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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]