Golden (Albert) Laszlo

* Betlér, September 19, 1909 – † Rozsnyó, October 13, 1967 / linguist, teacher, ethnographic collector ; ; He graduated from the Rozsnyó Realgymnázium (1927), and obtained a diploma from the Komenský University in Bratislava (1932). From 1935 he headed the Institute of Dialectology of the University of Bratislava, while he was first a teacher at a Slovak school in Bratislava, and later at the Hungarian Realgymnázium. In 1937 he obtained a doctorate and, as the head of the Hungarian committee operating within the linguistics section of the Šafárik Scientific Society, became the director of the collection of Hungarian dialects in Slovakia. In 1943–1945 he was a colleague of the SZTA. During the period of disenfranchisement of Hungarians in Slovakia (1945–1949), he was dismissed from his job, and in 1949, for his participation in the founding and operation of the illegal rights organization called the Czechoslovak Hungarian Democratic People's Association, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison, which he served in various labor camps. After his release under presidential amnesty, he worked as the director of the Rožňava District Museum (1955–1958). Later, he worked as a physical laborer in Bratislava, but due to an illness he contracted in the Jáchymov uranium mine – which proved incurable – he moved back to Rožňava, where he continued his previously abandoned linguistic research. His studies were also read at international conferences. His scientific activities covered several branches of linguistics (Hungarian and Slovak dialect research, descriptive grammar, historical phonology). He was one of the first to deal with structuralist linguistics in Slovakia. Together with Jozef Orlovský, he wrote the first structuralist grammar of the Slovak language (Gramatika jazyka slovenského, 1946). ; ; His main work deals with the dialect of Kolon near Nitra, in which he not only applied the results of Saussure and the Prague structuralist school, but also enriched it with new elements and discoveries. He was also interested in ethnography, but in this field he wrote works of a more general nature. In the summer of 1992, a memorial plaque was placed in Kolon, and a memorial conference was organized in his honor at the initiative of the Hungarian Department of the Pedagogical College in Nitra. ; ; His main works: Psychologické základy javov bilingvistických, 1939, ; Striedanie typu ä, a v nárečí nižnonitrianskom, 1940, ; Ethnography of the Hungarians in Slovakia, 1942, ; The phonological system of the Kolon dialect. Introduction to structural dialectology, 1944, ; 2nd edition: Bloomington–The Hague, 1967, ; The structural order and invalidation of the ancient Hungarian language, 1967, ; The system of the Finnic-Ungrian and the ancient Magyar languages, 1968.