So two of the three referees Gorka’s PhD did not even have Ph.Ds and one was the US Defense Attaché at the American Embassy in Budapest at the time.
As a former attache to Yugoslavia, with a graduate degree in Eastern European Area Studies, neither I nor anyone without academic accreditation, could have acted as referees.
Gorka is a fascist.
makes sense. thank you:)
To go back to my point: gurke / Gurke is Jiddisch / German for Gherkin. Hungarians whose use of Hungarian is influenced by Jiddisch or who are German speakers (and most educated Hungarians who concern themselves with the English Press will likely fall in one of these categories) will make the connection between Gorka and gurka far more so than any presumed connection to the elite fighting troops of the Gurkas.
Gorka Sebestyėny is not a particularly noble sounding name to a Hungarian ear. And the sound of your name matters. Especially in a country obsessed with heritage, especially in a country where whether your name ends with a ‘y’ or an ‘i’ influences how people treat you.
To go back to your points:
Not sure what’s wrong with arguing about language. Trying to clarify understanding and agree on definitions is the most basic of human activities. And having a more nuanced understanding of languages other than English would do the English speaking world, and the world as a whole, a lot of good.
No, I am not. But I am telling you that there is a good reason why Hungarian uses accents and that there is a marked difference in sound between uborka and úborka. Accents matter.
As I am sure you know, there is no official right or wrong way in Hungarian accents. They are not like French accents, where the direction has phonetic implication. In my school in Budapest (admittedly 35 yrs ago) we learned to write accents straight down EDIT: to correct to vertically. When right handed people write the accent leans to the right, that is how their hands lean. It is a real pain to add accents on an English keyboard which is probably the reason you left out the accent on Szėkler:
Point being that there are nuances to language and when those nuances are being effected by mundane practicalities such as the predominant use of anEnglish keyboard, humans react with flexibility–and make do with what’s manageable, in my case any accent is better than no accent.
You will notice my use of quotation marks in “high Hungarian” precisely because there is no official term for “high Hungarian”. However Hungarian just like all other languages has a vernacular. And my entire point was related to the vernacular use of Hungarian–particularly the influence of Jiddisch in this case.
Edit to add: Hope you enjoyed your beer.
There is also the additional interesting detail that Gorka was born and raised in the UK, thus had access to any University in the world. Under such circumstances choosing a Hungarian Institution sounds weird. I have doubts that Corvinus had particular expertise on Al-Quida in the 1990s. And expertise surely would determine your choice of Institution?
It is possible that he was already working in Hungary. His undergrad degree was only a 2:2, so he would probably not have been accepted into a Political Science graduate program in a UK university. It wouldn’t help that his degree, while from one of the really good colleges at UCL, was in the wrong field.
Aside from his horrendous ideas and reign of intellectual destruction, Gorka’s bio could be an interesting study of immigrant fate, struggle for recognition / development of immigrant identity and the often unbelievable irrational nationalism of emigrants.
Having had the dubious pleasure to see some online fora used by Hungarian refugees and their offsprings I doubt there are many more irrational and delusional communities around. A favourite: Hungarians discovered agriculture!
I have been weary of these intellectual cesspits all my adult life and thought them marginal. Seeing one of the proponents of such nationalistic idiocy become the advisor to the US President carries a particular horror for me.
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