Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)
themselves mami as well. When the people of the steppe highway moved on, a major part of the original conquerors left the land and the marginal inhabitants calling themselves mansi stayed behind." This conception is clearly not up to modern rigorous scientific standards, and the citation shows the curious logic and qualities of the orthodox school when trying to relate early Iranian expansion and the autochthonous natives of the forest belt in the Kama region west of the Urals to one another. (The school has no idea of the actual ethnic situation in this area in the Late Bronze Age period!!!) In essence, I do not believe in the generally accepted, Finno-Ugric etymology of magyar/megyer, which is over-intricate. There seems to be enough in the explanation I have shown above to justify investigating it further, particularly if one can move outside of the petrified field of the historical linguistics of the Hungarian language. Therefore, I fully agree with Dénes Sinor's criticism of the incorrect coordination of historical and linguistic hypotheses in the search for the origins of the Hungarian language and people As an outsider, however, I cannot offer a better solution that can meet the requirements and expected standard of present European scholarship. The natural presumption is (as was also the opinion of Gy. Moravcsik) that it was not only aliens that called Arpád's people turks but very probably they professed themselves to be Turkic both in ethnicity and in language. Chapters 2.11—12. review demographic questions including the number of Arpád's people (the newcomers) at the time of the Conquest and the number of the original inhabitants occupying the Carpathian Basin's ca 200,000 then habitable square kilometres. These rough estimates are only simple guesses and fluctuate between the extremes of 50,000 and 500,000 16 for the people of Árpád, while the original inhabitants have been regarded as half as many (i.e. around 200,000). The most important point made by the orthodox school is a very simple one. Since in the 11th —12th centuries the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the Carpathian Basin was Hungarian (as is clearly shown by the extant place and personal names), and the number of the conquering ("Hungarian") people must have exceeded the number of the ("surely not Hungarian") aboriginals. Assimilating processes between such proportions of Hungarians and non-Hungarians could only have resulted in the final dominance of Hungarian in an area where the 213
