Abstract
The present study joins the series of works aiming to bring up to date, within Romanian linguistics, the theories concerning (Romanian-Hungarian) linguistic interferences manifested in bilingual communities and the research of lexical properties which have entered the Romanian written language either by the influence of the Hungarian dialects, spoken in different regions of the country, or by the translation of Hungarian texts into Romanian. The study will focus on Hungarian loanwords in old Romanian language which are discussed in terms of their changes in meaning. The inventory of the Hungarian loanwords’ meanings listed here was made based on a corpus of old Romanian texts, taking into account the material provided by various dictionaries with etymological concerns. As the few examples analysed in this study show, lexical meaning is impregnated with both intellect and emotional sensibility. The emotional universe, however, is rarely taken over along with the loanword. The emotional content is most often adapted, in its turn, to the sensitivity and spirituality of the speakers who borrowed the word.
Highlights
The psychological side of the wordEvery word is a combination of different mental representations, a “complication” of them, i.e. a simultaneous connection between disparate representations (cf. Wundt, 1893, p. 209; Gombocz, 1997, p. 134)
N Hungarian loanwords in old Romanian language which are discussed in terms of their changes in meaning
Its premiss was the observation that the spirit of a community should be regarded as being different from the individual spirit and, beside individual psychology, the existence of an ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie) should be acknowledged
Summary
Every word is a combination of different mental representations, a “complication” of them, i.e. a simultaneous connection between disparate representations (cf. Wundt, 1893, p. 209; Gombocz, 1997, p. 134). Kecsegtet ‘deceives, promises’ is unpleasant to hearing and perceived as being ugly Another interesting situation is when each lexeme in a synonymous pair of words is associated with different affective values. The author distinguishes two types of semantic changes: regular and singular (sporadic) The former represent the actual semantic changes, in the strict sense of the word, which appear as a result of a slow and steady process, whose causes should be sought in the attributes of the concept subjected to change, being produced, as a consequence of the changes occurred within the mental associations which work in each and every member of the community, just like instinctive acts. As a matter of fact, this interpretation, in its turn, has certain drawbacks since the changes of the cultural and social conditions constitute only one of the possible causes, by no means necessary, of the changes occured in the mental representations and associations, and their impact on the processes of the meaning shift is only indirect
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