Hungarian Legal Terminology and the ‘Serving of Justice’

If you have ever been involved in a lawsuit, or even just watched a courtroom film, you have surely heard the word igazságszolgáltatás, which in Hungarian literally means the serving of justice. This expression has become so ordinary that no one stops to think about what it actually means. Yet it is worth pondering, because courts do not dispense justice, they apply the law. The two are not the same. When someone loses a lawsuit, you often hear them say that justice was not served. Legally speaking, however, the court may have done exactly what it had to, it is just that justice and law are two separate things. This little linguistic twist is by no means an accidental mistranslation, but the imprint of a fascinating historical process. Hungarian legal terminology is in fact much younger than we would think, and during its formation some of our words were simply left out of the great language reform. Let’s look together at where this story began and where it led.

A note on the Hungarian words in this article. Because the whole story is about the Hungarian language itself, I keep the key Hungarian words in their original form and explain them in parentheses. Bear with me, it is worth it.

When Hungarian Lawyers Still Argued in Latin

It is strange to think about, but for centuries the language of Hungarian law was not Hungarian, but Latin. The legal life of medieval Europe was conducted in Latin in almost every country, this is not a Hungarian peculiarity. What is a peculiarity, however, is how long it took for this to change. Practically from the time Géza and Saint Stephen reorganized the steppe-type Hungarian state into a European-type Christian one, all the way to the middle and end of the nineteenth century, for nearly a thousand years, Latin was the language of law.

In other countries the local language entered legal life much earlier. The German law book known as the Sachsenspiegel was written in German as early as around 1230. The Poles and the Czechs also issued their legal collections in their own languages, as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In England, laws were promulgated in English from the early 1500s, and in France the king ordered in 1534 that legislation be published in French.

It is worth adding that legal scholarship clung to Latin even longer than legislation did. Among the English and the French this practice died out from the 1600s, and among the Germans it ceased in the early 1700s. In Hungary, by contrast, we had to wait all the way until 1840 for Hungarian-language laws to become mandatory. Werbőczy’s famous Tripartitum, published in 1517, was still written in Latin. The first Hungarian translation, which bears the name Magyar Decretum and, alongside the Tripartitum, also contains entire statutes, was only completed in 1565, and rather freely at that, in abridged form. The translator, Balázs Veres (or in the old spelling Weres), practically begged the king in his petition for support of the Hungarian-language edition, saying that every nation strives to let its people learn its laws in their own language. The full, faithful translation, however, had to wait until 1611. Interestingly, it is not the translator Balázs Veres who is regarded as the true creator of our legal language, but the post-Mohács generation, the group of lawyers organized around Baron Tamás Nádasdy, who were the first to begin writing consciously and systematically in Hungarian on legal matters.

A peculiar duality also prevailed in the legal writing of the time. Alongside the ornate, bombastic style of the Latin texts, there lived a much simpler, more concise spoken Hungarian, only the two rarely met on paper. In the everyday litigation of the lower courts, however, living Hungarian speech appeared early on. In a Transylvanian court document from 1571, the parties argued that the judge should not burden the litigants with an unusual fine.

And in a document from 1662, they admonished one another not to engage in patvarkodás (quarrelsome litigation) and árultatás (betrayal), but rather to learn at the cost of their own losses. These sentences show well that at the lower levels of legal life, Hungarian was far livelier than we would think based on the official Latin-language documents. In the courtrooms, then, life was conducted in Hungarian centuries before the official language change, it is just that this language was not yet rich enough to become an independent professional terminology.

There was one fortunate exception, the Principality of Transylvania. After the country split into three parts, Transylvania experienced more or less independent Hungarian statehood for a century and a half. The Principality of Transylvania was officially a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, but it had free room for maneuver, which the Transylvanian rulers tried to exploit with more (Gábor Bethlen) or less (György Rákóczi II) success.

In Transylvania, then, Hungarian became the official language of public life and jurisdiction much earlier. According to the surviving Transylvanian court documents, trials were already conducted in Hungarian at the end of the sixteenth century, in a colorful and flavorful language at that. This early practice also shows that behind the slow development lay not linguistic impossibility, but political and social causes. It was precisely this long dormancy that laid the ground for Hungarian legal terminology, when it finally got going a few centuries later, to make up the lag in a matter of decades.

