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The 20th century witnessed two Chinese translation booms of the Hungarian writer Mór Jókai's work. In order to have a better understanding of Jókai in China, this paper focuses on the Chinese translation of Jókai's work, providing an overview of its history, and offers insights into the socio-cultural context of the translation, the features of Jókai's writing highlighted in translation, and the Chinese understanding of his literary world. It will be shown that the Chinese translation of Jókai's work in the 20th century was almost always dominated by political discourse: in the early 20th century it was "the literature of marginalized nationalities," and in the second half of the century "the literature of socialist countries." While the readers in the earlier period inserted modern China's national consciousness into their interpretation of the writer, who therefore appeared as strangely familiar to them, the readers in the later period were under the influence of socialist ideology, thus distinguishing themselves from the writer, who was regarded as a bourgeois novelist. For the latter, they not only constantly warned themselves of his idealist parochialism but also thought of him as a tragic Rousseau/Owen-style utopian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the exponential growth in the number of documents on the Web, accessing the salient information relevant to a user need is gaining importance, which increases the popularity of text summarization. Recent progress in deep learning shifted the research in text summarization from extractive methods towards more abstractive approaches. The research and the available resources remain mostly limited to the English language, which prevents progress in other languages. There is need in low-resourced languages for gathering large-scale resources suitable for such tasks. In this study, we release two large-scale datasets (TR-News and HU-News) that can serve as benchmarks in the abstractive summarization task for Turkish and Hungarian. The datasets are primarily compiled for text summarization, but are also suitable for other tasks such as topic classification, title generation, and key phrase extraction. Morphology is important for these agglutinative languages since meaning is carried mostly within the morphemes of the words. We utilize these morphological properties for tokenization to retain the semantic information and reduce the vocabulary sparsity introduced by the agglutinative nature of these languages. Using the datasets compiled, we propose linguistically-oriented tokenization methods (SeparateSuffix and CombinedSuffix) and evaluate them on the state-of-the-art abstractive summarization models. The SeparateSuffix method achieves the highest ROUGE-1 score on the TR-News dataset and provides promising results on the HU-News dataset. In another experiment, we show that the multilingual cased BERT model outperforms monolingual BERT models for both languages and reaches the highest ROUGE-1 score on the HU-News dataset. Lastly, we provide qualitative analysis of the generated summaries on the TR-News dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on minority language policy implementation in Romania. Although the policy framework of minority language use is considered quite satisfying by many authors, a deeper analysis reveals significant problems in the implementation of these policies. Based on implementation research, the paper reveals the hidden mechanism of language policy in Romania. First, it presents evidence that without clear guidelines and tools for accountability, state authorities leave room for negotiation, and municipalities can choose whether they want to implement minority language use provisions or not. Second, rather counterintuitively, in many cases Hungarian settlements do not implement it either. All explanations point toward the fact that Hungarian political elites fail to create public pressure to force implementation, thus they choose to keep claims regarding minority language use in the symbolic and political realm. Moreover, it argues that policy implementation is not always a necessary condition for successful claim making, as the two domains are not always linked by the public. Also, it underlines the importance of micro-level analysis in the case of minority language policies, which can be achieved by putting more focus on implementation research, instead of legal and policy-based macro-analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims at rendering how the negotiation of the multilingual inheritance in the Austro-Hungarian Empire worked in Liviu Rebreanu’s case. Generally esteemed as the most important novelist of the interwar period, Liviu Rebreanu (1885-1944) was educated—both as an intellectual and as a writer—within a cultural environment stamped by the features of the early twentieth-century Budapest. In fact, his first literary takes (between 1907 and 1909) should be related to German and Hungarian languages, whose perfect command is proven through the writer’s extensive readings from the two literatures. Also, young Rebreanu had a close relationship with Hungarian writers; some of them became his collaborators, while others had been translated or imitated. His reinvention as a “national writer” implied thus to re-define and repress this multilingual inheritance. Before he became a “major” writer of an emergent literature, Rebreanu had developed as a “minor” author (in Deleuze’s terms) within an environment marked by diglossia, by the overlapping of several literary cultures, and by their conflictual articulation. At the same time, his case illustrates the process of literary emergence coming after