Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/104

90 ignorance of existing ones. A third fact which gave impetus to the reformers was that many Hungarian words were too long to be easily used in verse, the length being due to the so-called "agglutinative" character of the language.

The reform entirely changed the language. In new books there were a great number of words of which the previous generation had never heard. As one author said, with little exaggeration, sometimes the reader hardly understood what he read, there were so many strange words in it. Of course this autocratic way of making words which people scarcely understood, was only possible with a language like Hungarian, where by means of different affixes any number of new words can be made. The mistake of the reformers was that they sometimes added syllables which had never before existed, and which they invented, as, for example the affix—da. Sometimes, again, they cut off one part of the word, and treating the remnant as a complete word (though often it was a mere meaningless stump) they used it as a basis for the fabrication of fresh words. In other cases they trans­lated a foreign word literally, though this did not suit the genius of the Hungarian language at all, but Kazinczy hoped to transplant the beauty of foreign languages into his native tongue. The idea of collecting the obsolete but purely Hungarian words used by old authors, and bringing them into fashion again, was much more commendable.

The mistake, then, of these reformers was that they did not consider the natural laws of Hungarian etymology, while it was their great merit that they did actually succeed, within so short a time, in creating a complete literary language. The success of the reform was