Nemeth's scholarship was devoted almost entirely to various aspects of Ottoman-Turkish studies. A few works of his, however, crossed over into Iranian studies and made lasting contributions to this field, including the Persian-Arabic elements in the Turkish language.
He is believed to have been Cumanian by origin (Kakuk, 1977, p. 8; 1978, p. 208), although the name Németh (‘German’) in local practice was often assigned to people who were supporters of the German-Austrian invaders of the region.
In his early years he made several trips to Turkey: Istanbul in 1907, Aydin and Smirna in 1908. From 1909, as the fellow of the prestigious Eötvös College, he studied in the Budapest University under the guidance of Zoltán Gombócz[1], Bernát Munkácsi[2], Ignác Goldziher[3], and Armin Vámbéry[4]. Between 1911 and 1914, he studied in Leipzig, Kiel, and Berlin. He made a fast and brilliant career. In 1915 he was qualified as lecturer of the University of Budapest. In 1916 he became extraordinary professor and in 1918 ordinary professor of the Turkish Department. In 1922 he became corresponding member and from 1932 regular member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
In 1930 he published his most important and, by its impact on Hungarian ancient history, most significant work A honfoglaló magyarság kialakulása (Formation of the Hungarian Conquerors of the 9th century) in which he explored the role of the Turkic tribes in the ethnic formation of the Hungarian people.
His scholarship was devoted almost entirely to various aspects of Ottoman-Turkish studies. A few works of his, however, reached over to Iranian studies too and made lasting contributions to this field. While he was working on a series of Ottoman Manuals for Sammlung Göschen, he paid special attention to the Persian-Arabic elements in the Turkish language partly because of their unusually large number, partly because of their unique status. He established that the Persian elements had got into the Oghuz languages (Southern Turkic group) through direct contact. As for the Arabic loanwords, in his opinion, most of them had found their way into Turkish through Persian transmission. In his view, Persian-Arabic elements played a positive role in the formation of the Ottoman literary idiom. They reflect the most significant social change in the history of the Turks, when the nomads became sedentary and followed the Iranian lifestyle. “This extraordinary social change was accompanied by extraordinary transformation of the language” (Németh, 1951, p. 315).
Exploring the unusual status of the Persian-Arabic elements in the Turkish vernacular, Németh developed the theory of mixed language structure and presented it for debate to the General Assembly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on 11 December 1951. According to his observation, the Ottoman-Turkish language had a dual grammatical system, which was manifest in the different treatment of the native elements from the Persian-Arab loans in morphology, word formation, and to some extent, phonetics. For example, the Persian eżāfa in the Ottoman Turkish occurred only with Arabic or Persian constituents, phrasal verbs were created only on Arabic or Persian bases, while the palato-alveolar harmony was binding in Turkish words only, and not in Arabic or Persian ones. Németh came to the conclusion that in the use of its vocabulary the Ottoman Turkish obeyed a dual set of rules governing morphological and phonemic processes. He applied his theory to the Turkish vernacular, the every day Turkish, as he repeatedly pointed out. He was not talking about the difference between the literary idiom and the everyday language, as S. Kakuk understood it (Kakuk, 1977, p. 11; Idem, 1978, p. 209). Lajos Ligeti, Zsigmond Telegdi, Lajos Tamás, and László Gáldi—the best linguists of the Hungarian Academy—commented on Németh’s lecture providing supportive materials from other languages. Ligeti expressed some concern about the technical term “dual language system”. He suggested the term “mixed languages” for idioms that possessed these phenomena (A kevert nyelvrendszer kérdéséhez … , pp. 332-33). Telegdi’s five-page comment is very important also for those who study Modern Persian, and, to some extent, for general linguists. He expanded on the nature and origin of Persian phrasal verbs (he calls them compound verbs or verbal paraphrases), which he developed into a long article a year later. He stated that Turkish abounds in phrasal verbs borrowed from Persian. The Turks kept the Arabic or Persian nominal part unchanged but translated the Persian derivative auxiliary into Turkish (Idem, pp. 340-41). What Telegdi meant to say was that the Turks did not create these phrasal verbs guided by the rules of a second language system. They picked them from the storehouse of ready materials transferred from Persian.
