimulating questions,and to Bill Hanks for his commentsat the AAA symposium" 2 Pukdnszky (I}ZD carefully describes the few paragraphs that Hercler devotes to the Hungarianlanguage and people, tracing the reception and influence of this part of Herder's work on Hungarian scholarshipand literary life in the 19rh century. 156 SusanGal was the casein many overseascolonies, elites of easternEurope were in constant contact with German, French and English scholarshipduring the 18th and 19th centuries.Indeed, Hungarian, Romanian and Slavic elites helped create these ideas, sometimesto form their own "eastern"identities in oppositionto "Europe."At other times they argued for their own "Europeanness"and thus for political and military support to guard European trontiers againstinvaders from further east (Verdery 1991,:Chap 2). Then, as now, this dichotomousdiscourse about "Europe" and the "east"worked as a symboliccounter, a linguisticshifter of identity(Gal 1991).Thus, I focusnot on the orientalistproject of the metropolebuilding its visionof itselfby constructinga devalued,homogenous, changeless other, but rather on what the changingand far from homogeneousobjects of that categorizingdid with someof theseideas. More specifically,my aim is to examine briefly two well-known linguistic debatesof the late 19thcentury in Hungary(roughly 1870-1890): a) on the origins and genetic relationshipsof the Hungarianlanguage, and b) on the ways in which the languageshould be modernized,expanded and reformedto meet the needsof an increasinglycapitalist society. The two debates,while contemporaneousand equally discussedin Hungarian historiography,are neverthelessrarely treated together.This is perhapsbecause they appearto take up quite difterent issues. Nevertheless,it is clear that the participantswrote for and read the same few journals,were involvedin closecollegial or student-teacherrelationships, and those best known for their contributionin one discussionoccasionally also commented on the other.3I suggestthat the implicit links betweenthe two debatesbecome clearer if we view them not only as scholarlyarguments about specific linguistic problems, but simultaneouslyas codedcontests that, in differentways,, proposed to detine the "nation" and a national public. At the sametime, the debateswere equally about claims to a professionalexpertise that could legitimatelyprovide such definitions" Both of the debatesdrew on ideas about the nature of languageand its relationto sociallife that were developedearlier in Germanand Englishwritings. By reworking these ideas and inscribingthem in everdaypractices, Hungarian thinkers,publishers, newspaper writers, administrators and politicianswere literally creatingthe Hungarian language,along with its popular image.In this process,they also created categoriesof identity that formed extemalboundaries defining what "Hungarian"was vis-d-vis the rest of the world. Simultaneously,they formed intemal boundariesdefining what part of the populationcounted as really Hungarian;what part would be imagined,taken-for-granted as the anonymous"public" or "people" who spoke that language.This questionwas particularlysalient for the Kingdom of Hungary in the late 19th century, as for other similar structures all over the continent.Hungary was culturally and linguisticallyvery heterogenous, and its earlier form of ideological unity - loyalty to the Crown of St. Stephen - was being challengedas a form of political legitimacyby nationalismsimagined in ethnicterms. Both kinds of boundarieswere thus mattersof struggle,not only amonglinguists, 3 For biographical informationas well as evidenceon friendshiplinks betweenthe linguists of the period, see Pinter(1934), who providesmuch more straightforward information, especially on religious and etitnicbackground, than any works produced during the state-socialist period. Linguistic theories and national intages in 19th century Hungary I57 but alsoamong broader social groups and classes. In analyzingthese 19thcentury arguments, I draw on a notion of "public" as an idecJogicalconstruct that is often dependent on print, and thus on the decontexutalizationof language.It is not an empiricallycountable audience,nor evena notionof readership,modelled on face-to-faceinteraction. Rather, one might call it a logic for the legitimation of political power that gets its authority from supposedlyincluding "everyone."This negative notion of the public has been identifiedin a number of forms in recent studiesof post-absolutistEurope and North America. Warner (1990),building on Habermas'early work on European publics,argues that the legitimacyof 18th century American republicanismwas basedon the idea of disinterestedindividuals who, becausethe anonymityof print allowedthem to be no-one-in-particular,could claim to represent the "people." Anderson's(1983) notion of an "imaginedcommunity" plays on this same logic of a non-face-to-facesocial group definedthrough simultaneousreading as everyone- because-no-one-in-particular.The relatedidea of the Volk accomplishesthe same thing:Collections of taleswhose authorswere deliberatelyeftaced to produce an imageof the authenticfolk who are "everyclne"because no-one. In 19th century Hungary,one set of argumentsabout the nationallanguage worked in just this way to createthe imageof a politicalunit definedand legitimatedthrough a standard languagesupposedly linked to no particular group, whose inherent laws were discoveredthrough the disinterestedexpertise of linguisticscience. 2. Externalboundaries By the middle of the 19th century,the earlier influenceof Herder in Hungary was far outstrippedby the ideasof the Victorian linguist,Max Miiller. Miiller's Lectures on thescience of langmge,delivered to the Royal Societyin the 1860s,argued for the view that linguisticsis a natural science,and languagesare organismsof the naturalworld. Lecture 8 proposedthe famoushierarchy of languagesand cultures which is recognizableas part of the wider discourseabout Aryan and Semitic peoples.Mtiller first distinguishedthe isolatinglanguages, exemplified by Chinese, in whichgrammatical relations are not signalledby suffixationat all. In contrast, agglutinatinglanguages, exemplifed by what Miiller calledthe "Turanian"language familyof CentralAsia, addedsuffixes without alteringthe roots,and their speakers werenomadic hordes unsuited to state-making.The highestevolutionary category includedthe Semitic and Aryan languageswhich were inflecting. The root was systematicallychanged by affixationsignaling grammatical relation. These, Miiller asserted,were the languagesof high civilizations. Mtiller'slectures were reviewedin Hungarysoon after their publicationand, unusualfor contemporarylinguistic work-s, were translatedinto Hungarian in the 1870s.This interestwas perhapsnot entirely scientific,but due in part to matters of self-representation.Mtiller had wide, internationalinfluence. A-German-born philosopher,linguist, and orientalist who had gone to England in his youth, his researchon easternlanguages was supported by the East India Company.Although he wrote in English, and held a professorshipat Oxford, he was translatedinto Germanand severalother languages.Most importantly,he had discussedMagyar directly,placing it among the Turanian family of languages,those whose speakers 158 Susan Gal were categorizedas incapableof state-making.Such newscame at a bad time for Hungarian elites, who were just embarking

Load more