Volume 36, Issue 2

As a result of German-Hungarian societal bilingualism German family names had been present in multilingual 19 th century Hungary for centuries. Magyarizations of family names in the second half of the 19 th century mostly affected the German and Yiddish speech communities bearing German family names. This paper explores the causes and characteristics of this phenomenon by examining the social, psychological, and ideological factors influencing the use of family names. After giving the numerical description of family name changes, the authors examine the sociolinguistic background of family name use, focusing on the situation of ethnolinguistic communities whose members bore German family names. By analysing the semantic structure of family names, the authors present how and why these family names could become tools of linguistic nationalism in contemporary Hungary, generating the claim of changing foreign-sounding family names to Hungarian ones. The political and social background of family name changes as well as social stratification of the applicants are also examined. The authors describe the movement of family name Magyarizations as a behavioural pattern of middle-class people ready to accept social mobility and willing to take part in assimilation. The aesthetic, functional and linguistic principles found behind these family name changes are also discussed. After briefly presenting the history of German family names in 20 th century Hungary, the authors deduce some basic theoretical and methodological conclusions.

In this paper dealing with schwa insertion in German conjugation, two rules are worked out and shown to be each necessary. They are compared with other formulations found in the literature. Some general problems related to the two rules are discussed, especially natural classes and the Naturalness Condition in phonology. One of the rules and the Naturalness Condition are used to show the necessity of the phonetic feature “approximant”.

This paper is about the potential value of the Old High German Tatian manuscript as a source for research on word order. The Tatian (dated before 850), being one of the largest records of Old High German, is often viewed as a slavish translation of the Latin text, displaying many features of an interlinear translation. However, it has long been noted that deviations from the Latin word order can provide valuable evidence for genuine Old High German syntactic structures. Research until now has shown that such deviations display features known from New High German grammar. In this paper, it is argued that deviations from the Latin word order going against New High German can also be found in significant numbers. Taking into account the totality of deviations, it is argued that they allow to reconstruct a genuine Old High German system in which word order is largely determined by information structural parameters.

The following paper deals with the issue of disguise in incriminated writings within the framework of forensic authorship assessment. Although it does not seem to be widely known among linguistically untrained speakers that written language can indeed contain traces of the individual author and that these traces may be detected by a linguist, authors of incriminated writings such as extortion letters or threatening letters frequently attempt to disguise not only their handwriting, but also their language. Everyday practice points to a number of possible strategies of disguise which, however, have not as yet been empirically investigated. In order to acquire some empirical data a study was carried out with 52 students of German Studies, the results of which are presented and discussed. Although the results remain to be tested against data acquired under more representative conditions, different strategies of disguise can indeed be distinguished which may facilitate the forensic linguist's task of identifying disguised as opposed to authentic language in written texts. Also, it is suggested that the results of an experiment such as the one outlined here may contribute to research into issues concerning the general metalinguistic knowledge of native speakers in general.