Calquing

Abstract:
During their migration across the East European steppes in the 9th century, ancestors of Hungarians, speakers of a Uralic language, had merely sporadic contacts with East Slavic dialect speakers. Really intensive Slavic–Hungarian language contacts started only at the end of the 9th century after the settlement of Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin. The Hungarian tribes found here a population speaking one of the late Proto-Slavic dialects that they gradually assimilated. It means that Hungarian is a Uralic (Finno-Ugric) language that developed on a Slavic substrate on its present-day territory. It can be presumed that this Slavic substrate was far from homogenous. On the basis of the early Slavic
loanwords in Hungarian, a South Slavic–West Slavic transitory dialect and a Bulgarian Slavic dialect can be identified. Since the Hungarian language area is mainly surrounded by Slavic languages, the number of Slavic loanwords in Hungarian has been increasing to this day. The Slavic loanwords constitute the largest group of foreign lexical elements in Hungarian: their proportion (9.36 per cent) is close to the ratio of the vocabulary of Finno-Ugric origin (10.1 per cent) as far as stems are concerned. Since the Slavic–Hungarian language contacts were predominantly oral, calques (e.g. varga ‚shoemaker‘: varr ‚sew‘ < *šьvьcь:
*šiti) and semantic loans (e.g. világ ‚light‘ → ‚world‘ < *světъ ‚light; world‘) based on Slavic models were created spontaneously. Early calques from Latin (e.g. fordít ‚turn‘ → ‚translate‘ < converto ‚turn; translate‘) and German (e.g. község ‚township‘: köz ‚common‘ < Gemeinde) were also created in this way. During the language reform, lasting from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, a large number of loan translations were created based on German and Latin models (e.g. anyag ‚material, stuff‘: anya ‚mother‘; szöveg ‚text‘: sző ‚weave‘). The new calques emerging at that time have not always replaced the corresponding
borrowed elements (the words matéria ‚material‘ and textus ‚text‘ can still be found in terminology and in literary language use); in many cases, the loanword and the calque function as synonyms. In science terminology, the loanword and the neologism (the latter being a loan translation) are also frequently used in parallel (e.g. geológia ~ földtan ‚geology‘, geográfia ~ földrajz ‚geography‘). Consequently, according to Unbegaun’s classification, Hungarian remains a language having an inclination for the creation of calques but its vocabulary is constantly enriched by loanwords as well, especially form English. Apart from the
extensive influx of English lexical borrowings in the late 20th and early 21st century, in present-day Hungarian, a significant number of loan translations and semantic loans are also created on the basis of English models (e.g. okostelefon ‚smartphone‘ < okos ‚smart‘ + telefon ‚phone‘, csapatépítés ‚team building‘ < csapat ‚team‘ + építés ‚building‘).