the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but also the mobilization of a state of hybridity, which was made possible by the very existence of this multinational aggregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper inquires into two issues of Hungarian PPs. Firstly, when Hungarian pronouns bear an oblique case, the case marker must be followed by possessive agreement. Secondly, this pronoun-case-agreement order contrasts with the order found in garden variety possessive structures: ordinary possessive DPs feature the order noun-agreement-case. The goal of this paper is to offer an account of these puzzling phenomena. I argue that a PP structure in which PPs are projected from a silent place noun and the Ground is merged as the possessor of place (Terzi 2005, 2008, 2010; Botwinik-Rotem 2008; Botwinik-Rotem and Terzi 2008; Pantcheva 2008; Cinque 2010a; Noonan 2010, and Nchare and Terzi 2014) allows an enlightening analysis of the appearance and position of the possessive agreement in PPs. I also discuss how certain surface differences between PPs and ordinary possessive constructions can be accounted for while maintaining the possessive analysis of PPs. By showing that a PP structure with a possessive core yields a natural account of the intricate Hungarian data, the paper strengthens the case for a possessive-based approach to PPs in Universal Grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates how a single type of sign can be connected to language policy on a larger scale. Focusing on the relationship between language policy and language ideologies, I investigate the private Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Hungarians living in two villages in Slovakia. Through an examination of 'beware of the dog' signs, it is shown how such signs can be indicative of different language policies. In Slovakia, the Hungarian public LL is often referred to as a threat to the state language and public order. This ideology is reflected on the LL so that there are mostly Slovak-only public signs in bilingual and Hungarian dominant villages. The private realm is the only significant area where a certain Hungarian dominance is present. In a bilingual village, Hungarians prefer Slovak in their public signage, while in a village with Hungarian majority people invest on having private Hungarian signs by purchasing them in Hungary as well as through hand-making signs. The counter-normativity of having monolingual Hungarian signs is underlined by several factors. First, the language policy referred to as laws have put an emphasis on warning signs. Secondly, a Hungarian language rights leaflet has elevated 'beware of the dog' signs as normatively bilingual. Thirdly, the context of Slovakia, engaged in nation building disfavors the public use of Hungarian. This paper illustrates the importance of considering ideologies as reflected in private LL in multilingual contexts in transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The Core Outcome Measure Index (COMI) is a short, multidimensional outcome instrument developed for the evaluation of patients with spinal conditions. The aim of this study was to produce a cross-culturally adapted and validated Hungarian version of the COMI Back questionnaire.Methods: A cross-cultural adaptation of the COMI into Hungarian was carried out using established guidelines. Low back pain patients completed a booklet of questionnaires containing the Hungarian versions of COMI, Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) and WHO Quality of Life-BREF assessment (WHOQOL-BREF). The validation of the COMI included assessment of its construct validity, reliability, and responsiveness.Results: 145 patients participated in the assessment of reliability and 159 surgically treated patients were included in the responsiveness study. Excellent correlation was found between COMI and ODI scores (rho = 0.83, p < 0.01). The COMI showed a very good correlation with the physical subscale of WHOQOL-BREF (rho = -0.75, p < 0.01) and pain (rho = 0.68, p < 0.01). Test-retest analysis showed that Hungarian COMI is a reliable measurement tool (ICC = 0.92) with an acceptable standard error of measurement (SEM = 0.59) and minimum detectable change (MDC = 1.63). Internal responsiveness analysis indicated a large effect size (1.16) for the change in COMI score after lumbar surgery. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) for the COMI score compared with the global outcome of the surgery was 0.87.Conclusion: The translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the COMI into the Hungarian language was successful, resulting in a reliable and valid measurement tool with good clinimetric properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with the seminal work of Szabolcsi, morphologically unmarked and Dative-marked possessors in Hungarian have been the subject of rich investigation. Anaphoric possessive constructions, however, have remained poorly researched. In these possessives the possessor bears the mysterious -é suffix and the covert possessum is interpreted under identity with an antecedent. This paper presents new evidence in favour of Bartos' () analysis of anaphoric possessives, which holds that -é is the Genitive case. I further argue that anaphoric possessives in Hungarian involve a pro-form rather than deletion of a lexical noun, and this accounts for the restricted modification of the possessum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of patient-reported outcome questionnaires is recommended in studies of the orthopaedic field. Reliable, validated tools are necessary to ensure the comparability of results across different studies, centers, and countries. The patient-rated wrist