Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)

protolanguage, i.e. the Finno-Ugric group, was proposed and proven by two eminent Hungarian scholars towards the end of the eighteenth century. These were J. Sajnovics (1733—1785) and S. Gyarmatin (1751-1830) . Sajnovics was the first historical linguist who not only compared grammatical structures to test putative affinity between languages (in which his work had been anticipated by that of Marcus Wöldike, the famous professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen), but also attempted to show structural, typological, and material correspondences, to demonstrate in this case the ancestral affinity of Hungarian and Lapponic. These definitive conclusions of Sajnovics came before the generalisations of Sir William Jones in 1779 and his tested formulation in 1786, in which this celebrated scholar explained the similarities between Indo-European dialects on the basis of probabilities. As a result of these early discoveries, and after deep and complicated discussions between supporters and non-supporters, it became clear in the last quarter of the 19th century that the only tenable explanation was that Proto-Hungarian belonged genetically within the ancestral Finno-Ugric dialectal continuum. The only possible location of the territory of distribution or homeland of these ancestral Finno-Ugric speakers in the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages could be in the vast territories lying north or north-east of the putative distribution of the early Indo-European dialects of Central Europe and the North German plain, and in the South Russian and South Siberian steppe belt. There was no likelihood (and no serious scholar tried to prove) that *Finno-Ugric, or *Uralic, or *Proto-Hungarian (i.e. the ősmagyar nyelv) was an indigenous language of the Carpathian Basin, the area of its historical distribution during the time of its first emergence into the historical record. Therefore the only possible conclusion was that the Hungarians left their Proto-Ugric homeland (this was either between the Kama river and the Urals, the Kama-B'elaya area, or on both sides of the Ural mountains between the Kama river and the Middle — or Lower — Ob, etc.) for an area on the steppe belt between the Volga and Dnieper rivers, south or south-west of their ancient habitat in the forest belt. According to the different variants of this model, the Hungarians either left their pre- and proto-historical homeland (most probably lying somewhere in the 200