In the Fever of the Language Reform, or Lawyers Manufacturing Words

The first breeze of the turn had arrived earlier. In a decree issued in 1784, Joseph II wanted to make German the official language of the empire in place of Latin. The move, however, produced exactly the opposite effect to what the emperor had counted on. From then on, the Hungarian nobility and intelligentsia began to defend the Hungarian language not only against Latin but against German as well. In the same period, the first word-explaining volumes appeared, not yet specifically professional, but rather intended for the educated public.

The great turn then came at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and not by chance. A law of 1805 made it possible for the counties to submit petitions to the authorities in Hungarian too. But an unpleasant problem soon came to light. The Hungarian language was simply not prepared for this task. The words were missing. Lawyers often had nothing to write in Hungarian, because the concepts had no Hungarian equivalents. Contemporaries called the legal mixed-language of the time downright cryptic, since alongside a few Hungarian words they worked almost exclusively with Latin expressions distorted into Hungarian forms.

After this, decade by decade, laws expanding language use were born one after another. In 1830 the earlier linguistic rights were reaffirmed. In 1836 it was declared that in disputed cases the Hungarian text counts as official, and it was prescribed that the judgments of the Royal Court of Appeal also be drafted in Hungarian. In 1840 even the ecclesiastical authorities and the court chamber were obliged to correspond in Hungarian. The process reached its peak in 1844, when a law finally elevated Hungarian to the rank of state language.

Meanwhile, a veritable feverish search for the missing words began. Legal dictionaries, word collections, and so-called official dictionaries appeared one after another, trying to make up the shortfall. The counties also set to work, with Pest-Pilis-Solt county being the first to issue its own official dictionary in 1806. A year later, Ferenc Verseghy also contributed to the compilation of the Zala county dictionary.

After the county dictionaries, ever bolder authors stepped onto the scene. Károly Puky’s 1830 Honni törvényszótár (Domestic Law Dictionary) offered as many as three or four Hungarian equivalents for a single Latin word. And János Fogarasi worked consciously on creating a Hungarian legal terminology in several of his works, including the 1835 Diák magyar műszókönyv (Latin-Hungarian Technical Word Book), no longer afraid even of coining new words. This duality, the tension between reviving old words and coining new ones, accompanied the whole era, just as the language reform as a whole was divided by the debate between the so-called orthologists and neologists (as the name suggests, the latter group was not afraid of innovations).

Meanwhile, legal higher education also switched to Hungarian. These were no small undertakings. Translating a single textbook essentially had to create the entire vocabulary of a whole branch of law, since students had to learn in Hungarian concepts they had until then known only in Latin.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, more than forty such works saw the light of day. The many attempts were finally brought into a unified framework by the Hungarian Learned Society. The Törvénytudományi Műszótár (Dictionary of Legal Science), published in 1843 and then in expanded form in 1847, collected nearly forty thousand Hungarian legal expressions in some twelve thousand entries. Among the editors were names such as Ferenc Kölcsey, the poet, who at the time happened to be systematizing legal words in his spare time.

This era gifted today’s Hungarian language with a great many words that are now considered entirely everyday. Such is utalvány (voucher), szerződés (contract), alapítvány (foundation), intézmény (institution), határozat (resolution), szavazat (vote), hivatalnok (official), bizonyíték (evidence), törvénytár (statute book), jelzálog (mortgage), tulajdonjog (ownership right), vádirat (indictment), or indeed gyám (guardian). Next time you sign a szerződés (contract), consider that this word too is a product of the language reform, the conscious creation of a nineteenth-century lawyer or linguist.

Some of our words, meanwhile, were born in quite an entertaining way. The word gyám (guardian) was shortened from gyámol (support), the word eskü (oath) became an independent noun from the verb esküszik (to swear), and the word cikk (article) is a remnant of cikkely (clause). Linguists call this technique szóelvonás (back-formation), and the lawyers of the reform era gladly made use of it when they wanted to carve a simpler, punchier expression out of a longer, already existing word.

It is worth mentioning that legal popularization, that is, exactly what this article also attempts, is by no means a recent endeavor. Farkas Cserey compiled a book on the inheritance and property rights of women as early as the 1760s and 1770s, with the express intention of developing the Hungarian legal language along the way. And in 1790, György Aranka wrote a short book comparing English and Hungarian administration for a wider audience. Lawyers, then, have been trying to explain the workings of the law in plain terms for two and a half centuries, it is just that back then they first had to find the very words to do so.

