Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)
Székely runic scripts also show that the Székely group was already speaking an Old-Hungarian tongue before the 10th century AD. For example the Székely script borrowed two signs from the Greek for writing the sounds / and h, but these sounds were never present in any old Turkic dialect, though specifically characteristic of Old-Hungarian. 5—6. In both Old and also modern Hungarian the terminology of certain subjects consists mostly of Slavic loan-words. This applies to state organisation, Christian church organisation, religious life and legal terminology so far as concerned newly introduced organisations, expressions and concepts. This contradicts the generally held belief that Christianity, state organisation and a legal system of Late Carolingian type were all introduced into the Hungarian polity from the West, i.e. from Germany and North Italy. This apparent conflict is easily resolved if we suppose that Christianity and various elements of state organisation had already been introduced through the mediation of the Slavic groups living on the eastern peripheries of the Carolingian Empire and in the NW Balkans in the 7 th —9th centuries AD, i..e. during the Late Avar period. 7. This model also explains the curious missing toponymy of the Late Avar period. Positing that speakers of Old- or Proto-Hungarian were already living in the Carpathian Basin before the AD. 895 Conquest...» a new theory, "...which should be proposed with the greatest caution, would answer, at least in part, a thorny question. In some peripheral regions ... relatively numerous linguistic data are to be found referring to the former [one-time] presence of the Avars, e.g. the series of toponyms formed from the Avars' Slavic name ob(a)r: Abriakh, Obre, Obrov, Obrovac, etc. However at the centre of the Avar state relevant Hungarian linguistic research reveals only extremely sparse toponymie traces of the Avars' presence, even though this lasted a quarter of a millennium. ... This discrepancy may possibly be explained by the fact that the linguistic relics of the Avar conquerors are more easily discernible against the Slavic and German linguistic background of the peripheral regions than in the central areas. In these the language of Árpád's Finno-Ugric people, with its mixture of Turkic elements, did not contrast sharply with the language of the late Avar population, which was Altaic mixed with Finno-Ugric. The supposition is that this substratum really did include a Finno-Ugric component. 225
