Language and Literature paper by Zsemlyei, Borbála
Babes Bolyai University

Crossing Language Borders – as shown by the Historical Dictionary of the Hungarian Language in Transylvania

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Transylvania has always been a space of multiculturalism which is reflected in the fact that the Hungarian regional standard contains more Romanian and German elements than the central standard. And that is not only characteristic to the present state of the language but it is a historical phenomena.
During the process of editing the Dictionary, Attila Szabó T. and his co-workers realised that the language material gathered from Transylvanian archives contain a number of Hungarian words of Romanian origin that the literature has no knowledge of. Thus came the idea of a smaller dictionary which would present the Romanian loanwords of Hungarian spoken in Transylvania in the period of the 16–19th centuries. By the mid 1980’s the editorial work was finalized, however it has never been published, the material is kept at the Department of Hungarian and General Linguistics, Babes–Bolyai University, Kolozsvár.
In my paper I attempt to present the words of Romanian origin listed in the Historical Dictionary of the Hungarian Language in Transylvania which the general literature of loan words has no knowledge of in the context of crossing borders in the sense that neighbouring languages always have huge impact on each other even if they are genetically completely different.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dr. Zsemlyei Borbála is currently a teaching assistant at the Department of Hungarian and General Linguistics, Babeș‒Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She completed her university degree in Hungarian language and literature and English language and literature at Babeș‒Bolyai University in 2000. She continued her studies at the same university and received her master’s degree in Hungarian linguistics in 2002. In 2009 she defended her PhD thesis with the title Diminutive Suffixes in Old Hungarian in Transylvania. Her main field of research is the old Hungarian language used in Transylvania. She presented the results of her research in numerous national and international conferences. She is one of the editors of the Historical Dictionary of the Hungarian Language in Transylvania (Erdélyi magyar szótörténeti tár).