Category Archives: Hungarian

Magyar is Turkic

The traditional etymology of the Hungarian self-appellation magyar derives the word from the same Proto-Ugric root as the ethnonym Mańsi, perhaps as a compound with a second word *er of uncertain meaning. However, it is recognized that some of the other Hungarian tribal names during the period of migration into the Carpathian Basin are of Turkic origin, and Árpád Berta shows evidence that magyar is Turkic as well. In a 1998 paper ultimately collected in the memorial volume Studies in Turkic Etymology ed. Lars Johanson and András Róna-Tas (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), Berta suggests that it is a compound of West Old Turkic *ban ‘big’ (cf. Chuvash măn(ă)) and *ǰer ‘place’.

Such an original meaning for this ethnonym acts neatly as the keystone for a series of relationships built up by the other tribal names with Turkic etymologies:

Lastly, let us consider the pattern of meanings that will emerge on the assumption that all Hungarian tribal names are of Turkic origin: ‘Hedge’ (Nyék) – a tribe of guardsmen who, in earlier times, patrolled the borders of the tribal confederation; ‘Chief Place’ (Megyer) – the Chief Tribe after the change of dynasties; ‘Abreast–Behind’ (Kürtgyarmat) – formerly the vanguard and rear guard of the Megyer tribe, merged to protect the new Chief Tribe after the change of dynasties; ‘Tarxan’ (Tarján) – the new Chief Tribe; ‘Little Flank/Face’ (Jenő) – the flank or vanguard of the new Chief Tribe; ‘Back; the Last’ (Kér) – the rear guard of the new Chief Tribe; ‘Fragment’ (Keszi) – the remnant of a former major tribe. (p. 184)

That bit is somewhat speculative. However, the evidence for a Turkic origin of the name that Berta presents is strong and I’d like to see this paper get more attention.

The twists and turns of Chuvash etymology

1 Reply

The Chuvash branch of Turkic actually preserved some lexical items common to the whole Turkic family, but you’d never guess it from looking at modern Chuvash. Here the early Chuvash loans into Hungarian prove essential for knowing the whole history of r-type Turkic.

The first example is Proto-Turkic *teŋiz ‘sea’. Chuvash must have inherited this, because it was borrowed into Hungarian as tenger. In modern Chuvash, we do not find this word, however, but tinĕs, clearly a loan from a z-type Turkic language, presumably Tatar tiŋez (Fedotov 1996: 232).

The other example is also maritime. Proto-Turkic *yinčü ‘pearl’ must have survived into the Chuvash branch long enough to be borrowed by Hungarian as gyöngy and even Russian as žemčhug. The distinct Proto-Chuvash form must have been something like *ǯinǯü (Fedotov 1996: 155). At some point, however, Chuvash must have lost it. Modern Chuvash ĕnče would seem to be a borrowing of Tatar enče, as the Proto-Chuvash form would have developed to something like ˣśĕnśĕ.

(Róna-Tas 1982 also has much discussion of using Chuvash loans into other languages to peer into the history of Chuvash itself.)

I’m curious about the dating of these loans into Chuvash, as they were evidentally borrowed after Volga Tatar’s switch of mid vowels with high vowels, a change I’ve always thought was quite late. Tatar loans in Mari, such as Mari osal ‘bad, evil’ ~ modern Tatar usal, seem to preserve the original vocalism. Did the Mari have heavy Tatar influence so much earlier than the Chuvash?

References

  1. Fedotov, M. R. (1996). Etimologičeskij slovar’ čuvašskogo jazyka. Čeboksary: Čuvašskij gosudarstvennij institut gumanitarnyx nauk.
  2. Róna-Tas, András (1982). “The periodization and sources of Chuvash linguistic history”. In: Chuvash Studies, ed. András Róna-Tas. Asiatische Forschungen 79. Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz, 113–170.

More weird sound changes in Romanian borrowings

2 Replies

The Crestomație de literatură română veche edited by I. C. Chițimia and Stela Toma (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1984) that I picked up for cheap last year in a Cluj antiquary has so much trivia on Slavonic hangers-on in the early modern Romanian lexicon that I could do an endless series of posts here. Less visible but often even more intriguing are the signs of contact with Hungarian. A liturgy book produced in Brașov in Transylvania in 1570 features the following lines of translation of Psalm 50: Ție unuia greșiiu și hiclenșug înaintea ta feciu, ca să dereptezi-te întru cuvintele tale și pîrî-veri cînd veri judeca ‘Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.’

