Wojtilla Gyula: A List of Words Sanskrit and Hungarian by Alexander Csoma de Kőrös.
II. Csoma and Sanskrit Studies
53 Professor József Schmidt a brilliant linguist in IndoEuropean studies dealt with Csoma and the etymologies of some vocables recorded first by Csoma in more than one paper. In his Körösi Csoma Sándo r he places Csoma's output in proper historical setting, assuming that comparative philology in that epoch and even after was not free of fallacies and the idea of Sanskrit-Hungarian parentship haunted for a long time. It pleased the national pride of Hungarians and really there are certain links between Sanskrit and Hungarian. Csoma was not a linguist, in spite of his wide knowledge of languages. He and his contemporaries did not know that genealogical relation was a precondition of parentship between two languages . 4 8 In his Körösi Csoma Sándor mint nyelvkutat ó he points to the lack of recognising affinities in grammatical structure as a condition of parentship. Although this idea was in the air at the beginning of the 19th century, Csoma was satisfied with setting up analogies of a general type in the field of inflection, word-formation and word-composition. These analogies do not prove anything genealogically, but any morphological classification must be based on this. "Csoma and other Hungarian orientalists did not commit an unpardonable sin" because "some remote genealogical relation between "Sanskrit aná Hungarian could be supposed and they presupposed it." 4 7 Schmidt discusses particuarly two items of Csoma's List of word s, namely gyul- Skt jval- and szekér- Skt sakata-. Schmidt accepts the relation proposed by Csoma in the case of gyul-. The Hungarian verb is the adoption of Skt jval-. As to szekér it is a more complicate matter. Prakrit derivatives of Sakat a , i.g. sakara-(<*sakala- <"áakada-) served as forms to be borrowed by Finno-Ugrian languages. Indo-Scythian acted as intermediator in borrowing. Schmidt's view directly opposes that of Jacobsohn's who considered the idea of the existence of Indian loans in Finno-Ugrian languages improbable. Z. Mády, a reviewer of their dispute accepts Schmidt's assumption in case of Hung, gyul-, Skt. jval-. Such a borrowing is acceptable both phonetically and semantically . According to him Schmidt's proposition makes a breach in Jacobsohn's theory. Beside Mády he calls attention to the possibility of a proto-Aryan borrowing, too. 4 8
