The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1983 (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1983-07-01 / 7. szám
Page 8 THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE July, 1983 TIBOR E. BARÄTH: THE EARLY HUNGARIANS — contiued from previous issue — 4. Now, the important question is to know to which family of languages Hungarian belongs and what position it occupies within its group, according to the newest researches. If Hungarian cannot be classified as a Finno-Ugrian language, nor as a Turkish one, we have to examine the third alternative, its connections with the family of Indo-European languages, that is, we have to look whether Hungarian has connections with the Greek, Latin, German, English and Slavonic languages in Europe (the “Kentum” group of the Indo-European) on the one hand, and with the Hindu, Sanscrit, Sumerian and ancient Egyptian in Asia and Africa (the “Satem” group of Indo-European) on the other. Actually, Hungarian has been compared with all these languages. The most detailed comparison with Greek was carried out by József Aczél (1927). According to him, Greek and Hungarian have over two thousand words in common, in addition to the great number of Greek place-names, having a definite Hungarian meaning. A closer analysis has disclosed, however, that the common Hungarian-Greek words are to be found mostly in Old Greek, i.e. in the pre-Greek languages: Pelasgian, Cretan and Aegean. — The comparison with Latin disclosed that its grammatical structure is, in many respects, similar to that of Hungarian. Latin is also an agglutinative tongue, using a great number of affixes, both in declensions and conjugations. Moreover, its vocabulary has many words that are in common with Hungarian (11.5%), — according to Gy. Hary’s word-statistics. The most extensive research in this regard has been done by Prof. László Szabédy (1974). The fact that several inscriptions, written in the pre-Latin Etruscan language, were read in Hungarian by this author, suggests that the Hungarian words in question must have found their way into Latin through the intermediary of Etruscan, an Oriental language from Asia Minor, and that these words are now embedded in the lowest and oldest stage of Latin, which is similar to the Hungarian words in old Greek. The number of common Germano-Hungarian words accounts for 6.1% of the Hungarian vocabulary. We know little about the common English words, as no research has been made yet in this particular field. Their number might be, however, quite significant, proof of which are several hundred Old British place-names (cf. P 108) that. in essence, are Hungarian. The British scholar L. A. Waddell has found enough evidence (see P 132) to prove that the early Brit-Honi population originated from the Ancient Near-East, together with the very name of Brit, Prit which sounded originally like Barat, and had the meaning of ‘Companion, Fellow-Traveller, Associate’, exactly as in the Hungarian language of today. A particular British fellow-traveller ethnic group of the Bronze Age, was the Picti, whose name is unexplainable in English, but clear in Hungarian. Picti would be pronounced today, after the P > F change, as Fekete, meaning ‘dark coloured’. We really know from authentic historical sources that the Picti were a dark skinned people. — The greatest number of French-Hungarian common words are to be found in Gallic place- and ethnic names, preserved in Caesar’s famous report, De bello Gallico (P 030). But amongst the present French place-names there are also a great number of Hungarian words, proof of which is the Directory of the French communes (P 039 bis). The Slavonic languages also have a considerable number of common words resembling Hungarian. Their proportion amounts to 13.5% of the Hungarian vocabulary, according to the above-mentioned word-statistics. It is important to mention that the great majority of these words occurs only in those Slavonic countries which border on Hungary, so that they do not seem to be of Slavic origin, but were most probably borrowed from the Hungarian. If the percentages of all common Hungaro-Indo-European words are added together, we get the impressive high figure of 31.1%. This fully justifies the conclusion that Hungarians must have had long-lasting contacts with the Indo-European-speaking population in the millenia before Christ. But vocabulary concordances alone, without stronger grammatical support, are not sufficiently strong to prove close genetic connections between them. The relations of the Hungarian language are closer with the Satem-branch of the Indo-European and with Oriental languages in general. The internationally reputed specialist in Sanscrit, Alexander Csorna de Körös, summed up his findings on that score with the following sentence: “The Sanscrit language shows no stronger relationship to any other language than it does to Hungarian” (quoted in P 098 p. 217). And with regard to the highly developed Sumerian language of Mesopotamia, Prof. C.G. Gostony (Paris) discovered and mentioned in his book (P 056), that
