The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1983 (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1983-05-01 / 5. szám
Page 10 THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE May, 1983 seemed to prevail, to the detriment of the free researches. 3. After 1945 this situation totally changed, when swarms of intellectuals left Hungary, following the communist take-over. These exiles, free of any political pressure, once they were settled in the free world, have undertaken the renewal of the ancient Hungarian history in an Oriental light. Ida Bobula (USA, 1900-1981) was the first to perceive their new mission. She took up research where Prof. Varga left off in 1942 and was indefatigable in arousing interest for the arduous task. In his time, Prof. Varga was mainly dealing with grammatical parallels between Sumerian and Hungarian. As regards the vocabulary, however, he was unable to find more than about 80 common words. Consequently, Ida Bobula, focussed her efforts upon the enlargement of the vocabulary concordances and was instrumental in completing the existing list with over a thousand additional common words, amongst them the important one for ‘God’, Isten in both languages. With her work, she firmly established the Sumero-Hungarian kinship as a scientifically proven fact and summed up her results in an English language study, Sumerian affiliations (P 014). Other exiled Hungarian scholars followed the trend as set forth by Ida Bobula, elucidating a surprisingly high number of common characteristics of the Sumerian and Hungarian languages. Amongst them, we have first to mention Ferenc Badiny Jós (Argentina), professor of sumerologv at the University of Buenos Aires, who tried to fill the considerable time-gap between the end of Sumer in the Near East and the birth of Hungary proper in Europe, by means of a Hungarian language book, “From Chaldea to Ister-Gam” (P 006). The late Victor Padányi (Australia) concentrated his attention upon the migrating Hungarians in the Don region (P 101) and C. G. Gostony (France) produced an etymological dictionary of Sumerian (P 056), while Sándor Csőké (Austria) compiled a “Sumero-Hungarian grammar” (P 015). Finally, the comprehensive work of Sándor Nagy which was written in English, deserves special mention, The forgotten cradle of the Hungarian culture (P 098). All these works concerned Sumer (Southern Mesopotamia) only and maintained that Hungarian is the direct continuation of the ancient Mesopotamian language, as it was spoken in the Illrd millenium B.C., or, as Sándor Csőké expressed it: “With a few phonetical and grammatical differences, the Sumerian folklanguage, i.e. the spoken language was, on the whole, the same as present-day Hungarian.” The next most important step in the elaboration of the orientalist conception was the extension of the field of investigation beyond Mesopotamia, to cover the whole Near-East. It was indeed discovered that innumerable Magyar words were used, not only in Mesopotamia, but elsewhere too, in the B.C. times, especially in the Nile valley, as well as in Syria and in Anatolia. In these areas certain texts written with hieroglyphs or with Phoenician-type characters, can be read in Hungarian. These surprising results definitely proved that the original home of the Hungarian speaking population was the entire Near-East and also that Magyar was a primary language, from which many others originated. The enlargement of the field of investigations and the above mentioned decipherings are due to Prof. Tibor Barath, author of this book, whose three volumes — Ancient History of the Hungarian speaking Peoples” (P 007) — are fundamental in this regard. That ancient Egypt had been the most brilliant Magyar homeland, was first stated by F. Thomas in his Latin study: Conjecturae de origine, prima sede et lingua Hungarorum (Buda 1806). It must also be added that the eminent Finnish linguist, Helmi Poukka (Helsinki), has made an important contribution to the subject with her “Hungarian- Finn-Egyptian word-parallels” (P 105). In her publication, she lists 1,045 identical Egypto-Hungarian words. This work was recently expanded into an important manuscrit of 307 pages, which its author has generously forwarded to the writer of these lines. All these studies made almost exclusively by exiled Hungarian scholars resulted in the elaboration of a new Hungarian ancient history, whose starting point is in Ancient Near East, in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. 4. In the light of these researches, the basic theses of the Finno-Ugrian historical conception became more and more untenable; above all the belief that Hungarian was a language of Finno- Ugrian origin. This must be a misnomer, declared the orientalists, in view of the fact that the Hungarian vocabulary includes a mere 7.3% of common Finno-Ugrian words, against 92.7% non- Finno-Ugrian. Moreover, if Old Hungarian antedates the Indo-European languages, how it could
