adriano p. PALMA ) wrote:
: who cares?

clearly you and charles care suffciciently to raise the matter and to
comment on it, not to mention the people who were with me on these dates.

d.a.

: On Sun, 25 Dec 1994, IMRE BOKOR wrote:

: > Charles ) wrote:
: > : >>Andra1s Kornai wrote:
: > : >>
: > : >
: > : >>Ok.  Are people who go to World Cup Soccer games ridiculous for
: > : >cheering on
: > : >>the team from their home country, just because they are from the
: > : >same country?
: > : >
: > : --Imi Bokor replied:
: >
: > : >yes.
: > : >
: > : --And I say, Imi, I bet you really are a lot of fun on a date,
: > : aren't you?
: >
: > i don't watch football matches on television on a date, nor have i ever
: > gone to a football match on a date.
: >
: > d.a.
: >

 wrote:
: Thomas Breed adds his own two-cents worth about the meaning of "honfoglalas,"
: which literally means "establishment of the fatherland."


orszagh laszlo, magyar-angol nagyszotar I, 1982

p.663:

"foglalas 1. seizing, seizure, occupation"

orszagh laszlo, angol-magyar nagyszotar I, 1982

p.639

"establishment: megerosites..; leszogezes, megallapitas...biztositas,
megszilarditas...alakitas,..megalapitas,...letesites..feallitas...bevezetes...
alapitas....letrehozatal,..megnyitas"

equating "foglalas" with "establishment" is deceptive, whether intentionally
or otherwise.

orszagh laszlo, magyar-angol nagyszotar I, 1982

p.867

"honfoglalas: conquest, original settlement (as of magyars in hungary
in the last years of the 9th century), the hungarian/magyar conquest (of
hungary), arpad's conquest of hungary"

honfoglalaskori: of (belonging to, dating from) the time of the
hungarian/magyar conquest/settlement

honfoglalo: I. conquering; a ~ magyarok the first magyar settlers of
hungary, the conquering hungarians; ~ oseink our forefathers II.
(hungarian) conqueror(s of the 9th century)."

orszagh laszlo seems to be more candid than our learned gentlemen.

d.a.

 wrote:
: In any case the numbers
: had to be quite high, especially in comparison to other peoples already
: settled in the area. As I said earlier, otherwise the Hungarian language
: wouldn't have survived. A good counter-example is Bulgaria where the native
: Slavic population was in majority and accordingly the Bulgars' language
: didn't survive.

the logic of your argument evades me, for if i look at the southern part
of africa, where the boers have always formed but a small part of the
population, the afrikaans language has *not* disappeared. in many regions
of australia where the kooris/murris form a majority, their language(s)
have nevertheless vanished. the survival of a language --- or more
accurately the evolution of a descendent language --- hardly seems
sufficient ground to draw conclusions about relative population sizes.
it is rather an indication of dominance, for which a small but powerful
minority suffices.

d.a.

to the list manager--
please unsubscribe me asap--


On Mon, 26 Dec 1994, IMRE BOKOR wrote:

> adriano p. PALMA ) wrote:
> : who cares?
>
> clearly you and charles care suffciciently to raise the matter and to
> comment on it, not to mention the people who were with me on these dates.
>
> d.a.
>
> : On Sun, 25 Dec 1994, IMRE BOKOR wrote:
>
> : > Charles ) wrote:
> : > : >>Andra1s Kornai wrote:
> : > : >>
> : > : >
> : > : >>Ok.  Are people who go to World Cup Soccer games ridiculous for
> : > : >cheering on
> : > : >>the team from their home country, just because they are from the
> : > : >same country?
> : > : >
> : > : --Imi Bokor replied:
> : >
> : > : >yes.
> : > : >
> : > : --And I say, Imi, I bet you really are a lot of fun on a date,
> : > : aren't you?
> : >
> : > i don't watch football matches on television on a date, nor have i ever
> : > gone to a football match on a date.
> : >
> : > d.a.
> : >
>

Eva Durant writes:
> > :Az apostoli hitvalla's
> > :======================
> > :Hiszek egy Istenben, mindenhato' Atya'ban,
> > :mennynek e's fo%ldnek Teremto"je'ben;
> > :e's a Je'zus Krisztusban,,
> > :o" egy Fia'ban, mi Urunkban;
> >
> > etc. etc. Am I the only one for who these prayers sound totally
ludicrous?

> You are really strange if  o n l y  these prayers sound to you
ludicrous...
Well Eva it is not as ludicrous as substitutung Marx and Lenin in the
appropiate places and repeating it almost daily rather than weekly.
Jeliko.