A word list on the back of a document dated 1422 CE, discovered in the Hungarian National Archives, was the object of Németh’s research of the Yazygian (Hungarian jász) people, their presence in Hungary, and their language. He identified the document as a glossary of Yazygian words and phrases mostly with Latin and in six cases with Hungarian glosses. With remarkable philological skill and erudition he was able to restore almost all elements of the text and authenticate them with an impressive critical apparatus. He would consult his fellow scholars, especially the Iranist János Hartmatta, and include their views into his publications irrespective of whether they were in agreement with him or not. He compared his findings partly with Yazygian data already established in Hungary and partly with the two dialects, Iron and Digor, of the Ossetic language. With this new data he reviewed Yazygian personal and place names found in Hungarian documents and made important corrections in their forms. He also found that Yazygian was so close to Ossetic, that they constituted two different dialects of the same language, rather than two different Iranian languages. From the two dialects of the Ossetic language it was the Digor that showed greater similarity to Yazygian.
In recognition of his scholarship, in 1930 Németh was granted the privilege to establish the Department of Turkish Philology and Hungarian Ancient History. In view of the importance of Persian for Ottoman studies, in this department he also provided home for Iranian courses. For decades, lecturers and native speakers from Persia would teach classical and modern Persian language and literature and colloquial Persian according to his program.
András Bodrogligeti
Works.
Gyula Németh (1916).
Türkische Grammatik. G. J. Göschen.
Julius Németh (1917).
Türkische Grammatik. G.J. Göschen'sche Verlagshandlung.
Gyula Németh (1917).
Türkische-deutsches gesprächsbuch. G.J. Göschen.
Gyula Németh; Gyula
Káldy-Nagy (1976). Hungaro-Turcica: studies in honor of Julius Németh. Loránd
Eötvös Univ. ISBN 978-963-461-058-8.
Gy Németh (1967). Korosi
Csoma - Archivum. Brill Archive. pp. 209
Bibliography
For a complete bibliography
of Julius Németh’s works see Gyula Németh, Törökök ésmagyarok (Turks and
Hungarians), vol. 2: Oszmán törökök (Ottoman Turks), Budapest, 1990, pp.
287-312.
“A kevert nyelvrendszer kérdéséhez. Az oszmán-török nyelv kettös rendszere” (To the Question of Mixed Language Structure. The Dual Grammatical System of the Ottoman Turkish Language), with comments by Lajos Ligeti, Zsigmond Telegdi, Lajos Tamás, and László Gáldi, A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Nyelv-és Irodalomtudományi Osztályának Közleményei II, 1958, Nos. 1-4, pp. 313-45.
Studies.
Gábor Agoston, “Karcag és a Magyar turkologia” (Karcag and Hungarian Turcology), Jászkunság, 1993, No. 5, pp. 38-41.
Hungaro-Turcica. Studies in Honour of Julius Németh, ed. Káldy-Nagy, Budapest, 1976.
Zsuzsa Kakuk, “Julius Németh 1890-1976,” Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungarica 27 (1977), pp. 3-13.
Idem,“Németh Gyula 1890-1976,” Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 80 (1978), pp. 206-9.
András Róna-Tas, “Julius Németh. Life and work,” Acta Orientalia Hungarica 32 (1978), pp. 261-84.
Zsigmond Telegdi, “Nature et
fonction des périphrases verbales dites ‘verbes composés’ en persan,” Acta
Orientalia Hungarica, 1952, pp. 315-38.
Idem, “La construction abrui muhoyaš daroz en tadjik,” W. B. Henning Memorial Volume, London, 1970, pp. 427-46.
SOURCE: https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/nemeth-gyula
https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/nemeth-gyula-julius
[1] Zoltán Gombocz (18 June 1877
– 2 May 1935) was a Hungarian scholar specializing in Finno-Ugric languages,
but also in Turkic languages.
Gombocz was born in Ödenburg/Sopron, and spent his early years there, where his father was a professor at an evangelical college.[1] He studied philology, which also included Romance languages, under the linguists Josef Szinnyei, August Ph. Becker[2] and also Zsigmund Simonyi at Budapest University,[a] and through them absorbed the principles of the Junggrammatiker. Szinnyei's diplomacy is said to have been decisive in influencing Gombocz's decision to concentrate on languages related to Hungary's historic roots. he obtained his doctorate in 1900.[3] He studied abroad, under the Jesuit linguist Jean-Pierre Rousselot at the Collège de France in Paris,[4] in Germany over 1903/4 in Leipzig where he came under the influence of Hermann Paul and Wilhelm Wundt, and in Finland where he mastered Finnish.
