Terminology in the New Hungarian Civil Code: Reception of Hungarian Sources and Foreign Models
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Terminology in the New Hungarian Civil Code: Reception of Hungarian Sources and Foreign Models Herbert Küpper1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Every legal system needs to update its rules from time to time. Since legal rules are laid down in language, legal innovation requires linguistic innovation as well. This essay analyses how Hungary modernised its private law in pre-socialist, socialist and, most important, post-socialist times. The focus of the analysis is the interaction between the modernisation of the substance-matter and the modernisation of legal language. During the codification of the 2009 and 2013 Civil Codes, the legislator sometimes reverted to pre-socialist Hungarian sources, sometimes reacted to requirements of European Union and international law, and sometimes autonomously created new legal instruments and/or new legal terminology. In order to do so, the codification commissions sometimes received a foreign regulation pattern and created a Hungarian term for it, sometimes they developed the regulation themselves and adopted a foreign term for it, and sometimes the reception of foreign role models ran parallel in substance-matter and terminology. The analysis of the Hungarian post-socialist modernisation of civil law and its linguistic basis shows that terminological and material receptions are not necessarily interdependent but can, and did, happen independently of each other. Keywords Hungary · Legal terminology · Reception · Civil code
* Herbert Küpper [email protected] http://www.ostrecht.eu 1
Institute for East European Law Munich, Regensburg, Germany
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H. Küpper
1 Historical Overview Little is known about the rules in the life of the nomad Magyar tribes before they immigrated into the Carpathian Basin.1 The integration into the sedentary European lifestyle of the time created both the possibility and the necessity to develop a Hungarian private law. In order to do so, medieval and early modern Hungarian law took over many legal institutions from the surrounding countries. The unofficial codification of large parts of the nobility’s law by Werbőczy in his Tripartitum of 1514 [35] unified the usage of terminology because in the course of time, legal practice more and more applied the rules they found in the Tripartitum. Since the Tripartitum was originally written and published in Latin, this unifying effect first concerned the parts of legal practice that worked in Latin. However, translations into Hungarian soon followed and helped standardize the usage of Hungarian legal language, too [17]. Hungarian law in some cases named new legal institutions with words taken from its own stock,2 such as ‘jog’, ‘jószág’, ‘ország’, ‘vásár(ol)’, ‘jobbágy’, ‘szerződés’, ‘hitbér’, ‘vérfogadás’, ‘örököl’, ‘ági öröklés’, ‘okirat’, ‘bíró’ or ‘per’. Some of these expressions circumscribe the phenomenon such as ‘hűbér’ (‘fief’) which means literally ‘reward for fidelity’. In other cases, Hungarian legal language translated more or less verbatim from contemporary
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