Hungarian Studies in London
On 29 February, PhD candidate Rob Gray presented the subject of his doctoral thesis, land reform in early nineteenth-century Hungary.
Rob began with an overview of the ideology of reform. Part reaction to economic stagnation and the dreaded nemzethalál (‘national death’), part critique of feudal society, reformers sought to revitalise the nobility and, by extension, the [...]
In December last year, first year BA Politics student Sandra Bernick gave a talk on the role language plays in Estonian national identity, the values of linguistic isolation, and contemporary discourses on identity.
Sandra asked what role language had played in the construction of Estonian national identity. Until the late nineteenth century, inhabitants of the villages [...]
The second Khanty dialect we studied was an Eastern variant, Pim; the text is available in László Honti, Chrestomathia Ostiacica, Budapest, 1984, pp. 166-7. It is the story of a wife-hunt, one of the favourite activities in Uralic folk tales. Three women sing while they fish:
ěj kimλem räp-räp-räp, pä kimλem räp-räp-räp
egyik ruhaalj-am, rep-rep-rep, másik ruhaalj-am [...]
A brief note on Khanty (Ostyak)
Khanty (older name: Ostyak) is a complex chain of dialects spoken by people who live in a vast, roughly L-shaped area along the Ob, the lower Irtysh, and tributaries. According to the most recent figures (1989 census), there are some 22,000 speakers of Khanty; of these, 62.9 per cent were [...]