He took up appointments successively thereafter as Professor of Finno-Ugric languages at Kolozsvár and Szeged, and was appointed chair of the subject in Budapest in 1921, where he rose to become rector in 1927 of the most prestigious institution of learning in his country, Eötvös Loránd University.
Aside from writing a key modern text on Hungarian, An Outline of a Historical Hungarian Grammnar, Gombocz tackled one of the most recondite problems of his discipline the reconstruction of the ancient vowel and vowel-ablaut system of proto-Finno-Ugrian, which, together with the work of his Finnish colleague Eemil Nestor Setälä, put Finno-Ugrian phonology on a firm scientific basis. Together with his friend and colleague Melich János,[6] Gombocz compiled a comprehensive etymological dictionary of Hungarian, the first scientific work of its kind for one of the Finno-Ugrian languages.
Gombocz also mastered Turkology and made fundamental contributions to the topic, writing important papers on the analysis of Turkic loan-words into Hungarian.
Gombocz died of a seizure during a faculty meeting, at the early age of 58, and was mourned by his peers as one of the two outstanding altmeister of Finno-Ugric studies of his time, the other being Setälä, who had died earlier in February, the same year.
[2] Munkácsi, Bernát
(1860–1937), Hungarian linguist, ethnographer, and pedagogue. Born in Oradea (Rom., Nagyvárad; Ger., Grosswardein), then located in Hungary, Bernát Munkácsi was the son of Me’ir Avraham Munk, a Hebrew writer. Munkácsi began his education in a traditional heder but later was sent to the local gymnasium. He started his university training in medicine but switched his concentration to Hungarian and German language and literature.
As a student of Ármin Vámbéry and other linguists and orientalists, Munkácsi researched the origins of the Hungarian language. As a specialist in comparative linguistics and ethnography, he uncovered sources for this language and studied the pre-European wanderings of the Magyars. His research tours to the mid-Volga and Kama River region in 1885 and to western Siberia in 1888–1889 were supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was elected a corresponding member of that academy in 1890 and became a full member in 1910.
Munkácsi served for more than 15 years as vice president of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society as well as editor of scientific journals, but was never appointed to a teaching or research position at a state high school or university. For nearly 50 years (1879–1927), he published books and journal articles in Hungarian and German, recording a critical body of linguistic and ethnographic knowledge. He also reconstructed his complex family history and genealogy.
In 1890, Munkácsi was appointed to be the school inspector for the Neolog Jewish community of Pest, whose leadership expected him to improve teaching practices and the curriculum for religious studies. In the 1890s, approximately 20,000 students were receiving Jewish religious education in Pest both in Jewish and “mixed” (non-Jewish) schools. Munkácsi’s attempt to develop a system called the Universal Religious Educational Program for the Jewish Congregation of Pest relied on the assumption that “dignity of religious educational policy can only be maintained and perpetuated if its teachings do not run counter to the pupils’ beliefs.” He and his editorial committee believed that the religious education curriculum should be “universal”—namely, applicable in all types of schools, Jewish and non-Jewish, and differentiated between compulsory and facultative parts in the teaching plan. Accordingly, the study of Hebrew language became an essential part of the curriculum, but the study of the Bible and later Hebrew-language works were to be presented in Hungarian translation. Munkácsi and his team suggested devoting six to eight hours each week to religious education in Jewish schools for boys and three to six hours for girls
After a long period of preparation, the new curriculum was finally published in 1906 and was accepted by Jewish school authorities in Pest. However, the program never gained widespread acceptance and implementation outside of that city. Though praised as an outstanding achievement of Jewish pedagogy, the new curriculum was implemented in fewer than half a dozen Jewish and non-Jewish schools in Pest, and about the same number of Jewish schools outside the capital. The total number of Jewish schools throughout Hungary before World War I was 500.
Suggested Reading
László Felkai, Zsidó iskolázás Magyarországon, 1780–1990 (Budapest, 1998); Aron Moskovits, Jewish Education in Hungary, 1848–1948 (New York, 1964). Author: Yitzhak Kashti
[3] Ignác (Yitzhaq Yehuda) Goldziher (22 June 1850 – 13 November 1921), often credited as Ignaz Goldziher, was a Hungarian scholar of Islam. Along with the German Theodor Nöldeke and the Dutch Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, he is considered the founder of modern Islamic studies in Europe.