Charles in response to Eva Durant:

> --Oh, God.  I haven't read Marx in years.  I suppose I'll have to.  I
> gave most of my political science stuff to the library when I retired
> this year, and Marx and Engels were among the discards.  I'll have to
> borrow them back, I guess.

>From the "dust bin of history"?

Regards,Jeliko.

Andras Kornai writes:
> Greg is often right, but even when he is not it's fun to debate with him.
> > The difference between square triangles and family pride is that one
> > finds examples of the latter and not of the former.
> Point granted. The concept is not impossible by virtue of logic, it is
> impossible given a set of ethical assumptions one is actually quite free to
> disobey. One finds people buying and selling babies for adoption, so the
> concept is not illogical, in fact it's highly logical given some other
> assumptions.

Are there any parents who are not proud (most of the time) of their children
and their accomplishments?

> For once, your dictionary is doing you a disservice. It's Christmastime
> and I am way, way out on my credit cards. I think I have a reasonable and
> quite justifiable feeling of my position, and it's not one of proudness
> (I'm actually more anxious than ashamed but pride it ain't, believe me).

You mean "kozgazdasagtan" is not an inherited trait? :-)

> There is a traditional world-view based on the observation that people are
> rich and poor, high and low in society, smart and stupid, and in almost
> every respect unequally endowed. There are two logical steps that can be
> taken from this starting point, and I take the first together with Paul,
but
> not the second.  The first step is that such divisions are pretty much
> inevitable, and society must be operating in recognition of this.

OK, but would not some pride be appropriate if one on his (or her) own
manages to move from the lower denizens to a higher level. There are many
cases when one succeded in spite of very low beginnings.

> You are certainly right on that one: in the world as we find it your family
> background matters enormously. I'm in favor of meritrocracy and absurdly
> high estate taxes, so as to discourage the kind of nonsense Paul takes for
> granted.

And there are examples of "rags to rags" in three generations also, even
without the absurdly high estate taxes.

> I doubt it. Tribes of a few thousand are extremely suspectible to famines,
> contagious diseases, floods, and other catastrophies. Therefore the typical
> social organization, even back in the stone age, was not the tribe but
> looser federations of tribes, such as the famous seven Hun tribes, or the
> Indian "nations" of North America. While for the most part the component
> tribes have independent economies, intermarriage is common, and in case one
> tribe falls prey to some natural catastrophy the others repopulate its
area.
> This loose mutual protective arrangement also extends to protection against
> invasion, so the tribes tend to go to war together against outside enemies,
> and have some peaceful means (council of the chieftains) to resolve
conflicts
> among the tribes composing the "nation".

I am sorry but this sounds to idyllic. Related or partly related tribes often
fought more among themselves and in fact contributed to the downfall of their
brethren by siding with the "outsiders". Just take the examples of the
Greek-Persian conflict, the Gothic divisions fighting each other, the Spanish
conquest of Mexico, the European conquest of N America or even today the
behavior in Central Europe.

> Now for the shocking part (shocking to Paul, that is). It is quite common
> for such nations to be composed of ethnically, genetically, and often
> culturally unrelated tribes.  As a matter of fact, the ethnically
> linguistically and culturally homogeneous "nation" is the exception, and
> their very homogeneity is often their downfall. Hungarian society preserved
> its multi-ethnic tribal roots long after it adopted Christianity: the
Cumans
> were not an afterthought, something artificially grafted on the society,
but
> an integral part of the structure.

I am not so sure that it was not artificial. While the value of Cuman
settlement was understood by some circles even before the Mongol entry into
Hungary, the original resistance because of the different life style,
religion, etc., was very strong and IMHO it was appearing to some people at
that time as artificial. After the population voids created by the Mongol war
it was still artificial, but created much less resistance because of a
changed circumstances.

>If Paul is so ready to celebrate and
> preserve ethnic diversity, he should ponder how this ethnic diversity was
> preserved for tens of thousands of years before the appearance of the
modern
> nation-state: it was preserved by a social organization that made room for
> different ethnicities, languages, and cultures *within* the same nation,
not
> through some 18th century ideal of the ethnically, linguistically, and
> culcurally cleansed nation-state.

There were changes long before the XVIII century. Just look at the faith of
Pechenegs, Avars, Cumans, Jazygi, etc., in Hungary versus the Slovaks,
Saxons, etc., some groups assimilated relatively fast while others maintained
or even developed a special ethnicity within the same system. As a matter of
fact some groups assimilated and developed an ethnicity different from that
of the main group. The word "Tot" was used originally to describe gepidic and
other gothic remnants in the Carpathian basin, many of these groups
assimilated into other than Hungarian groups in the same area and developed a
different ethnicity from their original.

