Sprachgeschichte und Sprachkontakte in den Forschungen von István Nyomárkay
Language Contacts and Language History in István Nyomárkay’s Research

Summary/Abstract: Academic István Nyomárkay (1937–2020) left a great legacy of his oeuvre, consisting of more than 280 publications. For size limits, this study presents only a few of the most important domains of Professor Nyomárkay’s research, based on some of his books. In the field of language contacts, his first monograph (1984) examines the integration of international loanwords into the morphological structure of the Croato-Serbian / Serbo-Croatian literary language. These international loanwords, eventually, are of Latin origin. Many of them are not Latin loanwords but they got adopted into the Croato-Serbian literary language by the mediation of the German, Italian, and French languages. This book was the first major synthesis in this field at that time. The next monograph (1989) examines the formation of the new words in the vocabulary related to Croatian civilization in the second half of the 19th century. Due to political and cultural reasons, the new expressions were created mainly on Hungarian patterns. Some of them are calques, other ones are new word formations inspired by Hungarian. The book published in 2002 pertaining to language-culture research investigates the influence of a German grammar published in Vienna in 1779 onto the grammars of Slovenian, Slovak, Croatian, and Hungarian. The authors took over many elements of the German grammar and adapted them to their own language each, with some modifications of several of its statements. From among the lexicographical works of Nyomárkay’s, the historical dictionary of the literary language of the Croatians in Burgenland is an outstanding piece (1996). It contains 4,864 entries, which were taken from 64 resources. Apart from the fact that the dictionary is a work of salient importance from language historical point of view, it also offers considerable help in reading old texts. The last monograph of the author on the history of the Serbian and Croatian languages (2007) pertains to the domain of language history. This is the first summary of the history of the aforementioned languages written in Hungarian. It is a piece of scholarly work in an easy to read style, addressing linguists and university students in Hungary. It is very important to point out that each of the books considered above is based on the analysis of numerous sources.

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