Born in Székesfehérvár of Jewish heritage, he was educated at the universities of Budapest, Berlin, Leipzig and Leiden with the support of József Eötvös, Hungarian minister of culture. He became privatdozent at Budapest in 1872. In the next year, under the auspices of the Hungarian government, he began a journey through Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and took the opportunity of attending lectures of Muslim sheiks in the mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo.[citation needed]
Goldziher kept a personal record of his reflections, travel records and daily records. This journal was later published in German as Tagebuch. The following quotation from Goldziher's published journal provides insight into his feelings about Islam.
Ich lebte mich denn auch während dieser Wochen so sehr in den mohammedanischen Geist ein, dass ich zuletzt innerlich überzeugt wurde, ich sei selbst Mohammedaner und klug herausfand, dass dies die einzige Religion sei, welche selbst in ihrer doktrinär-offiziellen Gestaltung und Formulirung philosophische Köpfe befriedigen könne. Mein Ideal war es, das Judenthum zu ähnlicher rationeller Stufe zu erheben. Der Islam, so lehrte mich meine Erfahrung, sei die einzige Religion, in welcher Aberglaube und heidnische Rudimente nicht durch den Rationalismus, sondern durch die orthodoxe Lehre verpönt werden. (p. 59)
i.e., "In those weeks, I
truly entered into the spirit of Islam to such an extent that ultimately I
became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim, and judiciously
discovered that this was the only religion which, even in its doctrinal and
official formulation, can satisfy philosophic minds. My ideal was to elevate
Judaism to a similar rational level. Islam, as my experience taught me, is the
only religion, in which superstitious and heathen ingredients are not frowned
upon by rationalism, but by orthodox doctrine."
Sander Gilman, in commenting
on this passage, writes that, 'the Islam he discovered becomes the model for a
new spirit of Judaism at the close of the nineteenth century.’ In Cairo, Goldziher even prayed as a Muslim:
"In the midst of the thousands of the pious, I rubbed my forehead against
the floor of the mosque. Never in my life was I more devout, more truly devout,
than on that exalted Friday."
Despite his love for Islam, Goldziher remained a devout Jew all his life. This bond to the Mosaic faith was unusual for a man seeking an academic career in Europe in the late 19th century. This fact is significant in understanding his work. He saw Islam through the eyes of someone who refused to assimilate into contemporary European culture. In fact, despite his fondness for Islam, he had little affection, if not outright scorn, for European Christianity. As a convert to Christianity he would have easily received a university appointment as full professor but he refused.
Goldziher died in Budapest.
Career
In 1890 he published
Muhammedanische Studien in which he showed how Hadith reflected the legal and
doctrinal controversies of the two centuries after the death of Muhammad rather
than the words of Mohamed himself. He was a strong believer in the view that
Islamic law owes its origins to Roman law but in the opinion of Patricia Crone
his arguments here are "uncharacteristically weak".
Goldziher was denied a teaching post at Budapest University until he was 44. He represented the Hungarian government and the Academy of Sciences at numerous international congresses. He received the large gold medal at the Stockholm Oriental Congress in 1889. He became a member of several Hungarian and other learned societies, and was appointed secretary of the Jewish community in Budapest. He was made Litt.D. of Cambridge (1904) and LL.D. of Aberdeen (1906).
Views on Zionism
Goldziher viewed Zionism as
an ethno-nationalist sentiment, a distinctly separate ideology from the
religion of Judaism or what makes one a Jew, stating:
“Jewishness is a religious term and not an ethnographical one. As regards to my nationality I am a Transdanubian, and by religion a Jew. When I headed for Hungary from Jerusalem I felt I was coming home.”
One of the features of
Ossetic is the number of lexical traces that show ancient contacts with many,
often very diverse, ethnic groups. Conversely, Ossetic loanwords can also be
observed in the languages of those groups. One of these languages is Hungarian,
whose speakers came into contact with Ossetic speakers, when they were still
settled in the Don-Kuban area (near the Caucasus). These contacts probably
dated to the 4th-6th centuries CE, well before the Hungarian settlement of the
Carpathian Basin in 896 (cf. Fehér, p. 23). Afterwards, small groups of
Ossetians, the so-called Jász, arrived with the Cumans, a Turkic-speaking
tribe, in Hungary (13th century). Most of the Ossetic borrowings in Hungarian
apparently stem from the earlier period, although a small word-list and some
names relating to these Jász have survived in Hungarian chronicles (cf. Németh,
pp. 5-38).
SOURCE: https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ossetic-ii
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