Hungarian Lexicography
Júlia Pajzs Research Institute for Linguistics Hungarian Academy of Sciences H-1068 Budapest Benczúr u. 33 Hungary
EXPLANATORY DICTIONARIES
The still largest seven volume monolingual dictionary of Hungarian was created during the fifties (Bárczi, G. Országh, L.: 1959-1962 A magyar nyelv értelmező szótára I-VII. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.). Although today considered outdated from several viewpoints (entry selection, usage labels, grammar etc.), it was recently published in electronic format, giving a new life to this old work. It contains some authentic quotations from Hungarian fiction, but not necessarily to each sense.
From that seven volume dictionary a slightly modernized, and considerably abridged one-volume version was compiled in the sixties (Juhász, J., Szőke I., O. Nagy, G.: 1972. Magyar Értelmező Kéziszótár. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.). It is still the most commonly used Hungarian monolingual dictionary, updated and corrected during the last few years (Pusztai F.: 2003. Magyar Értelmező Kéziszótár. Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó.). A considerable effort has been made to refresh the vocabulary of the dictionary not only with neologisms, but to include several words from the vocabulary of the Hungarians living outside present-day Hungary. Although a new, corpus based
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monolingual dictionary of Hungarian has been impossible to produce due to the lack of financial and human resources, the 150 million word synchronic electronic corpus of Hungarian (www.nytud.hu/mnsz) was used at the final stage of the new edition to create a frequency index. In 2004 the CD version of the dictionary was published as well.
HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES
Some smaller historical dictionaries were compiled during the 19th century (Budenz, J.: 1873-1881 Magyar-ugor összehasonlító szótár Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia; Szarvas, G., Simonyi, Zs.: 1890-1893. Magyar Nyelvtörténeti Szótár I.-III. Budapest: Hornyánszky Viktor Akadémiai Könyvkereskedése; Szily, K.: 1902-1908 A magyar nyelvújítás szótáraI.-II. Budapest: Hornyánszky Viktor.). A new project for creating the Historical Dictionary of Hungarian, underway for some years, currently aims to produce an eight volume dictionary, with some 100,000 entries, covering the period between 1772-2000. The entries are based on the 25 million word electronic historical corpus (www.nytud.hu/hhc), but also include the old-fashioned, hand-written dictionary slips. Each sense of each headword will be illustrated by corpus examples, including bibliographic reference to the sources. The first volume containing letter A-B is planned to be published in 2006.
Another project (Szabó T., A.: 1975-2002 Erdélyi magyar szótörténeti tár I-XI. Budapest/Kolozsvár: Akadémiai Kiadó/Erdélyi Múzeum Egyesület.) has been going on for several decades to collect and explain the words occurring in old documents and archives in Transylvania, a region of historical Hungary. It uses old manuscripts as
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resources, and each sense of each word is illustrated with authentic quotations with exact bibliographic reference.
ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARIES The most reliable etymological dictionary of Hungarian (Benkő, L.: 1967-1976 A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára I-III. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.) contains the etymology of the 10,000 most basic Hungarian words, supplied with earliest quotations found in archives or in printed sources. Its updated German version (Benkő L.: 1993-1997. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Ungarischen I.-III. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.) made the Hungarian scholarly lexicography available to international expert users.
A specialized etymological dictionary of the geographical names (Kiss, L.: 1988. Földrajzi nevek etimológiai szótára I-II. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.), mainly concentrates on the names of the Carpathian basin, but it also includes well known international names.
OTHER MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARIES. The first scholarly synonymic dictionary of Hungarian (O. Nagy, L., Ruzsiczky É. : 1978. Magyar szinonimaszótár Budapest: Akadémai Kiadó.), was followed by a new popular one (Kiss, G.: 1998. Magyar szókincstár. Budapest: Tinta.). Two brand new phrasal dictionaries have been published recently (Bárdosi, V.: 2003. Magyar szólástár. Budapest: Tinta; Forgács, T.: 2003. Magyar szólások és közmondások tára.
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Budapest: Tinta.), the latter being based on an electronic corpus of Hungarian newspapers.
BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES After a centuries long tradition of bilingual dictionary publishing, lately most of the earlier compiled dictionaries have been thoroughly updated and republished (Országh, L., Magay, T., Futász, L. Kövecses Z.: 1999; Angol-magyar szótár. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó; Országh, L., Magay, T.,: 2000 Magyar-angol szótár. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó; Eckhardt, S., Oláh, T.:1999 Francia-magyar nagyszótár. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó; Eckhardt, S., Konrád M.: 1999 Magyar-francia nagyszótár. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.; Halász, E. Földes, Cs., Uzonyi, P.: 2002 Német-magyar szótár. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.; Halász, E. Földes, Cs., Uzonyi, P.: 2002 Magyarnémet szótár. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.; Országh, Magay 1999; Magay, Országh 2000, Eckhardt, Oláh 1999, Eckhardt, Konrád 1999, Halász, Földes, Uzonyi 2002, Halász, Földes, Uzonyi 2002). Several brand new dictionaries have also been produced (Hessky, R.: 2000 Német-magyar kéziszótár. Szeged: Grimm Kiadó.; Hessky, R. 2002 Magyar-német kéziszótár. Szeged: Grimm Kiadó. Mollay, E. (2002). Holland-magyar kéziszótár. Szeged: Grimm Kiadó. Pálfy, M.: 1999 Francia-magyar kéziszótár Szeged: Grimm Kiadó. Perrot, J.: 2000 Magyar-francia kéziszótár Szeged: Grimm Kiadó.). These user friendly dictionaries employ up-to-date resources of international lexicography, including several example sentences, collocations and idioms, and systematic information on valencies.
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Each of the recently published dictionaries were computer-based, either directly entered in XML format or converted to this format at the end of the edition. They are all published in CD version as well.
THE LEXICOGRAPHIC COMMITTEE OF THE HUNGARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES The committee was re-established in 2000. Its main aim is to support scholarly lexicography, to coordinate the work of independent dictionary makers and to help to organize lexicography teaching at universities on different levels. One of its first and so far most important work was to compile a full bibliography of existing Hungarian dictionaries (Magay, T.: 2004. A magyar szótárirodalom bibliográfiája. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.).
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