> Oh but of course what I referred to as "European heritage" is composed of
> such factors as Greek culture, carried by migrants from Asia Minor and
> beyond, the Roman Empire, which incorporated a great deal of Africa (just
> read Martin Bernal's Black Athena if you want to get an idea how much
impact
> Africa had on everything Graeco-Roman),

Please lets leave Bernal out of the widely "accepted" theories. He has some
interesting facts and a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions. Howver the
Sumerian or Elamite influence on later creation and other beliefs is fairly
well demonstratable. So I am arguing with the example and not the generic
influence of cultures. In the west IMO far too much is assumed to have
"began" with the Greeks and the Romans.

>Judeo-Christian religious thought,
> which cannot be cast as an Aryan invention even by the broadest sweep of
the
> imagination, and so forth.

And as stated above, it does not even have the origin ascribed all the way
back.

>As for the ethnic mix in Beijing, I'm not
> particularly worried -- are you aware that China is a single sociopolitical
> entity but has hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages, and thousands
> of completely different tribes? It's only to the untrained round-eye that
> they look all alike.

Correct. In a discussion in China, I was told "we have only few minorities,
not more than 200 million. As a matter of fact I just got a package from
China containing Uygur fabric art from the Sinkiang area. I could sell it
even to Hungarians as "Hungarian" art. But interestingly, there is a "pride"
related problem even in China today. In the same NW area of China as Sinkiang
they started to dig out well dressed and wheel using "roundeye" remnants
which preceeded the Chinese use date of many of these items. The official
Chinese history still claims that these items were developed first in China,
while the current findings are making problems for them.

> > There are differences, and they are good!
> Some are and some aren't.

OK, now how shall we decide which is which?

Regards,Jeliko.

Eva Balogh quotes and writes: (most deleted)
> I read in Mozaik the following RFE news item:

> COMMITTEE INVESTIGATING RECENT HUNGARIAN HISTORY ABOLISHED.
 [As of 12:00 CET]
Well, the old saying is "history will tell" and obviously some people do not
want that to happen.

Regards,Jeliko.

Eva Durant writes:

> No, I wasn't even aware of the existance of upstairs...
> Yuppies probably wouldn't let people in who use an old Lada...
> 

Now who is contributing to the pollution in the good old UK? Or if a Marxist
does it, it is for the "public good"?

Jeliko.

Robert asks about Hungarian newspaper distributors in the U.S.--
I believe that Pu"ski Corvin bookstore on E. 83rd Street in New York is the
 place around here to contact.

Happy New Year!
Be1la

Paul took offense at some of my remarks on the issue of the physical basis
of ethnic identity--
I take Paul's word that he is not a racist and intended no racial implications
in what he wrote, nor did *I* intend to impute such a view to him.  But talk in
 informed circles of a physical [racial] basis of national identity is, IMHO,
extremely dangerous and misleading, and that was the sole import of my referenc
e
to the Nazi experience.

My really favorite example, however, is the present-day Bulgarians, whom many
uniformed people regard as "looking like" their Finno-Ugric language speaking
Asiatic ancestors.  The only problem is that most scholars believe that those
Bulgarians who look "Asiatic" do so because of their descent from the Mongol
conquerors of the 13th century, not because of any "racial" kinship to the
original Finno-Ugric conquerors.

I suppose it is harmless, as Paul argues, that some people of Italian descent
look for a mate who "looks Italian."  My only point is that there is no
 scienti-fic basis for such an approach, and see no good coming from our
 pretending or
arguing that there is.  A Hungarian is one who regards him/herself as Hungari-
an and is so regarded by other Hungarians, not one who "looks Hungarian."

Cheers, and Happy New Year!
Be1la

On Mon, 26 Dec 1994 14:01:12 PST JELIKO said:
>
>>From the "dust bin of history"?
>
--I think that the dust bin is where they belong, but as a special favor
to Average Sister Eva who is still living under the reign of Kun Bela...

Charles

JELIKO ) wrote:

: Are there any parents who are not proud (most of the time) of their children
: and their accomplishments?

the difference between parents' pride in the achievements of their children
and childrens' pride in the achievements of their parents is that parents
make the decisions (sometimes by default) which determine many aspects
of a child's upbringing. a child begins its education and development at
home. to that extent at least, the parents, be they biological as well as
or only foster parents, do play a significant part in the children's
achievements. thus mr polgar deliberately chose to raise his children to
be chess champions. he succeeded. to that extent he may choose to be
proud of his three daughters. that in no way detracts from his daughters'
achievements as being *their* achievements, nor does it suggest they
sould not have achieved as highly without him. it simply reflects the fact
that he was essentially involved.

on the other hand, i do not see how henry ford iii contribued to his
grandfather's achievements, nor indeed, do i see how he could have.

d.a.

