Stephen Kniezsa

* Trsztena, December 1, 1898 – † Budapest, March 15, 1965 / linguist, language historian, Slavist, full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1947) ; ; He graduated from high school in Nitra, fought on the Eastern Front in World War I in 1916–1917, where he suffered a serious hand injury, but served as a soldier in Győr until 1921. Between 1921 and 1927, he was an office assistant of the state police in Budapest. At the same time, in 1923, he enrolled at the Pázmány Péter University, where he initially studied law, and then from 1924, as an Eötvös student, he studied linguistics, history and Slavic studies under the tutelage of János Melich (1872–1963), professor of linguistics, and Zoltán Gombocz (1877–1935), linguist and academician. He earned a doctorate in humanities in 1928. After that, he pursued Slavic studies as a scholarship researcher in Berlin until 1930, in 1930–1931 and in Poland in 1934–1935. In 1934, he obtained a university private teacher qualification, and in 1930–1940, he was an official of the National Society of Hungarians. From October 1940 he was a full-time public professor of Slavic studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Cluj-Napoca, from 1941 at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Budapest, and until his death he was the head of the department. ; He edited the journal Études Slaves et Roumaines (1948–1949), then Studia Slavica (1955–). In 1953–1959 he was the president of the Hungarian Linguistic Society. Member of the Suomalais-ugrilainen Seura (Helsinki). His scientific work covered Hungarian and Slavic linguistics. He mainly carried out toponymy and personal name research in the service of Hungarian settlement history. Based on the material he collected, he established a medieval chronology of Hungarian and Slavic place-name types and compiled a nationalities map of the 11th century Kingdom of Hungary. He brought a new methodological approach to onomastics with the so-called with a profound analysis of the phenomenon of parallel toponymy, during which he established the laws of independent toponymy customs characteristic of ethnic groups in multi-ethnic regions. In addition, he dealt with the history of Hungarian spelling and the Slavic elements of the Hungarian language, and only the first part of his work summarizing his achievements in the latter field was published. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member in 1939 and a full member in 1947. From 1942 he was a full member of the Saint Stephen Academy. In 1953 he received the Kossuth Prize. ; ; His main works: ; A magyar szállásirás a tatárjárásig, 1928, ; A szlávok, 1932, ; Pseudorumänen in Pannonien und in den Nordkarpathen, 1936, ; Magyarország népei a 11th century, 1938, ; Cyrillic Slavic ; international scientific transcription of texts, 1939, ; Geographical names of Transylvania, 1940, ; Additions to the history of the Hungarian–Slovak language border, 1941, ; Water names of Transylvania, 1942, ; Linguistics and ancient history (In: The ancient history of the Hungarians), 1943, ; Toponyms of Eastern Hungary, 1943, ; Parallel toponymy, 1944, ; The language of the Slavs before the conquest in Transdanubia, 1952, The history of our spelling until the age of book printing, 1952, ; The history of Hungarian spelling, 1952, ; Slavic loanwords of the Hungarian language (I/1- 2.), 1955, ; The system of Hungarian and Slovak surnames, 1965.