evaluation (PRWE) is a widely accepted and commonly used outcome measure in the self-evaluation after distal radius fractures. The cross-cultural adaptation of PRWE was performed according to international guidelines, following prescribed six stages: translation, synthesis, back-translation, expert committee review, pre-testing, and submission of documentation. PRWE versions were achieved without any substantive difficulty in all seven languages. Cross-cultural adaptation aims 'to attain semantic, idiomatic, experiential and conceptual equivalence between the source and target questionnaires'. The present paper provides such adaptation of the PRWE in seven different languages, making this tool available for an additional nearly half a billion potential users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the agreement behavior of coordinate phrases (&Ps) on the basis of Hungarian data. It examines subject-verb agreement in number (and, in the case of pronominal subjects, also in person), and object-verb agreement in definiteness. Its primary goal is to account for the different agreement behavior of IP-internal and left-peripheral &Ps. It argues that because & has no φ-features of its own, &P assumes the φ-features projected by its conjuncts in formal agreement relations, and the features of its discourse referent in semantically motivated relations such as binding. In Hungarian, IP-internal agreement relations are formal relations, in which &P participates with the φ-features of its conjuncts. A left-peripheral &P, on the other hand, can be associated with a resumptive pro sharing its semantic features, and can be represented in agreement relations by its pro associate. An IP-internal &P elicits plural agreement on the verb if and only if either the specifier or the complement of &, or both, project a [plural] feature to &P. Since-as argued by Farkas and de Swart () on the basis of Hungarian facts-only plural noun phrases have a number feature, the possibility of a number feature conflict does not arise. When the conjuncts project contradictory person features or definiteness features to &P, the feature conflict must be eliminated for agreement to be possible. An option is the left dislocation of &P, and agreement with the resumptive pro associated with it. In the case of conjoined objects with conflicting definiteness features, Hungarian speakers prefer closest conjunct agreement, which is presumably licensed at the syntax-phonology interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a syntactic and semantic analysis of Double Negation (DN). It is shown that there are two types of DN. Strong DN is the result of a Focus construction that involves a polar reading triggered by a Verum Focus; Weak DN, on the other hand, arises when the corresponding n-word is marked as a Contrastive Topic and introduces weak (i.e. non-exclusive) alternatives. The paper discusses the occurrence of these two kinds of DN in two types of languages, which feature different negative strategies. While Hungarian is a strict NC language with non-negative n-words and an obligatory negative marker, English and German are non-NC languages, with negative n-words that can function on their own. It is shown that both strong DN and weak DN occur in each of these languages. However, the mechanisms that license n-words contributing the DN reading are different, due to the differences in the nature of the n-words and in the discourse-functional behavior of the languages in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been proposed that sensitivity to the parameters underlying speech rhythm may be important in setting up well-specified phonological representations in the mental lexicon. However, different acoustic parameters may contribute differentially to rhythm and stress in different languages. Here we contrast sensitivity to one such cue, amplitude envelope onset (rise time), in dyslexic and normally-developing children in two languages, Hungarian and English, ages from 7 to 11. Dyslexic and control children received phonological tasks, reading and spelling tasks and auditory processing tasks. While sensitivity to rise time was related to phonological representation in both languages, clear differences were found between languages. It is suggested that these differences may reflect differential language-specific weighting of different acoustic cues to rhythm and stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the various techniques used in experimental phonetics and the language inventories, more and more has been learned about the nature of stops of the world's languages. Stop consonants occur in all languages, with voiceless unaspirated stops being the most common. The differences in voice onset time (VOT) have been termed lead vs. short lag, where VOT itself is defined as the timing between the onset of phonation and the release of the occlusion of the vocal tract. For Hungarian, no systematic analysis of the stops has been carried out thus far. This paper aims to investigate the acoustic and perceptual properties of VOTs of the three Hungarian voiceless stops when they appear in isolation (in syllables and in words) but also when they occur in spontaneous speech. The results of the acoustic analysis show a clear difference between careful and spontaneous speech. Bilabials and velars are significantly shorter in fluent speech than in careful speech (18.51 msec and 35.31 msec respectively, as opposed to 24.64 msec and 50.17 msec) while dentals seem to be unchanged (23.3 msec as opposed to 26.59 msec). Therefore, the actual duration of VOT is characteristic of the place of the articulation of stops in spontaneous speech, and VOTs of bilabials and dentals do not differ from each