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# Society and Mother-tongue Culture

Over this fifty-year period, there was significant cultural change within a Transylvanian society that still retained a feudal structure. Education gained in importance, and, in some social strata, it became the highest of priorities. Testaments and foundations revealed the emergence of new cultural aspirations. These changes signalled a weakening of the traditional, hierarchic social order and a growing demand for culture rooted in the mother tongue.

Due to the small number of literate and university-trained people, each of the latter had to take on several tasks in the cultural {2-446.} sphere. The majority had begun their studies with philosophy; some then moved on to medicine or law, but, since the Churches were the principal source of financial aid, most chose to pursue higher studies in theology. In the educational system of the age, the several disciplines were closely integrated, and the division of labour among educated people stood at a low level. All this explains why many people were at once priest and doctor, priest and philosophy professor, or teacher and pastor.

The proportion in Transylvanian society of university-educated people was not low for the age, and their ranks swelled after 1670 with the arrival of persecuted Protestants from Hungary, but the supply could not keep up with demand. Doctors were found only the larger towns, and even Miklós Bethlen had difficulty in recruiting a suitable clerk. At the chancellery, an official fully fluent in Latin, German, and Hungarian was regarded as a rare asset. In the colleges, senior students often taught in junior classes; they thus gained pedagogical experience, and the colleges, which operated with a remarkably small number of professors, could not have done without their help.

Teachers, doctors, clerks, and lawyers often held appointments in Church organizations and, concurrently, in public institutions at the municipal, county, or national level; others found employment at the courts of the aristocracy. As in western Europe, few members of the intelligentsia worked and earned their living in a independent capacity. In a cultural system dominated by the Churches, the clergy constituted the top, and best remunerated layer of the intelligentsia. This remained a general rule, although Apafi ennobled a fair number of educated sons of villeins, and, intent on promoting the social and intellectual freedom of intellectuals, granted some professors a permanent stipend.

Such rational policies and official encouragement were but the reflection of profound socioeconomic changes that increased the demand for educated experts. The cultural reformism of Puritans {2-447.} and Cartesians was backed by the merchant strata in Várad as well as in Kolozsvár, Marosvásárhely, and other towns. Both Cocceian-ism, a new intellectual trend with religious overtones, and Pietism first struck root among the urban middle strata and Saxon burghers. János Apáczai Csere enjoyed the support of several entrepreneurial nobles and urban merchants, notably János Vargyasi Daniel, the founder of a mercury marketing enterprise, and this circumstance no doubt informed his conclusion that education had become a necessary condition of economic development. Chancellor János Bethlen and István Apor set up well-endowed educational foundations; but there were many others, from diverse social backgrounds, who made capital donations to Churches and colleges, thus enabling the sons of their family, estate, or wider community to study at home or abroad. People came to assign greater value to education, knowledge, and books. Many Greek Orthodox churches were built or rebuilt with the aid of foundations set up by wealthy Romanian merchants.

The development of the vernacular served — at least indirectly — to link social interest and culture, and the consequences would be far-reaching. The Hungarian language in Transylvania reached an important crossroads in the mid-1600s. Over the first half of the century, it had benefited from purposeful scholarly attention and undergone a harmonious development. The early writers on political philosophy readily integrated in their analytical vocabulary expressions such as közjó (common good), közérdek (public interest), and polgári társaság (civil community). Transylvanians connected to the world of manufacturing and smelting had no trouble devising neologisms like gépely (machine), vasfuttató kemence (iron-melting furnace), üvegfúvó pálca (glass-blowing rod), and ószeres (second-hand dealer). The word for both industrial products and tools, műszer, cropped up even in Transylvanian literature. Linguistic adaptation to economic development is illustrated by the appearance of költség (cost), bevárandó-pénz (payments due), and {2-448.} jelenvaló-pénz (cash balance) in the registers of trading companies. A light and varied conversational language emerged, and popular speech made its mark in the higher social strata as well.

