The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1983 (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1983-06-01 / 6. szám

June, 1983

THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE

Page 11

new word, in which the composing elements are sometimes hardly detectable. For example, a great city on the Hungarian Plain got its name from the fusion of two words, Kecske (goat) and Mat (pasture), and is today called Kecskemét. In the archaic period, the majority of nouns ended with a vowel. However, with the consolidation of the word-stress on the first syllable, the sound of the final vowel became weaker, and was eventually silenced. With the loss of the final vowel, the preceding one was usually lengthened as in the following examples: Old Hungarian Uru became Or; Sassu became Száz, and Bharata > Barát.

In Old Hungarian there was a marked preference for deeper vowels as opposed present usage. Instead of the present ‘A’, ‘O’ was used; and instead of ‘O’, ‘U’. So the present word for ‘Dust’, Por appears in older texts as Pur; the word for ‘Fatherland, Country’ Hon appears as Hun; ‘Ram’ which is today Kos, was then Kus (pron. Kush); and Magyar, the native name for Hungarian, formerly was Mogur; while the word for ‘Beer’ Sör, was Sura.

In the process of softening the system of consonants, the ‘P’, T’ and ‘K’ sounds often changed into voiced sounds: ‘B’, ‘D’ and ‘G’ respectively. The phenomenon of mutation of sounds is known in linguistics as sound-shift. Under its impact, almost all Old Hungarian words beginning with a ‘P’ sound, changed to ‘F’. Examples: Old Hungarian Pal meaning ‘Wall’ became Fal; Palu ‘Village’ became Falu; Patek > Fazék ‘(cooking) Pot’; Fekete > Fekete ‘Dark’; Penu > Fenyő ‘Pine’; and Pono > Fonó ‘Spinner’. In spite of the quasi regularity of the frontal P > F change, certain ossified words continue to be used in their archaic forms, such as Pallér ‘Contactor’, a compound of Fal -I- Ur, lit. ‘Wall Man’; and Puszta ‘Steppe’ (in Eastern Europe) which is the compound Fiis + Ta, lit. ‘Herbaceous land’.

The softening of the Hungarian sound-system had a second phase around Christ’s birth, which enriched the language with seven new voiced sounds, written today with double-lettered signs. These are 1. CS, which sounds like ch in ‘Cherry’;

2. GY as d in French ‘Dieu’; 3. LY as l in ‘Volume’;

4. NY as n in ‘New’; 5. SZ as s in ‘Science’; 6. TY as t in ‘Tuesday’; and 7. ZS like s in ‘Pleasure’. For all these new sounds (exactly as for B, D and G sounds) there never was any special graphic sign in the Old Hungarian writing, because its origin antedates the soundshift.

The above listed 40 words may appear in the following phonetical forms in old Hungarian written documents: 1. Kete; 2. Kar; 3. Seme, Zum; 4.

(H)asa; 5. (H)on, (H)un; 6. Taner; 7. Patek; 8. Seke; 9. At; 10. Ege; 11. Pod, Pot; 12. Nabu; 13. Pis; 14. Utu; 15. Mese; 16. Kerta; 17. Pu; 18. Medu; 19. Ital; 20. Sura; 21. Khala; 22. Matar; 23. Egur; 24. Kush; 25. Surke; 26. Beka; 27. Kesh; 28. (H)aiu; 29. Sekeri; 30. Kerek; 31. Uru, Ar; 32. Isten; 33. Khepe; 34. Massa; 35. Pap; 36, Tutu, Dudu; 37. Khetta; 38. Ut; 39. Hetu, Heth; 40. Sassu.

Now, if we imagine the Hungarian language in its archaic from, i.e. without voiced consonants, without diacritical signs, and with deeper tonality, and a vowel at the end of nouns, we will be surprised to see how closely such a script resembles the alphabetic transcript of certain Near Eastern languages of the Illrd and Und milleniums B.C. Actually, with the Old Hungarian phonetic key, it would be possible to understand certain hieroglyphic texts and inscriptions written with the Phoenician type of letters. The following specimen shows what Hungarian looked like around 1200 A.D., two hundred years after the conversion to Chzistianity and the adoption of the Latin alphabet. The following two sentences are taken from the Funeral Pryer, which starts thus: LATIATUC FELEIM ZUMTUCHEL MIC VOGMUC. YSA PUR ES CHOMUV VOGMUC. Using the present orthography, this text would be: Látjátok feleim szemetekkel mik vagyunk. Izzó por és hamu vagyunk. Translated into English in the original sequence of the words and suffixes, it would be: ‘See-you/brethren-my/eyes-your-with/what/arewe/. Glowing/dust/and/ash/are-we/. In this short sample, all the essential elements of the language are already in their final places and even the suffixes are solidly “glued” to their respective root-words. It should also be mentioned that this old text is comprehensible to every Hungarian of today at first hearing, so little has tne language changed in the lapse of eight hundred years, while the changes, witnessed by other European languages during the same period of time are, however, very considerable. So we have to keep in mind that the tempo of the Hungarian linguistic change is and has always been very slow.

We have a significant assessment of the general build-up and inner structure of Hungarian by an eminent English scholar, Sir John Browning (1792-1872) who had a good command of that language and had translated numerous poems. He expressed his admiration for its unity, originality and exceptionally strong cohesion. He likened it to an Egyptian stone monument hewn out from a single block of granite and upon which not the thinnest fissure is detectable. Its origin dates back to the times when none of the presently spoken languages of Europe were yet in existence.

(To be continued)