Friday, January 25, 2013

Sigh of relief

It seems like the bulk of the attention has blown over and I can now go back to the normal barren desert of this blog, occasionally frequented by tumbleweed.

Some interesting things came out of my brief flirtation with national fame (or whatever it was)

  • The sheer niceness of most people who wrote to me
  • The sheer absolute craziness of a very few people who wrote to me, who varied between people furious that Hungarians should ever be allowed to speak Hungarian at all, even in their own homes (quite possibly in their own dreams too) , to people at the other end of the scale (but actually at the same end, just upside down) who think that it should be Romanians who are learning Hungarian and that should be the only language of Transylvania.  Could I disrespectfully ask all such bigots from both sides to just piss off and go and wank over a picture of Gigi Becali or Gabor Vona.
  • The sheer persistence of the fear engendered in this country by so many years of vicious authoritarian rule.  A lot of people were very worried for me, and my family and so on, because - essentially - putting ones head above the parapet can only end badly. In the eyes of many there is now a bulging file on me kept by the securitate somewhere, ready to be used when I next dare to say anything that might not tally with the orthodoxy
  • How fascinating it is to be the one listened to, when for years and years people - real experts, not just language teachers like me - have been saying just the things I said, and being ignored. Because I'm neither Hungarian or Romanian, I guess it seems I don't have an axe to grind, and am not carrying a backful of historical baggage.
  • I suspect the brief rush of excitement (and, yes, panic) has died out and with it the subject.  That's the only regret I have, now.
So, for any readers of this blog who want to review some of the things that were published, here they are
There are a few other articles in the local Hungarian press which I either can't find online or can't be bothered to now.

Anyway, I have more to say, but it'll have to wait.  I'm going off to do stuff in the snow for the weekend 

2 comments:

Ireth said...

"I suspect the brief rush of excitement (and, yes, panic) has died out and with it the subject."
I don't think it has. The fact that it's not being discussed anymore doesn't mean that your raising of this topic has't generated some kind of very, very important change in people's thinking.(at least this is my opinion)
While I don't have much knowledge on the nationalist politics of the communist era and I'm not familiar with the debates on Hungarian education that occurred after it - I'm only as old enough as to have experienced Hungarian education in school and the minor distinction we had in our graduate programme and having the same postgraduate programme with Romanian students in university - I'm sure there are lots of people who, like me, haven't actually realized what's going on in schools. (Or maybe I'm just that young or that stupid... :) The thing is, in all my education it never occurred to me that Romanian could be taught as a foreign language, I never once stopped to compare Romanian classes to our English or French classes, I simply accepted it the way it was... Of course, there was the occasional realization of the absurdity that we were expected to know things native speakers themselves didn't know, but our(or just my?) brain never made the connection that we were actually learning a foreign language...
And now all of this just seems ridiculous to write down... Anyway, I'm sure that there are others like me, even if they're just the very few head-in-the-clouds members of my generation, for whom your clear view on the situation was like a wake-up call. Somehow I'm sure that it has taken people one step closer to making the change... It has managed to stir our sleepy waters, not just the surface.

Ireth said...

"I suspect the brief rush of excitement (and, yes, panic) has died out and with it the subject."
I don't think it has. The fact that it's not being discussed anymore doesn't mean that your raising of this topic has't generated some kind of very, very important change in people's thinking.(at least this is my opinion)
While I don't have much knowledge on the nationalist politics of the communist era and I'm not familiar with the debates on Hungarian education that occurred after it - I'm only as old enough as to have experienced Hungarian education in school and the minor distinction we had in our graduate programme and having the same postgraduate programme with Romanian students in university - I'm sure there are lots of people who, like me, haven't actually realized what's going on in schools. (Or maybe I'm just that young or that stupid... :) The thing is, in all my education it never occurred to me that Romanian could be taught as a foreign language, I never once stopped to compare Romanian classes to our English or French classes, I simply accepted it the way it was... Of course, there was the occasional realization of the absurdity that we were expected to know things native speakers themselves didn't know, but our(or just my?) brain never made the connection that we were actually learning a foreign language...
And now all of this just seems ridiculous to write down... Anyway, I'm sure that there are others like me, even if they're just the very few head-in-the-clouds members of my generation, for whom your clear view on the situation was like a wake-up call. Somehow I'm sure that it has taken people one step closer to making the change... It has managed to stir our sleepy waters, not just the surface.