Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)

Hungarian language. The traditional model of the conquering Hungarians goes on to say that before the time of the Hungarian Conquest the original Turkic rulers (i.e. the Turkic tribes comprising the leading upper class) had been assimilated by the subjugated Hungarian speaking peoples. This new population (i.e. the people of Árpád) when they occupied the Carpathian Basin comprised a linguistically homogeneous tribal organisation and highly ranked chiefdom society speaking dialects of the so-called *Proto-Hungarian (ősmagyar) language. Amongst the models of language replacement listed by C. Renfrew, the displacement of Hungarian (in the theory of the orthodox version) was a specific case of élite dominance, where an incoming minority élite seized control within the territory by military means, but the displaced language in question (i.e. Proto-Hungarian) was not originally its mother tongue, but had been spoken by subjugated tribes under the dominance of this élite. Curiously enough the latter were nevertheless also an integral part of the conquering forces. The consequence of such speculations would be that the Hungarian language was a double exception to the general rule: the newly introduced (Hungarian) language was not the original mother tongue of the ruling élite, and it was not itself absorbed into the native languages of the occupied Carpatho

—Danubian territory, but instead assimilated most of the local, native languages in the occupied area. The orthodox theory considers that Proto-Hungarian was the only new language at the time of the Conquest, and that peoples of the seven tribes of Árpád only spoke Proto-Hungarian as their mother tongue (according to the theory they had previously learned some Turkic from the tribes of the associated Kabars). According to the orthodox model this conquest was linked with the first and only coming of the Hungarian language into the Carpathian Basin. In short there never was a both pre-orthodox and historically scientific model for the prehistory of the Hungarian language, for the earliest attempts in the 18th and 19th centuries were of a somewhat amateurish character, though containing important results in the details which were built into later theories. The orthodox model can be related to among others the work of József Budenz, Pál Hunfalvy and Gyula Pauler . In this model, the Turkic side of Hungarian pre- and protohistory plays an unimportant role, and the conquering Hungarians 204