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home / papers / 2025 / „Mázlid van haver, nem bóvli a szajré.” Hebrew and Yiddish Loanwords in Present-Day Hungarian Language

„Mázlid van haver, nem bóvli a szajré.” Hebrew and Yiddish Loanwords in Present-Day Hungarian Language

Summary

Egeresi examines which Hungarian words really come from Hebrew or Yiddish. In recent decades the revival of Hungarian Jewish life has prompted many new lists of such words, both printed and online. He finds these lists methodologically weak. They mix up Jewish and general usage, rarely separate Hebrew from Yiddish or German sources, and rest on no sociological or linguistic surveys. Using the standard Biblical Hebrew, Yiddish and Hungarian etymological and general dictionaries, he checks the most frequently cited items. He sets aside the biblical onomasticon and focuses on two groups: international words (e.g. ámen, gój, kóser) and non-international, mostly slang, words (e.g. mázli, haver, szajré). Each word receives one of three verdicts: accepted, debated, or refused Semitic origin. Most examined words turn out to be genuinely Hebrew or Yiddish, a few remain uncertain, and some are rejected. Several rejected items had never been linked to Hebrew before. The author connects these new claims to the community's wish to express renewed dignity through language. The paper offers a vetted reference list for a small, Budapest-centred layer of the Hungarian lexicon.

Key points

  • Table 1 sorts the words by group and verdict:
    • Group II (international): 19 accepted (e.g. gólem, kibic, smúzol, tréfli), 2 debated (abrakadabra, bejgli), 1 refused (gettó).
    • Group III (slang): 15 accepted (e.g. bóvli, córesz, jatt, meló, srác), 5 debated (balek, balhé, mismásol, mószerol, stika), 5 refused (cefet, gajdol, hakni, melák, séró).
  • Etymon assignment follows a fixed rule. Every word gets a Hebrew etymon, and a Yiddish one is given only when no Hebrew source exists. Each word is also dated to its earliest attestation or reconstruction.
  • Lexicon context:
    • The Hungarian lexicon is estimated at 60,000–100,000 words.
    • Loanwords make up about 45% of the basic vocabulary but under 12% of actual word usage; native words account for 88.4%.
    • Standard monographs list only two or three dozen Yiddish loans.
  • These loans are concentrated in Budapest, where most of the estimated 100,000–110,000 Hungarian Jews live. The author guesses that no more than about thirty are used elsewhere in the country.
  • He points to Benor's work on Orthodox Jewish English and to the Yinglish/Anglish literature as models for future survey-based research.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Instead of a yes/no origin label, each claim gets accepted, debated or refused, so honest uncertainty has its own bin rather than being forced into a guess. — For Mova (learn): Silver-data agreement among witness parsers could output an explicit "debated" class, kept out of training rather than resolved by majority vote.
  • I2. When several plausible sources exist, a fixed precedence rule decides attribution: the deeper ancestor (Hebrew) wins unless it is absent, which makes labelling reproducible. — For Mova (tokens): Lemma and morphology provenance (e.g. which lexicon or rule produced a lemma) could follow a declared priority order, so every lemma choice is traceable.
  • I3. A word's share of the dictionary and its share of running text are very different numbers (about 45% versus under 12%), so measuring by types and by tokens gives opposite pictures. — For Mova (learn): Evaluations should report both type-level and token-level accuracy, so rare-word errors are neither hidden nor overstated.
  • I4. The paper separates who uses a word (an in-group community versus the general population) and where (the capital versus elsewhere) before asking how common it is. — For Mova (world): Lexical knowledge entries could carry register and community tags, so slang senses are activated only when the text's context supports them.
  • I5. Newly circulating word lists are treated with suspicion and checked against reference dictionaries, since motivated sources can inflate claims. — For Mova (learn): Outputs from LLM teacher tiers could be audited against compiled resources like WordNet, and unsupported additions rejected rather than absorbed.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.24193/subbtref.70.2.02

@inproceedings{egeresi2025mazlid,
  title = {{„Mázlid van haver, nem bóvli a szajré.” Hebrew and Yiddish Loanwords in Present-Day Hungarian Language}},
  author = {EGERESI, László Sándor},
  booktitle = {Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai. Theologia Reformata Transylvanica 70},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.24193/subbtref.70.2.02},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.24193/subbtref.70.2.02}
}

References

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