Teaching at colleges was conducted in Latin, which remained the language of learning. However, when they went abroad, Transylvanian students realized that their excellent command of Latin only revealed the backwardness of their country. In France, Italy, and England, people already conversed fluently in their own language with respect to subjects for which Apáczai had to concoct an entirely new Hungarian vocabulary. Many, including Apáczai and Miklós Bethlen, observed at the time that they found it much easier to express themselves in Latin. Still, they acknowledged the necessity of change, for they realized that the transmission of modern knowledge in the mother tongue was the key to cultural progress.

Ferenc Pápai Páriz, a professor at Enyed, noted that Europe's more advanced nations were busily adapting Latin words to their mother tongue, and realized how harmful it would be for Transylvania not to follow suit. Accordingly, he proceeded to update and expand Szenczi Molnár's dictionary. This Latin-Hungarian dictionary, which took 15 years to complete, became an encyclopedic tool of the Cartesian outlook; it served as a linguistic link between Europe and Transylvania, as well as between 17th century and modern Hungary. His purpose, wrote Pápai in the preface, was to 'educate students, not linguists'.[149]149. Pápai Páriz Ferenc, 'Az olvasóhoz', Latin-magyar szótár (Lőcse, 1708), trans. by L. Puskás and E. Kovács, in Pápai Páriz, Békességet, p. 324. The dictionary only got published in 1708, but its impact was long-lasting; it remained, for over a century, an essential instrument in the dissemination of mother-tongue culture.

Demand was widespread for information written in the mother tongue. At about the same time in 1684, both a citizen of Nagybánya and a councillor from Debrecen voiced a request for Pápai Páriz's Romlott fal (Ruined Wall). The development of the vernacular followed some traditional routes. It was the preparation {2-449.} of a new popular edition of the Bible that led Miklós Misztótfalusi Kis to develop a simplified standard of spelling for the Hungarian language (1680–90). Assisted by Sámuel Kaposi Juhász and János Csécsi, he corrected mistakes in the translation and shaped the style into more idiomatic Hungarian. Like others before him, he deplored excessive Latinization, arguing that the 'student language' represented an unnecessary burden for children from the lower social strata: 'If we shifted our goals, from training people to be scholars to teaching them to read, there is scarcely a poor man who could not make the modest investment in time and money.[150]150. Miklós Misztótfalusi Kis, 'Az olvasásnak tudásáért (A Zsoltárok elő-szava, 1686), in Erdélyi Féniks: Misztótfalusi Kis Miklós öröksége, ed. by Zs. Jakó (Bucharest, 1974), p. 86.

The comprehensive program for the reform of Hungarian scholarly and literary language was developed one of Apafi's councillors, János Haller. In 1677–81, during his imprisonment at Fogaras on charges of being Béldi's accomplice, Haller worked on the enrichment of the Hungarian language by translating Greek stories into his mother tongue. To be sure, the lively tales in his Hármas História (Triple Story) fascinated the gentry, and the work's democratic spirit helped to earn it a place on the crossbeam of peasant homes, right next to the Bible and the almanac. But the main reason for the book's success was the clarity, simplicity, and light, modern style of its language. In A békességes tűrésnek pajzsa (The Shield of Calm Endurance), Haller outlined his ideas for a purposeful development of the Hungarian language and championed linguistic purity. He had also mastered Latin, German, Italian, and French, but few of his contemporaries knew so many languages. Among the leading political figures of the early 1660s, Miklós Bethlen was probably alone in knowing French. As before, a knowledge of Turkish was mandatory for the small group of diplomats assigned to the Porte. The knowledge of English spread with the intensification of Transylvania's diplomatic activities in the 1670s and 1680s. Within the principality, Hungarians, Germans, and Romanians became familiar with each other's language in the course of daily contact.

{2-450.} Mihail Halici, who had penned a eulogy in Romanian when Ferenc Pápai Páriz graduated as a doctor, compiled the first Romanian–Latin dictionary, thereby contributing to the development of Romanian. The Saxons consciously and deliberately cultivated their German mother-tongue, at times with active encouragement from abroad.

In the second half of the 17th century, Transylvanian society served as the cradle for linguistic modernization. The first, more or less deliberate experiments took place, in the spheres of scholarship, practical life, and light literature, to develop the native languages. The movement towards linguistic and cultural renewal en-compassed diverse ethnic groups and social strata, and it bore the promise of a country that had many languages but a unified culture.