Here the word hiclenșug ‘betrayal’ is clearly a borrowing of Hungarian hitlenség ‘infidelity’, a perfectly Magyar formation formed by hit ‘belief’ plus the caritive suffix lan/len and then the abstract formation ság/ség. I don’t know how to explain the final vowel in the Romanian form other then by wondering if the Hungarian ending, like many Hungarian endings, originally had an invariable back vowel before it was made to conform to vowel harmony.

The dissimilation before /l/ of /t/ to /k/ is a bit odd too, but things get stranger still when one considers that hiclenșug is archaic in Romanian, with not even an entry in the Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române, but the loan survives still today in the further altered form vicleșug. Now, I cannot help but wonder if that change of /h/ to /v/ is related to the word-final change of /h/ to /v/ in loanwords that I previously wrote about here.

The migration of the Hungarians

Leave a reply

In Historical and Linguistic Interaction Between Inner-Asia and Europe ed. Árpád Berta (Szeged, 1997), the Proceedings of the 39th Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) in Szeged, Hungary June 16–21, 1996, András Róna-Tas contributes the paper ‘The migration of the Hungarians and their settlement in the Carpathian Basin’. It sketches the stages by which the Hungarians went from being a minor Finno-Ugrian people somewhere near the Permians to masters of modern-day Hungary, with a few interesting linguistic bits.

Róna-Tas gives the etymology of the Hungarian people’s self-appellation magyar as a compound of the ethnonym *manš (cognate with the self-appelation of the Vogul/Mansi people) plus the word *er ‘man, creature’. Indeed, the form magyer lacking vowel harmony was recorded until the 13th century.

The Hungarians switched to a nomadic way of life in the 5th of 6th centuries AD in the southern part of the Urals near the Rivers Yayik or Ural. This is when all the Chuvash-type Turkic words came in, such as Hu. ökör ‘ox’ ~ Chuv. *văgăr but Old Turkic öküz.

Along with a host of other Turkic peoples, the Hungarians reached southern Russian near the border with modern-day Ukraine, inhabiting the area between the Kuban, the Don and the Sea of Azov. This was just north of the Alans, whose presence in the region is well-documented. Alan contacts gave loanwords such as Hungarian asszony ‘noblewoman’ ~ Old Osetian axsin ‘princess’. Old Turkic loanwords also came into Hungarian at the time, such as Hu. kőris ‘ash tree’ ~ West Old Turkic keürič and Hu. gyümölcs ‘fruit’ ~ OT yemiš. Their vicinity to the Black Sea facilitated the borrowing of words such as Hu. homok ‘sand’ ~ OT kumaki and Hu. hajó ‘boat’ ~ OT. kayik.

The final stage before the occupation of the Hungarian basin is one that I didn’t know about earlier, but seems to have gone on for nearly two hundred years before they eventually reached their current home in AD 895. Towards the end of the 7th century, the Hungarians moved down into the territory between the Dnieper and the Lower Danube. The early Hungarians called this region Etelküzü, where Etel is from the generic West Turkic name for ‘river’ and küzü is the same as the root of modern Hungarian postposition között ‘between’ which has a locative ending tacked on. The name of the region is equivalent to Greek ‘Mesopotamia’. This is when loanwords such as Hu. szőlő ‘wine grape’ ~ Turkic yedlig were borrowed.

I also thought it neat to learn that the Hungarian-speaking inhabitants of ‘Magna Hungaria’, the area around the Kama River visited by the Hungarian friar Julian in 1235 who was amazed to meet long separated kinsmen, had not stayed in the area the entire time, but in fact moved there from Etelküzü with some Bulgar tribes.

Last year, this year, next year

6 Replies

It’s interesting to note that Hungarian and Chuvash both express the concepts ‘last year’, ‘this year’, and ‘next year’ with lexically very different words:

Hungarian Chuvash
‘last year’ tavaly пӗлтӗр
‘this year’ idén кӑҫал
‘next year’ jövőre, következő évben ҫул

Granted, I’ve only studied European languages and Mandarin Chinese, but this seems like a very unusual system.

Hungarian-Old Chuvash contacts

1 Reply

In the collection Chuvash Studies ed. András Róna-tas (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982) there’s a fascinating paper by Margaret Palló entitled “The Bulgar-Turkish Loanwords of the Hungarian Language as Sources of Chuvash Prehistory”. The earliest terminology of animal husbandry in Hungarian is of a distinctly Proto-Chuvash type, and Pallo shows why:

