Lajos Podhorszky

* Feketelehota, 1815 – † Paris, August 26, 1891 / linguist, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences ; ; His father was a Lutheran minister, he first taught his son Latin, Greek and Hebrew, as well as music. He attended school in Sajógömör, Lőcse and Késmárk, during which he also mastered the basics of English and French. He was a talented but easily excitable young man who often stuttered. His father intended him to be a priest, but he was unable to deliver his beautifully written sermons consistently. Instead, he became acquainted with mining and began to deal with geology. In order to somehow balance himself financially, he first became a tutor for the Beniczky family for a few years, and then, due to the unexpected death of his father, he took a job as a piano teacher with Zsigmond Máriássy in Berzétén to help his mother, who was left a widow with eight children. During this time, studying different languages and folk customs also became almost a passion for him. In 1838–1840, he was a tutor for the Baron Kempelen family in Pest, and then a fencing master for two years. On one occasion, as a fencing master, he met Count István Széchenyi, who in 1841 asked him to be the tutor of his two sons: Béla and Ödön. By then, Podhorszky could already write and speak the most important European languages, and even delved into Old Scots and Sanskrit. At Széchenyi's encouragement, he began to deal with the Finnish language and the question of the Hungarian homeland. During the events of 1848, he became a captain in the National Guard, made himself useful as a fencing master in György Klapka's camp, and after the suppression of the War of Independence, he also fled to Turkish soil, and thus ended up in the house of the Serbian ruler Karagyorgyevich living in exile in Graz in 1859, where he became the tutor of his two sons. During this time, he studied the Turkish language. During his research, he came to the mistaken view that the Hungarian language was one of the Indo-Germanic languages. He wanted to learn more about the Chinese language, as he suspected a kinship between Chinese and Hungarian, so he went to Paris, where he studied the rich East Asian collection of the Bibliothèque National. His diligent diving also caught the attention of the director general of the library, who commissioned him to organize the East Asian book collection for a modest fee. In addition to Chinese, he also mastered Korean, Japanese and Manchu. He also started a French-English-East Asian dictionary. However, he could not raise the money needed for publication, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, to which he turned for help, also refused to publish it, only honoring Podhorszky with a corresponding membership. Later he married and lived in Budapest for a few years, but the clerical work he took on was not to his liking, and his colleagues had him committed to a mental institution due to his frequent outbursts of anger. He was later released and moved back to Paris, where he lived in great poverty until his death, although he also came into contact with people such as Mihály Munkácsy or István Türr and others. Towards the end of his life he even corresponded with the famous Nobel Prize-winning poet Fréderic Mistral (1830–1914). His ideas on the kinship relations of the Hungarian language were much criticized, and even the leading representatives of “official Hungarian linguistics” – e.g. József Budenz – questioned its scientificity. His most important work: Etymologisches Wörterbuch des magyarischen Sprache genetisch aus chinesischen Wurzeln und Stämmen erklärt, 1876/77.