| Lajos Kazár AM | |
| Birth Date: | 1924 |
| Birth Place: | Meggyeskovácsi, Vas County, Hungary |
| Death Date: | 31 March 1998 |
| Death Place: | Meggyeskovácsi, Hungary |
| Alma Mater: | Australian National University, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Hamburg |
| Workplaces: | Australian National University, Indiana University Bloomington |
| Fields: | Linguistics |
Lajos Kazár (1924–1998) was a Hungarian linguist.
Lajos Kazár was born in 1924 in Balozsameggyes, Vas County in Hungary born in poverty to the son of a blacksmith.[1] After graduating with honors from the Királyi State Ferenc Faludi High School in Szombathely, he continued his studies in Kassán. At the beginning of 1945, he drifted to Germany because of the war, and he was only able to continue his studies in 1947–48.
In the fall of 1949, he emigrated with his wife, Margarete Jung, the widow of Karl Leopold von Möller, to Australia, where he worked in factories and on his own farm in Horsham, Victoria until 1963. In 1966, he completed four years of oriental studies at The Australian National University in Canberra, majoring in Chinese and Japanese languages, Asian civilization, and general linguistics. Between 1970 and 1974, he studied at the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies at Indiana University. From 1974 to 1977, he worked and researched in Austria and the United States, among others in the library of Lajos Szathmáry in Chicago.
He then continued his studies in Hamburg, at the Japanese department of the University of Hamburg, with a scholarship from the German Research Foundation, until the fall of 1982, where he published most of his results. He wrote his dissertation at Indiana University Bloomington on the topic of Japanese-Uralic linguistic relations (Uralic-Japanese linguistic relations: A preliminary investigation, 1974; [Uralic-Japanese linguistic relations: preparatory investigation]). He returned to Canberra in 1982. From the following year until 1993, he was a lecturer and researcher in the Linguistic Department of The Australian National University Research School of Pacific Studies.[2]
He returned to Hungary in June 1993, and founded the Japanese Research Center ('Japanese Research Centre') in Pécs (in today's PTE library), which ceased to exist after Kazár's death due to lack of financial support. After moving home, he mainly worked on creating dictionaries and translating Japanese grammar books. He advocated the promotion of Japanese studies in Hungary and the establishment of a Japanese department. After returning home, he lived with his wife in Piliscsaba for a while. When he fell ill, he traveled home to his native village, where he was cared for by his sister until his death.
The professional assessment of his linguistic work is controversial. His main field of research was the origin and affiliation of the Japanese language, but also significant translations. He published his studies and results in numerous journals and books. His studies have been published, among others, in the columns of well-known journals and magazines such as Uralica published in Tokyo, the Bulletin of the European Association for Japanese Studies in London, the Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher, or Asian Profile in Hong Kong . After returning home, his writings were published in numerous domestic magazines and anthologies. He won several scholarships for his research. He presented his theory at several scientific symposia both abroad and in Hungary, for example at the 1980 International Symposium on the Genetic Relationships of the Japanese Language held in Kyoto at Kyoto Sangyo University, and in 1997 he explained his position at a debate organized by the Hungarian Linguistics Society.[3]
His name is attributed to the translation of the very first Japanese chronicle, Kojiki, into Hungarian, which was the sixth translation of the collection of Japanese proverbs into a foreign language after the Chinese, English, Italian, French and German translations prepared up to that point. Another prominent topic of his research was the history of Transylvania, in which he also carried out significant work. He devoted a good part of his works on this topic to the description of Transylvania and to the criticism of the Dacian-Roman continuity theory. His arguments against the latter are presented in 'Facts against fiction: Transylvania – homeland of the Wallachians/Romanians' summarized in his work, in which he called attention to errors related to Transylvania in foreign lexicons.
The largest part of his work was the investigation of the possible Uralic kinship of the Japanese language. According to his assumption, the Japanese language shows similar features to the languages of the Uralic language family. His theory is titled Japanese-Uralic language comparison: locating Japanese origins with the help of Samoyed, Finnish, Hungarian, etc.: An Attempt he explains in his work. In it, he compares about six hundred Japanese words with Uralic words, for which he takes as a basis, among others, the words of the Finnish, Samoyed, and Hungarian languages. It presents a total of 594 etymological suggestions and 30 morphological parallels.[4]
In 1997, he published Japanese-Uralic language comparison ... c. a substantially abbreviated summary of his work in Japanese-English-German-Hungarian, which – as stated in the introduction to the volume – offers a simplified ethnographic-linguistic (ethnolinguistic) selection with a few additions from the test results he published in his above-mentioned work.[5]
In his studies dealing with the hypothesis, he is briefly familiar with the most important foreign and Hungarian representatives of the past who relate Japanese to the Uralic (or Ural-Altaic) languages. He refers, among other things, to the orientalist and linguist Gábor Bálint Szentkatolnai and the famous Turkologist and orientalist Vilmos Pröhle's research in this direction, so we can consider their works as the precursor to his work, although he followed the latter in terms of his method. Although Kazár started his research independently of Pröhle's work, he later built on it.[6] Toru Szenga, a Japanese historian and university professor teaching in Hungary, briefly compares Kazár's work with the work of Pröhle and Gábor Bálint in the columns of Magyar Nyelv.[7]
Kazár sees this as a result that confirms his hypothesis, and in his studies he repeatedly refers to the research conducted by the Japanese geneticist Hideo Matsumoto in the 1980s, according to which the ancestors of the Japanese people, or a significant part of them, may have come from the area around Lake Baikal to the present-day Japanese islands, and with the Buryat-Mongols would show a closer genetic relationship.[8]
In 1998, he briefly summarized the ideas that equate Japanese with the Uralic languages, as well as the scientific works dealing with the issue, in a review.[9] In it, he briefly addresses the main counter-arguments against his theory, mentions Japanese language memories, and calls for further research in the "Japanese-Ural" direction.