One group of the Old Turkish loanwords of the Hungarian language suggests that the Magyars of the Ural region had got into closer contact with a Turkish people engaged in animal husbandry, and subsequently, changed their mainly predatory way of life to the more highly developed one of livestock breeding. This is proved by the large number of names of domestic animals: Hung. bika ‘bull’ < *bïqa, ökör ‘ox’ < *ökür, tinó ‘steer’ < *tïnaɣ, ünő ‘heifer’ < *inäɣ, borjú ‘calf’ < *buraɣu, kos ‘ram’ < *qoš, ürü ‘sheep’ < *iriɣ, toklyó ‘yearling’ < *toqlïɣ, kecske ‘goat’ < *käčkä, olló ‘kid of goat’ < *oɣlaɣ, kölyök ‘whelp, young of an animal’ < *köläk. Presumably the word iker ‘twins’ also belongs to this group as it may have meant twin broods. If we consider the most prominent phonetic characteristics of these animal names — r stands for ST z, as in öküz ∼ ökör, buzaɣu ∼ borjú, ikiz ∼ iker, and l stands for the ST š, as in *köšäk ∼ kölyök — then it seems obvious that it is BT and not some other Turkish languages whence the Hungarians borrowed them. No doubt, the other animal names without the characteristic OB phonetic features were also borrowed from the same source.

Hungarian regionalisms

Leave a reply

No teacher would deny that German, Italian, or French differ region by region from the standard language. Nonetheless, several prominent learning materials for speakers of English claim that Hungarian has no significant regional variation. As a beginner I believed that, but then one day when I couldn’t find a word in my dictionary, a native speaker alerted me to one of the major regionalisms in Hungarian. The writer had used ö in the word in question, but to get the standard form I had to look under e in the dictionary.

Another major regionalism is [a] for standard [ɛ] among the Székely (Szekler) Hungarians in Romania. A Transylvanian friend wrote me the following joke on the subject:

A székely városbeli vasútállomáson megszólal a hangosbeszélő:

― Figyelem, figyelem! Vonat erkezik az Á vágányra. Kérem vigyazzanak.

Vonat megjön, elmegy, ujra megszólal a hangosbeszelő:

― Mennyi halott, mennyi sebesült… pedig világosan megmondtam: Á mint Elemér!

At the train station in a Székely town the loudspeaker announces:

‘Attention, attention! A train is arriving on track A. Please be careful.’

The train comes and goes, and the loudspeaker again announces:

‘So many dead, so many injured… but I clearly said A as in Echo!’

The Department of Phonetics of the Research Institute for Linguistics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has a map of dialects where one can find the major traits of each region.

Hungarian and Mansi connections

4 Replies

In the Introduction to the Study of the Finno-Ugrian Languages course that I’m sitting in on again this year, the lecturer handed out a nice concise listing of similarities between Hungarian and Mansi—and differences between these two and Finnish—that show why traditionally Hungarian is grouped closely with the Ob-Ugrian languages.

Hungarian Mansi Finnish
hal xuul kala ‘fish’ *k before a back vowel
kéz kit käsi ‘hand’ *k before a front vowel
egér tänkør hiiri ‘mouse’ intervocalic *-ŋ-
harom xuurøm kolme ‘three’ *-rm- in this word.
két ∼ kettő kit ∼ kitøg kaksi ‘two’ 2 variants
alól joløl alta ‘below’ ablative ending
ház-am-ban kol-øm-t talo-ssa-ni house-1sg-inessive possessive suffix before case suffix
magyar mansyi endonyms
nyolc nyollow kahdeksan ‘eight’ same root and construction
ló luw hevonen ‘horse’ common vocabulary (around 150 total items)
nyereg nagør satula ‘saddle’
ostor osytør piiska ‘whip’

One of my favourite Uralic etyma is here: *šiŋere/*šiŋiri ‘mouse’. Here one can see the vastly different paths the word has taken in the various Uralic languages. In Finnish, initial *š- becomes /h/ and intervocalic *-ŋ- is lost. In Mansi, initial *š- merges with *s- and becomes first *θ- and ultimately /t-/, while intervocalic *-ŋ- becomes the cluster /-nk-/. Finally, in Hungarian initial *θ- (< *š-) is lost, and intervocalic *-ŋ- becomes first *-ng- and then is denazalized to intervocalic /-g-/. Cognates in other Uralic languages can be seen at a Uralic database entry.

When Hungarian was almost Romance

5 Replies

In the second volume of a Festschrift for Oswald Szemerényi published in 1979, I found Adam Makkai’s paper ‘Latinate Diglossia in Finno-Ugric’ that is one of the few examples of ‘speculative linguistics’ I know. Latin was almost like a native language for the Hungarian gentry in Austro-Hungarian times, but eventually the Language Purification Movement came out on top. Makkai writes:

Yet things could have taken a different turn and Latin could only be vigorously alive; it could, in fact, have penetrated the language deeply enough to create yet another brand of Eastern Romance. Admittedly this is somewhat speculative and there were, as we now know, more forces against such pidginization and later creolization than for it, but that it could have happened diachronically can be shown from the synchronic situation in Hungarian today.

