Obsolescence of foreign words crossing here and beyond

Abstract

In my study, I would like to deal with those foreign words that have become obsolete in Hungary, but are still in live use in other parts of the Hungarian language area. This is usually explained by the fact that speakers in the regions have adopted them from the language of contact, ie they are modeled on Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, German, Slovak, Ukrainian or Romanian. Obsolescence can be complete, it can cover the whole word, then it is obsolete in all its meanings, but sometimes the use of the word only in a certain sense is old, obsolete, it is considered partial obsolescence. An obsolete foreign word or its equivalent in the motherland may appear in use in several ancient ways, and sometimes it appears only in one of the regions. For example, the word advokát 'lawyer, legal adviser', which is obsolete in Hungary, can be found in the same form, meaning 'lawyer' in the Hungarian regional languages of Transylvania, the Highlands, Vojvodina, Transcarpathia, Croatia and Mura region. In the meaning of ‘general trade’, the obsolete equivalent of the main name of the bazár occurs only in the Highlands, in the form of a bazár and a autóbazár, denoting a used car dealership following the Slovak model.

It seems a coincidence that the same word in one language becomes obsolete, is not required by speakers, and the other language needs and uses it, does not allow it to become obsolete. En pre-sumably has a rational explanation. It should be borne in mind that the acquisition of foreign words is not a phenomenon that takes place equally in different languages, so the path of a foreign word taken from contact languages is not necessarily the same as the etiology of an obsolete foreign word in Hungary. The time, place and method of receipt must also be taken into account for a proper evaluation. Quite a few foreign words came to Hungarian in Hungary through German me-diation, but their counterparts reached Hungarian Serbs via French and Serbian mediation. There are some obsolete ones among them. For example, obsolete kredit meaning ‘loan’ is of German origin in Hungarian in Hungary. In Vojvodina's parlance, the meaning of kredit of French-Serbian origin is, on the one hand, a 'loan, a loan' and, on the other hand, an amount of ‘money that can be negotiated (on a mobile phone); frame'. It has its first meaning in Transylvania, Croatia, the Mura region and the Guardian region, and the second in Transylvania and the Highlands. The phenome-non may also be related to the fact that speakers living in regions outside Hungary rarely use the Hungarian equivalent of an outdated foreign word, or do not know the foreign word at all under the influence of another language, in which case the kredit noun is used instead of the hitel noun used.