Where Did the Word ‘Jog’ Come From in the First Place?

If all this seems natural, it is worth pausing for a moment. Our word jog (law/right), without which today we could not formulate a single legal sentence, simply did not exist in the Hungarian language before the 1820s. This was the greatest, most surprising turning point of our legal terminology.

Consider how fundamental this word is. Today we use it in two clearly distinct senses. On the one hand it means the totality of rules, the legal system, the legislation. On the other hand it also means when someone ‘has a right’ to something, that is, an individual entitlement (for example ownership right over a property or over a red bicycle). Among the Germans, a common word for this duality had already developed by the end of the 1600s, Recht. Among the French, droit. The English rather work with two separate words, law and right.

The Hungarian language also followed two separate paths until the middle of the nineteenth century, only neither word resembled today’s jog. For the totality of rules, they used the word törvény (law/statute) or the expression ország szokásai (the customs of the land). For individual entitlement, however, they used juss, Hungarianized from the Latin ius, or simply the words igaz (true) and igazság (truth/justice). This sounds strange today, but back then, if someone said igazam van (literally ‘I have truth’), it meant at once that what they claim is true, and also what we would today put as ‘I have a right to it’. There was even an author, István Czövek, who tried to distinguish the Latin concepts of private law and public law under the names Közönséges jus (Common jus) and Magános jus (Private jus), and called the whole of legal science Justudomány (jus-science).

And Illés Georch, a generation earlier, translated the king’s right outright as a király igaza (the king’s truth). These attempts show well how gropingly the age searched for the right Hungarian words. No wonder that Hungarian-language legal treatises also only became truly widespread in the 1850s and 1860s, well after the transformation of everyday lawyerly language.

It is worth examining another word at the same time, törvény (law/statute). Before the appearance of the word jog, almost every such concept was expressed with the word törvény. Adjudication was called törvénykezés, the court was called törvényszék (literally ‘law-seat’), and expressions were used such as törvénybe hívni (to summon to law), törvény elé állítani (to bring before the law), or törvényt ülni felette (to sit in law over someone).

When the word jog took over part of these roles, our word törvény lost this broader meaning and narrowed to legislation in today’s sense. Interestingly, the name törvényszék has stayed with us to this day, since some Hungarian courts are still called this, even though the word’s original, broader meaning long ago faded from the language.

The first appearance of the word jog can be dated to 1827, in one of Károly Pauly’s dictionaries. The word derives from our word jobb (right, as in the right-hand side, also meaning ‘better’), from the same idea that, among the Germans and the French too, gave the word for law its basis in the right-hand side, the more valuable hand. From here the word’s spectacular career began. Within just a few years, the entire legal vocabulary organized itself around it. Our words magánjog (private law), közjog (public law), büntetőjog (criminal law), jogtudomány (legal science), jogász (lawyer), jogszabály (legal rule), and jogviszony (legal relationship) were all born.

Of course, this did not happen without resistance. Ignác Frank, one of the greatest domestic legal scholars of the era, did not sympathize with the innovation at all. Frank believed that language can develop only organically, out of the life of the people, and cannot be created by conscious decision, much as, in his view, law cannot be made at will. In his writings he stubbornly clung to the old words igaz and törvény, while the younger generation of lawyers was already using the word jog as a matter of course. In a famous piece he expounded at length that the word igaz is the equivalent of the Latin justus, and igazság the equivalent of jus, that is, of law, only in his view this old usage was more precise than the new expression jog. The debate dragged on for decades. Even in 1896 a linguistic piece appeared arguing that the word jog was the result of a mere misunderstanding, only by then it was too widespread to be eliminated.

Why Did ‘Justice Service’ Remain, if the Hungarian Legal Terminology Renamed Everything Else?

Here comes the twist promised in the title of the article. The triumphant march of the word jog rearranged almost the entire legal vocabulary by the middle of the 1800s. One important area was left out of this transformation, the world of the courts.

