Oldal 116 [116]
OCR
HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH influenzat kap — catch the flu fejéhez kap — clutch ones head erőre kap — regain ones strength szárnyra kap — take wing két kézzel kap rajta — jump at the chance lóra kap — leap into saddle vérszemet kap — become/grow bold/dauntless hazugságon kap — catch sy telling lies görcsöt kap — be seized with a cramp hülyét kap (töle) — it drives him/her mad/crazy Polysemy is also typical of suffixes. Ihe suffix -er may denote a person (farmer, teacher), a machine (toaster, freezer) and various other things (ice-breaker, skyscraper, mind-boggler, etc.). A milker can be a person (fejő), a machine (fejégép) and a milking cow (a good milker). In Hungarian, the suffix -ds/és is polysemous. The word forditas may refer to the process or to the product. Both meanings may correspond to English translation, but in the process meaning translating occurs more often. 7.5.4.1 Polysemy and motivation As described above, Hungarian has a preference for morphological motivation, while English tends to use semantic motivation. The outcome of this contrast is that English words may acquire new meanings without any formal change, while Hungarian tends to signal transferred meaning by affixes or compounding. Some types of this contrast will be described in this section. 7.5.4.2 Conversion In English, the same word may be used both as a noun and a verb without change of form: bus — to bus. In Hungarian, suffixation or compounding is used: busz, buszozik. In principle, with Hungarian as L1, this feature of English should not be very difficult to get used to, since it is a convergent phenomenon. 7.5.4.3 Abstract concept — specific object In English, words expressing abstract concepts can often be used to denote specific objects connected with the abstract concept, e.g. control — ellenériz, ellenörzes > ellenörzö müszer. There seems to be convergence in this case too (several Hungarian words corresponding to one English word), so the learning task is not particularly heavy, but the difference may sometimes lead to overtranslation (ellenőrző műszer — "controlling instrument). e 114 "