other in careful speech. Vowels following the stops influence them more in careful than in spontaneous speech, which can also be explained by the experimentally confirmed phenomenon of the changing quality of the present-day Hungarian vowels into the neutral vowel. Voice onset time is a specific feature of the Hungarian unaspirated plosive consonants. A further experiment was carried out to define the actual function of the VOTs of the voiceless stops in the Hungarian listeners' perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosody is the change of F0 and intensity in time and the speed of articulation. The presence or absence of the realization of word accent is also examined as an important feature in prosody generation. During verbal communication various prosody forms contribute to the expression of the textual content of the message on the one hand and of the personal intention of the speaker on the other. In many cases in dialogues the same text can be (must be) pronounced with different intentions. Our goal was to find what kind of prosody patterns and rules are characteristic of these utterance types and what the acoustic relationship among them is for Hungarian. In this article the prosody structures of the most important dialogue components are described, and invariant structures are derived and verified by speech synthesis. Rules are also stated as generalized function structures to show the acoustic relationship of the prosody of these expressions to the prosody of statements. Using these rules, it is possible to convert the prosody of a given utterance type to another one by preserving the naturalness of the speech. The rules can be used in text to speech (TTS) conversion to generate spoken dialogues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes an objective speech quality assessment method developed for the Hungarian NMT-450 cellular mobile telephone system. The method is based on a psychoacoustic front end followed by a cognitive modeling component. Special problems of the NMT system, such as handover (HOV), the effects of automatic gain control (AGC), and the intrusion of signaling noise, are addressed in the cognitive module. Correlation between the subjective and objective quality measures is maximized by finding a transformation that linearizes their relationship. A correlation of 0.95 is achieved on an independent test set between the subjective speech quality and the proposed objective quality measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Correct reading of numbers is an essential feature of today's text-to-speech systems (TTS). This article discusses the problems of converting numbers into letters for Hungarian speech synthesis. In the first part of the article, numbers as an organic part of the text are analyzed. Different representations of ordinals, cardinals, telephone numbers, and date and time formats are examined. Special characters, such as comma, period, and plus or minus sign, and various suffixes attached to the numbers may modify the written and spoken form of the number. Numerous conjugated forms are introduced, and examples are shown for these cases. Next, the prosody of spoken numbers is analyzed; intonation, word stress, and pause assignment rules are discussed. Last, implementation questions of number-to-letter (NTL) conversion are addressed with respect to application in TTS and number-to-speech systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The latest Hungarian text-to-speech (TTS) system developed for telephone-based applications is described. The main features are intelligible human-like voice; robust software designed for continuous running; fully automatic conversion of declarative (short and very long) sentences and questions; and real time parallel operation, running on minimum 30 channels. The concept of prosody generation and sound duration processing is introduced. Also, the development environment of Profivox is presented. The market-leader Hungarian mobile service provider applies the TTS system in an automatic e-mail reading application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical review on the beginnings and the development of Hungarian speech research from the 1700s up to the modern era. The aim is to highlight the tradition in order to keep a good memory of the useful results of the past and of the Hungarian researchers who achieved them in this scientific field. Farkas Kempelen, the Hungarian nobleman and his work will be introduced first. The paper then deals with the early achievements of experimental investigations, the description of the devices used, and the further developments. Results that are unknown in the phonetic and speech technology literature will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the problems encountered during the design and implementation of automatic speech recognition systems for the Hungarian language, proposes practical solutions for treating them, and evaluates their practicality using publicly available databases. The article introduces a rule-based system for modeling the phonological rules inside of words as well as at word boundaries and the notion of stochastic morphological analysis for the treatment of the vocabulary size problem. Finally, the implementation of the proposed methods by the FlexiVoice speech engine is described, and the results of the experimental evaluation on isolated and connected digit recognition, on a 2000-word recognition of Hungarian city names, and on inflected word recognition tasks are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses several articles about speech technology and the Hungarian language, which appeared in the 2000 issue of the "International Journal of Speech Technology."