The Pannonian Slavic Dialect of the Common Slavic Proto-Language: The View From Old Hungarian (review)

Some questions in diachronic linguistics remain unresolved due to either a lack of data or a huge gap in time between the period under consideration and the present day. One such question concerns the Pannonian Slavic loanwords in Old Hungarian. This monograph provides new insight into this problem while attempting to reevaluate the existing data and identify a Slavic source for these early borrowings.

The introduction (1–48) gives an exhaustive overview of the migrations in the Pannonian region, in particular the relationship between Slavs and Avars, and the theories suggesting the origin of the Slavic dialect spoken in Pannonia. This discussion would have benefited from a map showing the dialectal distribution and the routes of migration at the time in question.

Richards is very careful in his methodology. Every loanword under consideration is filtered through Hungarian and Slavic diachronic phonology, semantics, and morphology. Ch. 2 (49–88) focuses on the phonological differences between Common Slavic and Old Hungarian and on the preservation of Slavic traces in Old Hungarian. An infelicity in this section is that R erroneously describes the addition of an anlaut vowel in Hungarian as breaking up consonant clusters (71). In reality this process results in resyllabification: cf. Slavic dvorŭ: Hungarian udvar, Slavic stolŭ: Hungarian asztal.

The preservation by Hungarian of Common Slavic nasal vowels as combinations of vowel + nasal stop and the replacement of Common Slavic /c/ by Hungarian /č/ and /t/ are the main criteria used to identify the earliest Slavic loanwords in Hungarian. R addresses the problem of potential non-Pannonian borrowings, the possibility of misidentification of a Slavic loanword because of internal phonological developments in Hungarian, and the value of both semantic analysis and written sources for the study.

Ch. 3 (89–189), the core of the study, discusses the peculiarities of Slavic-Hungarian contact, addresses the problematic nature of East Slavic loanwords in Hungarian, and questions whether Pannonian should be treated as linguistically homogeneous or heterogeneous. The main part of this chapter is the examination of the corpus. Each of fifty-three entries presents a proto-Slavic form and its Hungarian counterpart and gives a phonological and semantic analysis of considered items. R never specifically mentions the source for the suggested proto-Slavic forms. The possible connection of a loanword with a certain Slavic dialect is marked with the help of a system developed by Henrik Birnbaum and modified by R. This classification posits six groups of Common Slavic dialects, labeled A–F. Connections between a given lexeme and these dialect groups are evaluated according to such metrics as: phonologically feasible, infeasible, and improbable; morphologically feasible and infeasible; and geographically viable and semantically viable. The last three types seem to be very difficult to determine and are often omitted. Several commentaries and a quantitative analysis of the data conclude this chapter.

There is some unjustified repetition of the tables containing redundant material (180, 181, 184, 185, 186), doublings of the same words (*potȩgŭ, *kọsŭ) in Table 1 (178), and errors like medenica instead of meděnica (75). There are also some inaccuracies in numerical calculations (178–81, 184–87). R’s conclusion about the nature of Pannonian, based on the analyzed material, seems correct, and there is a high likelihood that Proto-Serbocroatian is a source for Pannonian loanwords.

Ch. 4 (191–214) summarizes the conclusions of R’s analysis and reviews the theories mentioned in Chs. 1 and 2. The reconstructed Pannonian Slavic corpus does not provide evidence for designating Pannonia as the Urheimat of the Slavs. Pannonian Slavic was either linguistically homogeneous, in which case it was probably an extension of Proto-Serbocroatian, or it was heterogeneous and an extension of Proto-Serbocroatian and Proto-Czechoslovak. The probability that Proto-Slovene is the source of Pannonian loanwords is low.

Although the conclusions of this book are suggestions rather than a new theory, this...