Chapter 172: Only Interests Are Eternal
Lack of money was a major problem. Although Fikvenna was a writer with a decent income, he was equally powerless to solve the school's funding problem.
Donations? Anyone who looked into why the Hungarian National School had been founded would know that raising funds now was impossible.
This was tied to the Great Revolution of 1848. Those who had fervently advocated promoting the Hungarian language and writing had mostly leaned toward the revolutionary party. Nearly all of them had either gone to meet God or were now struggling away for Austria's railway enterprise.
Those lucky enough to escape disaster were mostly moderates. Such people tended to tread carefully, and there were not many of them to begin with, leaving them unable to shoulder such an expense.
Hungarian language and writing had taken ten centuries of evolution to take shape. Its origins reached back to the ninth century AD. By the Middle Ages, it already had eight hundred words, mainly borrowed from the Turkic language family, Caucasian languages, Romance languages, Slavic languages, and German.
In 1836, Hungary launched a revolution in language and writing. The Hungarian language and writing of later generations had basically taken shape during that period, and in 1844, Hungarian became Hungary's legal language.
Most Hungarian nobles came from Germany. Quite a few of them could speak Hungarian, but very few had learned Hungarian writing. Hungarian was mainly circulated among the lower classes.
Against this backdrop, István Széchenyi founded the Hungarian National School to promote Hungarian language and writing among the middle and upper classes.
Had history remained unchanged, such language schools would have blossomed all across Hungary, laying the foundation for Hungarian national culture in later generations.
This was also one of the reasons István Széchenyi came to be known in