The synchronic situation to which the author refers is the speech of the oldest generation at the time of writing, which was a product of the Austro-Hungarian education regime. Makkai tape-recorded the following judgments of a Hungarian academic, aged 75, about an American colleague:

Micsoda implauzibilis szituacio! Ez a pasas nem gavaller, hanem szadista frater. Patriotismus es szolidaritas? Semper fidelis? Numquam fidelis… Nem kapiskalja, hogy aquila non captat muscas. Palam et publice impertinens, agressziv, kleptomaniakus, retorikaja extrem es abszurd. Antifeminista, antiszocialis, kriminalis tendenciai vannak. Hogy antialkoholista es antimorfinista is? Ja, noch schön… aber… imposszibilis teoriakat fabrikal, obskurus, misztikus obfuszkaciokkal alteralja a szocialis milieu-t… Intolerabilis antiracionalista, aki denigralja az universzitas-beli akademikusok konfraternitasat, amor patris-at, optimizmusat…

‘What an impossible situation! This guy/character [from French passager] is no gentleman [from Spanish caballero] but a sadistic gangster [from Latin frater ‘friar’]. (regarding) patriotism and solidarity? Always faithful? (why, he is) never faithful… He doesn’t understand [from Italian capisco] that ‘ the eagle doesn’t catch flies’ [Lat. proverb of high frequency in Hung.]. In full public view [frequent Latinism in Hung.] he is impertinent, aggressive, kleptomaniacal [from Gk. ‘to steal’], his rhetoric is extreme and absurd. He is an antifeminist, he is antisocial, and he has criminal tendencies. That he is also an antialcoholic and an antimorphinist? Well, that’s the saving grace…but… [German interjection] he fabricates impossible theories; keeps altering the social milieu [French] with obscure and mystical obfuscations… He is an intolerable antirationalist who denigrates the fraternity of university academics, their love [of their] country and their optimism’

Makkai makes the interesting point that after Latin declined in popularity, and ‘pure’ Hungarian formations became the standard, the younger generations could hardly understand classically educated old people.

The last sections of the paper are mainly in jest, example texts in the conjectured Romance language that Hungarian might have become. Nonetheless, the matter reminded me of a remark by Anthony Fox in his textbook Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method

A more radical conclusion is drawn by Trubetzkoy (1939), who suggests that, since features may be shared by unrelated languages, the idea of a language family as a group of languages derived from a single source is actually unnecessary. Terms such as ‘Indo-European’ merely cover groups of languages sharing a number of features, and as a result it is possible for a language which acquires the appropriate features to become Indo-European.

The Trubetzkoy work is ‘Gedanken ueber das Indogermanenproblem’, Acta Linguistica, 1: 81–9. I haven’t read it yet, but I would like to find it soon and see how this seventy year-old idea of languages changing families jives with contemporary notions about genetic affiliation and contact phenomena.

Wild Hungarian lipograms

3 Replies

Many readers here might be familiar with Georges Perec’s novel La disparition (ingeniously translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void), where the mad French writer succeeds in never once using the letter e in the course of the book’s 300 pages. This type of text is called a ‘lipogram’, from the Greek λειπ- ‘to leave’ and γραμμα ‘writing, letter’, as something is missing from it.

A Hungarian friend has just made me aware of a peculiar Hungarian kind of lipogram, where famous poems are written so that they contain only the letter e. The ‘translator’ rewrites the poem striving to remain as similar in meaning as possible to the original, but with vocabulary containing only e. Take, for example, this stanza by Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi:

Falu végén kurta kocsma,
Oda rúg ki a Szamosra,
Meg is látná magát benne,
Ha az éj nem közelegne.

At the end of a village: a small tavern,
The Szamos flows by.
It would reflect itself
If the night were not approaching.

I quite like this little verse, especially because not far from my own window the Szamos/Someș river winds its way through Kolozsvár/Cluj. Now, some person with a lot of time on his hands has rewritten it as follows:

Telepszegleten szeszelde
Csermej mellett elhejezve,
benne kedve tetszelegne,
teszem fel, nem esteledne.

At the corner of settlement: a sipping place,
placed near the creek,
It would find delight in itself
Assuming it weren’t getting dark.

The particular kind of lipogram, using only e, is known as Eszperente in Hungarian. The website Eszperente Net contains many such reworkings, and even the site’s introductory comments are written under the same constraint.