In several of his studies, he advocates the cooperation of experts in the Altai and Uralic languages in connection with the research on the affiliation of the Japanese language.[10]
The majority of Hungarian linguists are skeptical of his works comparing Japanese and Uralic languages. According to the counterarguments that appear in most criticisms, Lajos Kazár separated Japanese from the Altaic hypothesis and placed it in a kinship relationship with the Uralic language family, so the interpretations can be questioned from a methodological point of view.[11] American linguist and Altaist Roy Andrew Miller discussed this question in more depth in his more detailed critical analysis of Kazár's work published in the columns of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese.[12] Kazár wrote his objections in the 1984–85 issue of the aforementioned magazine.[13]
Miller considers, among other things, the basics of Kazár's language comparison method to be incorrect, such as the one in which he states that Japanese and Uralic languages can be compared even without the inclusion of Altaic languages.[14] Kazár justifies this by saying that while Uralic is a demonstrably existing language family whose existence is scientifically established, the common origin of the languages classified in the Altai group cannot be considered proven.[15] Miller, on the other hand, takes the position that a "proven" language family does not exist, only a hypothetical one.[16]
Linguist József Hegedűs Belief and reality: Foreign and domestic views on the kinship of the Hungarian language. In his work, he briefly describes Kazár's work and then gives examples of his similes.[17]
The Göttingen linguist István Futaky criticized Kazár's hypothesis in the journal Finnisch‐Ugrische Mitteilungen, which he edited himself.[18] His objections include, among other things, that "Kazar simplifies the two-syllable stems that can be reconstructed into the Uralic-Finno-Ugric base language into monosyllabic ones." Kazár briefly explains his position on this as follows: "The statement prevails [in Uralic linguistics], according to the words of the Uralic base language – with very few exceptions – were two-syllables ending in a vowel. [...] This proposition is clearly opposed by the existence of many similar, one-syllable words in the Uralic languages." He mentions the words Hungarian 'fa' and Samoyed 'pa' (=fa) as example.[19]
Another counterargument against his interpretations is that "he does not say which of the meanings of Japanese words (he sometimes gives 3-6-9 meanings) he considers to be the original (initial) meaning. For example: Jap. am.e, am.a-, Old Jap. am.a 'sky, rain, deity' ~ Finnish jumma 'god' etc. [*juma]; Jap. at.aeru, Old Jap. at.ap.u 'gives, places near' ~ m. ad, Finnish. anta- [*amta-]; etc.".[20]
According to the opinion of linguist László Grétsy, Kazár "researched some kind of connection between our language and Japanese, and in the form of a dictionary he also proved how many similarities the two languages show.".[21]
According to a blog dealing with the issue in several posts, the Uralist linguist Koizumi Tamotsu from the Japanese side expresses his doubts about Kazár's theory in his work entitled Jomongo no hakken (Tokyo, 1998), although he does not categorically reject it.[22]
Criticisms of his theory can be roughly summarized as follows: possible methodological errors resulting from the omission of Altaic languages, the problematic of the age of the Old Japanese and Uralic languages, and in some cases the lack of clarity of the basic meaning.
Until now, there has been no in-depth, detailed evaluation of his work.
His significant achievement is the translation into Hungarian of the Kojiki, the ancient Japanese chronicle and collection of religious texts. This translation was first published in Sydney in 1982 by the "Hungarian Historical Society" there. Although the second edition bears the same publication data as the first, the preface reveals that it was most likely already published in Budapest. (The "Foreword to the Hungarian edition" on page 3 ends with a Budapest date of 1993.) According to the volume's introduction, the "basic material used for the translation was the complete, new, and marked Chinese edition of the Old Japanese text by Kinoshita".[23]
He also used the German translation also prepared by Professor Kinosita Ivao, as well as the English translations of Basil Hall Chamberlain, Donald L. Philippi and Karl Florenz, mainly their explanations and theoretical parts.[24] At the beginning of the book, he describes in detail the origins and characteristics of Kodziki, as well as the circumstances and background of the translation into Hungarian. He translated and supplemented Wolfgang Hadamitzky's popular handbook on the Japanese writing system, which was also published several times in Hungary (Wolfgang Hadamitzky-Lajos Kazár: Kanji és kana: handbook and dictionary of the Japanese writing system), and it was translated into Hungarian by John Caiger and RHP Maison, The History of Japan written by Australian National University professors.
He died on May 31, 1998, after a short illness in Hungary.
Kazár married Margarete Jung, the wife of Karl Leopold von Möller.
Lajos Kazár's work is currently little known in the field of Hungarian linguistics and Japanology, and his hypothesis regarding the origin of the Japanese language was mainly reacted to in American and German language forums. He had to undertake the publishing of a considerable part of his works published in Hungary himself. His translations, or a significant part of his translation fragments remained in manuscript, including the Hungarian translation of the successful Japanese language book Japanese for Everyone for native English speakers, or the similarly renowned work, the Dzidaibecu kokugo daijiten (時代別国語大辞典) dictionary series, which divided the old Japanese language into eras interpretive dictionary. He also started to translate his work on Japanese-Ural language comparison into English, but his illness prevented him from completing it. His life work is commemorated in more detail on the website of his native village. His grave is located in his native village, in the Balozsa cemetery.[25]