On Mon, 26 Dec 1994 17:17:00 EST W. BATKAY said:
                         A Hungarian is one who regards him/herself as Hungari-
>an and is so regarded by other Hungarians, not one who "looks Hungarian."

--I've stayed out of this discussion, but what the Hell, traffic's slow.
When I came back from Budapest, people asked me, "What were the Hungarians
like?"  I could only say, "Well, they didn't seem that different from us."
"But didn't they look different?" I was asked.  "Frankly, no" I told them.
I really couldn't see any difference that amounted to anything.  I've seen
people like those in Budapest on the streets of Tuscaloosa!  Of course,
Tuscaloosa is a pretty cosmopolitan city, although I don't expect any of
you lot to believe it, since it is in Alabama.

Charles

On Mon, 26 Dec 1994 16:09:18 PST JELIKO said:
>
>Now who is contributing to the pollution in the good old UK? Or if a Marxist
>does it, it is for the "public good"?
>
--Now, now, Jeliko, I must speak up for Eva.  At least she doesn't drive
a Trabant.  The joke in Budapest was that there were people willing to
pay good money for Trabants.  They wanted them to fill in holes on the
farm.

Charles

In article >,  (IMRE BOKOR)
writes:
> the logic of your argument evades me, for if i look at the southern part
> of africa, where the boers have always formed but a small part of the
> population, the afrikaans language has *not* disappeared. in many regions
> of australia where the kooris/murris form a majority, their language(s)
> have nevertheless vanished. the survival of a language --- or more
> accurately the evolution of a descendent language --- hardly seems
> sufficient ground to draw conclusions about relative population sizes.
> it is rather an indication of dominance, for which a small but powerful
> minority suffices.

You find extreme examples and claim that that abolishes EvaB s rule.  Your
examples quote extreme differenses in pouer, and I doubt one of them:  I believ
that the Boers managed to eliminate the nativs from the lands that thei held,
thereby makind themselvs the majoritie.  Most of the time the majoritie
determins the language.  Pouer also matters, but more than a little is needed
for to overcum the inherent weakness of being in the minoritie.  English is
chock-full of French, from the harsh rule of the Normans, but it is not lost.

Norb asks what Paripa1s and Cservenka are called today--
According to *Magyar Neve--hata1rokon tu1li magyar helyse1gne1vszo1ta1r*,
Arany Lapok, 1990, the Serb name of Paripa1s is Ratkovo; Cservenka is--
are you ready for this?--Crvenka.

BUE1K!
Be1la

In article >,  (AND Books) writes:
> wine soup: mix egg and hot sauterne
No wine soup in our hous--nevver heard of it.

> : =there any special songs or music that Hungarians associate with Christmas?
> pa'sztorok and menybo"l az angyal
and more, more than I can think of

> // cut nostalgia //
Not nostalgia: the described custom is the custom that we to this dai follow.

> : Szekler (Sze'kely) Christmas plai is well known.
> dont know! soundz interesting... tell me more about Szekler please!
All that I know I got from one showing of an ethnographic film of one
Christmas: Basiclie, Herod (!) in his own words narrates the storie found in
Luke, and it is plaid out by a group of male fellow-villagers, maibe one woman
for Mary (I forget).  My mother was in such plais when she was young, but, of
cours, the details greatlie differ--for one thing, in her area onlie childer
partook

Joh Eckel asks about where to get military items from (former) Communist
nations--
Aside from flea markets in East Europe and Russia, military miniature ("toy
soldier") shows in the U.S. often have military hardware, medals, and parts
of uniforms.  I've seen East German and Russian stuff at the toy soldier
show held at Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. in Hackensack, NJ every fall.

Happy collecting!
Be1la

In article >, JELIKO
> writes:
> I am sorry but this sounds to idyllic. Related or partly related tribes often
> fought more among themselves and in fact contributed to the downfall of their
> brethren by siding with the "outsiders". Just take the examples of the
> Greek-Persian conflict, the Gothic divisions fighting each other, the Spanish
> conquest of Mexico, the European conquest of N America or even today the
> behavior in Central Europe.

You refer to at least partlie civilized nations.  Not civilized nations hav a
stronger feeling of us against the rest.  In Africa, there is a bigger group,
not a nation in the NAn Indian sens, but a group of tribes that all speak
essentiallie one tung.  When one of these fights another of them, thei follow
rules of war, that restrict that which mai be doon in war.  When one tribe
fights others outside the "nation", these rules are not in effect.