The Eighth Tribe, 1979 (6. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1979-11-01 / 11. szám
Page 6 THE EIGHTH TRIBE November, 1979 COMMENTS ON THE ORIGIN OF HUNGARIAN AND OTHER FINN-UGORIAN LANGUAGES (Excerpts) Our apologies to the author for not printing the complete article submitted to us. —Editor. During the last decades an increasing number of Hungarian, English and German books, monographs and articles have been published in the Western World advocating the recognition of linguistic relationship between Hungarian (with or without the other Finn-ugorian languages) and Sumerian. Some of that literature found its way to Hungary and the subject reached such a level of popularity that Budapest found it necessary to react and counterattack. During the last few years several articles were published in Hungarian literary and cultural magazines rejecting the possible existence of any level of relation between Hungarian and Sumerian. The authors of these articles were accomplished linguists and historians. Even a paperback, by G. Komoróczy, was published in 1976. This hook was written in a popularized style, addressed to the general public, and clearly designed to stop the spread of the utopian ideas of Hungarian-Sumerian connections. To my knowledge, no publications supporting non-Finnugorian relations were allowed. That is, until October 1976 when a major cultural magazine, VALÓSÁG, printed an article written by Mrs. Gy. Hary. In this paper she cpenly criticizes the stubborn attitude of Finn-ugorian linguists and praises the contributions of foreign and Hungarian authors analysing other than Finn-ugorian linguistic relations. She points out that the similarity between Sumerian and Finn-ugorian, or Hungarian, was not discovered by diletante and frustrated Hungarian emigrants, but by English, French and German linguists. It was much later that Hungarians joined their ranks and made noteworthy contributions. From the beginning to the present they were discouraged, first by the Austrian dominated government of the Monarchy and later by the solid front of Finn-ugorian linguists. Similar treatment waited for those who called attention the striking similarities between Hungarian and Indoeuropean, Austroasiatic, Polynesian and other exotic languages. Many of them were driven to publish outside of Hungary and most of them were and still are ridiculed in the Hungarian literature. There are some recent developments in linguistics which should cast a different light on these heretic studies. The idea of a single Eurasian primary language is being revived which was probably the ancestor of most of our language families. One of the leading linguists promoting that hypothesis is Dolgopolski. He analysed the vocabularies of many languages of most language families and demonstrated with careful probability calculations that many basic words of these languages can be derived from a single primary language (1964, 1973). He calls that primary language Boreal (Boreisch) after the name of the climatic period in which that language may have flourished. In order to demonstrate the difficulties concerning the exclusive Finn-ugorian origin of the Hungarian language Mrs. Hary quotes some statistics from the first two volumes of the recently published Hungarian etymological dictionary. Almost 50% of the basic words listed are labelled as being of “unknown origin” or are “sound imitations”. Almost 6% is identified as Turkish, over 13% as Slavic, over 11% as Latin, about 6% as German and another 6% as miscellaneous loan words. Only 7.3% of the basic words are recognized as genuine Hungarian words of Finn-ugorian origin. That figure appears to be too low to represent the original roots of the Hungarian language. The true percentage of Finn-ugorian words may even be lower. Some of the words included in that category could have been classified simultaneousely under Indoeuropean or other categories as well. For example, NÉV is classified as Finn-ugorian, yet its cognate in German is NAME. On the other hand, she finds it difficult to believe that over 40% of the Hungarian vocabulary could be composed of genuine loan words. A broader than exclusively Finnugorian origin of the Hungarian language could justify the reclassification of most of these words and would render the statistics more credibility. In two paragraphs she calls attention to the fact that Hungarians are not alone, among the Finnugorians, who are skeptical about the validity of the rigid Finn-ugorian origin of their language. She quotes two Finnish authors who have recently published books and articles on Finnish-Indoeuropean and on paleo-Mideastern linguistic relations. One of them, Helmi Poukka, came out to say that “The expression of Uralic languages . . in reference to Finn-ugorians . . is erroneous. Our ancestors have never been there”. (I would like to add to Mrs. Hary’s comments that Finnish and Estonian languages were compared with almost as many other languages as Hungarian. In fact, almost exclusively with the same languages. The internationally known Finnish assryologist, Harri
