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

any effect on it. The aim of this short book is to lay out some arguments in the hope of finding different interpretations when they are needed. After a short introduction, chapter 2 provides a brief description of the 895—896 AD. landtaking, mentioning the losses suffered by Arpad's people as the result of the attack of the treacherous Pechenegs. The high number given in the sources for the rumpled and fleeing people of Árpád (four hundred thousand) can be flatly refuted. Nor does the author agree with the generally professed thesis of Hungarian linguists that this short panic flight in 894 or 895 — be it three weeks or three months — can mark the linguistic boundary between two stages in the development of Hungarian, i.e. between ^ősmagyar (•Proto

—Hungarian) and ómagyar (Old-Hungarian). Anybody turning to the most recent and comprehensive handbook on Hungarian grammar, will find that all the description of language developments starts with the stage of Proto-Hungarian. If the reader asks for a precise dating of the beginnings of the Proto-Hungarian (ősmagyar) developmental stage, he will find very different chronologies are proposed, ranging from the early part of the I. Mill. ВС. to the 4th century AD. (see our chapter 1.1.!). Another disturbing fact is that the first written documents in Old-Hungarian (with very isolated and unsure exceptions) are only known from sources dated to the middle of the 11th century AD., and therefore cannot be used to demonstrate that the date of the linguistic boundary between Proto- and Old-Hungarian lay exactly in 895 AD. Chapters 2.1-3. deal with the surviving onomastic material of the first six or seven generations of the Árpád dynasty in the late 9th - early 11th centuries. It starts from the principle that isolated onomastic elements have to be explained as coincidences. Thus, it is necessary first to establish genealogically and chronologically consistent series, for these are the only ones that can demonstrate ethnic affiliation (see our notes 38—39!). Now most of the 21, or 24, personal names of the Árpád family are characteristically Turkic, and the few of them that might have an Old-Hungarian (i.e. Finno-Ugric) etymology are more probably those of mythological figures than of historical persons. In the few cases when sources mention female members of the dynasty, the women also had Turkic names. These include Emese, the grandmother of Árpád and the mother of Almos, who came from the Jenő tribe, a characteristic 208