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

Mezőség must be the result of a still earlier population movement and language shift, which is likely to have taken place during the early Avarian conquest of Bajan. This means that the speakers of the Mezőség dialect and their relatives in Moldavia, the Hungarian speaking Csángó people, have been living in their historically attested territories since the last quarter of the 6th century AD. 2. This model provides an answer to the old question of why Finno-Ugric elements are so underrepresented in the extremely rich material of Hungarian folk music, folk tales and folk ballads. The simplest explanation is obvious. The ancestral Finno-Ugrians acquired autonomy and diverged from their kinsfolk and antecedents very early, certainly some time before AD. 375, while the representatives of the two, three or even four Turkic superstrata did not begin to leave traces of their Turkic background until after around AD. 400 at the earliest. The result was that most of the original Finno-Ugric ethnic traits disappeared into oblivion during the long time that has elapsed since they lived in their original Kama-homeland. This did not happen with the Turkic heritage: this did not perish during its short period of migration of at most one or two centuries. 3. This new model satisfies the requirements of modern anthropological research down to the smallest details, as recent studies of Kinga К. Éry perfectly show (see notes 879—884!). The new observations are, however, irreconcilable with the theories of the orthodox model. 4. New discoveries of 'runic scripts' (the so-called rovásírás ) from the Late Avarian period and from the decades of the Hungarian Conquest period (see chapters 3.3.3. and also 3.9.a.!) resulted in a curious situation. The Late Avarian inscription from Szarvas can be interpreted as being written in Old Hungarian, while the short inscription from the earliest Conquest period from Homokmégy-Halom (in county Bács) was in all probability written in [common] Turkic (see notes 525 and 885-891!). If we take these data at their face value, as we must, they demonstrate irrefutably that the Proto-Hungarian language was spoken in the Late Avar period in the Carpathian Basin, and that a group of the Arpadian conquerors (living near an important family centre of the ruling Arpadian clan in Kalocsa!) spoke Turkic. Some further details of the Late Avarian, Proto-Hungarian and Old 224