The judicial sphere continued to be called igazságügyi (justice-affairs) sphere, and the operation of the courts igazságszolgáltatás (the serving of justice). This old usage, rooted in igaz and igazság, survived directly from the contemporary meaning of juss, from the very time when our word jog did not yet exist. Had the language reform been consistent in this area too, we might today speak of a jogügyi (law-affairs) ministry and of jogszolgáltatás (the serving of law), while the expression igazságügy (justice affairs) would rather denote some general scholarly or truth-seeking field.

It is worth noting that this kind of caution showed itself elsewhere too. The 1847 dictionary of the Hungarian Learned Society still bore the old name Törvénytudományi Műszótár (Dictionary of Legal Science, using the older törvény root), rather than Jogtudományi Műszótár, even though by then the word jog had spread widely. Tivadar Pauler, one of the leading legal historians of the age, in his 1878 book still used now the term jogtudományi kar (faculty of legal science), now the archaic törvénykar. Institutions and names, then, followed the linguistic change far more slowly than everyday lawyerly usage. The Viennese court, incidentally, two years after the Dictionary of Legal Science, in 1845, tried to unify official language use with its own dictionary, hoping that finally only a single Hungarian word would be assigned to each Latin expression. The chancellery’s effort failed, however, Hungarian legal opinion did not accept the unification dictated by the court as its standard.

This old name, however, carries a hidden message to this day. The word igazság means not only a statement that corresponds to reality, but also justness. This double meaning is perhaps the reason the expression holds on so stubbornly. Even today one sometimes hears a sentence such as the courts ‘no longer serve justice, only serve law’. This phrasing involuntarily casts mere application of the law as inferior to the search for justness, yet the two were never the same. The court has always applied the law, it never pronounced some abstract justice. Only its name preserved the old tradition from the time of juss.

What Does All This Tell Us Today?

Hungarian legal terminology, then, is not the result of centuries of organic development, but largely the work of a single generation, the lawyers and linguists of the reform era. When we say that we ‘have a right’ to something, or when we sign a szerződés (contract), we are in fact using the result of a language-reform debate from 200 years ago.

The process, by the way, did not end there. Toward the end of the century, Gábor Bakos worked out an entire program for how order might finally be brought to the jungle of legal usage, to define precise meanings and weed out unnecessary synonyms. And the real conclusion had to wait until the early twentieth century, until between 1898 and 1907 the six-volume Magyar Jogi Lexikon (Hungarian Legal Encyclopedia) appeared, compiled with the contribution of 175 lawyers and legal scholars, which finally gave precise definitions to our legal concepts.

Our word igazságszolgáltatás, however, reminds us to this day that language is rarely entirely consistent. Next time someone says ‘the courts will decide’, consider that it is in fact a legal decision, not some kind of final rendering of justice. This distinction is not merely a linguistic treat, but often the key to understanding legal matters. Someone who understands this is less disappointed even when a court decision does not coincide with their subjective sense of justice, since the court’s task is the application of the law, not the pronouncement of a final, universal truth.

Perhaps this is the most important lesson of the whole story. The language of law did not spring from nothing, nor was it born of a single brilliant idea. Many, many lawyers, linguists, and enthusiastic amateurs tried, argued, and often erred for decades before we arrived at the concepts we use today. Next time you talk to a lawyer and a particular technical term seems strange, it is worth remembering that behind those words too stood people who, once upon a time, tried just as hard to express themselves clearly as I strive to with this article.

I hope I have managed to show that our legal terminology is a far more exciting story than it first seems, and that behind a single word there often lie centuries of debate.

If you have a legal question and would like someone who not only quotes the rules but thinks through every small detail of your case, feel free to get in touch. I will be glad to help you find your way through the maze of the law, and if need be, of justice too.

List of Sources

Since precise citation is not expected of a popular blog article, I give the sources used in summary form:

• Ferenc Kovács: A magyar jogi terminológia kialakulása (The Formation of Hungarian Legal Terminology). Akadémia Kiadó, 1964.
• Béla Pokol: A magyar jogi terminológia formálódása (The Shaping of Hungarian Legal Terminology). Jogelméleti Szemle, 2009/1.
• József Szabadfalvi: Adalékok a magyar jogi terminológia eredettörténetéhez (Contributions to the Origin History of Hungarian Legal Terminology). Magyar Jogi Nyelv, 2021/2.

Statutes referenced: Act IV of 1805, Act VIII of 1830, Act III of 1836, Act VI of 1840, Act II of 1844.