A magyar keresztény terminológia bizánci rítusú szláv elemei

The 10th­century Byzantine conversion of Hungarians was carried out through Slavic media-tion, as there were many Slavic­Hungarian bilinguals among the Hungarians settled in the midst of Slavic population, and Slavic­Greek bilingual missionaries were easy to find in the Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire (e.g. in Macedonia). Most of the early Slavic borrowings to Hungarian came from the Slavic substrate of the Carpathian Basin (Pannonian Slavic), and this is also true of Christian terminology. Due to the high degree of similarity between 10th­century Slavic dialects, it is difficult to separate terms locally borrowed from Pannonian Slavs from those introduced by the Byzantine missionaries speaking Slavic in Hungary. However, there are some words and expres-sions of Balkans origin (hálát ad ‘give thanks’, karácsony ‘Christmas’, pitvar ‘porch’, formerly ‘limbo, edge of Hell’, etc.) that could hardly have been found in Pannonian Slavic; these were most probably brought by the Byzantine missionaries and spread among the Hungarians.