Ákos Bitter Deutsche Sprachelemente im Ungarischen als Hilfen beim kognitiven Erwerb des Deutschen

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The German language contains a lot of words which do not belong to ist native vocabulary, such as Chance ‘opportunity’, Fenster ‘window’, Tollpatsch ‘clumsy person’, and Wolkenkratzer ‘skyscraper’. Whereas Chance and Tollpatsch betray their foreign origin, Fenster or Wolkenkratzer—the latter a loan rendition of the English skyscraper—would hardly be perceived as loan words by speakers of German. Tollpatsch, originally meaning ‘Hungarian footman’ (Hung. Talpas, coined after talp ‘sole [foot]’), is among the few Hungarian loan words in German.

Conversely, however, a plethora of German loan words have entered the Hungarian language during the course of the past millennium, among other reasons due to the spatial proximity of the German-speaking regions. Even larger is the amount of syntactic constructions and compounds, such as Wolkenkratzer, which have been coined after a German (or other foreign-language) model. Thus, for example, Hungarian felhokarcoló is a loan translation of German Wolkenkratzer. Without using the words sín (G. Schiene ‘rail’), zokni (G. Socken ‘socks’), or the loan translation pályaudvar (G. Bahnhof ‘train station’), thus, without using German loans, a speaker of Hungarian would most probably face serious difficulties in expressing himself.

The question that I investigated with the help of three German teachers as well as their students in Hungary is whether raising the level of awareness of German loans in Hungarian gives them an easier time learning and teaching German. In order to answer this question, I provided the teachers with a list of over one thousand loans and asked them to implement two teaching units on the topic in their classes. In the subsequent expert interviews with teachers and learners, almost all of the participants stated that they found the novel and unfamiliar way of looking at the two languages stimulating.

A diachronic analysis of the subjects discussed in the teaching units was conducted in order to answer further questions on loan words in Hungarian and their potential for teaching and learning German. Classical and more recent approaches to the contrastive and comparative learning and teaching of foreign languages were taken into consideration against the background of multilingual didactics, also considering the fact that English was unintentionally used as a point of comparison by many of the participants as well. The reflection of the participants’ experiences and the results of the present study point to the conclusion that raising the level of awareness of German loans in Hungarian is a significant aid to learners of German who are interested in the topic and are ready to submit themselves to a comparative view on the two languages. What domains of foreign language acquisition are affected—and to what degree—is a promising question for further research.