Wojtilla Gyula: A List of Words Sanskrit and Hungarian by Alexander Csoma de Kőrös.
II. Csoma and Sanskrit Studies
4. Csoma's attempts in his List of Words Linguists working in Finno-Ugrian-Aryan contacts owe a great deal to etymological studies. Although several problems are to be solved, there are certain principles accepted by the majority of scholars of sound knowledge. First of all, historicity is a prerequisite of setting up genealogical relation. In the case of comparing Hungarian on the one hand, and Indie languages on the other hand - as Aulis Joki justly says: "there was no factual and historical necessity of borrowing." Having stressed the complexity of problems, J. Harmatta assumes: "... purely from the linguistic point of view it is very difficult to say in single cases whether we have to do with Aryan, Proto-Iranian or perhaps Proto-Indic loans in the FinnoUgrian languages." He calls our attention to the historical fact that the settlements of Proto-Indians laid "in the southeastern part of the Indo-Iranian linguistic area, in Central Asia already in the 3rd millenium B.C." and "we cannot reckon with their presence in the neighbourhood of the Finno-Ugrian tribes at the beginning of the Indo-Iranian period." In this manner, we are allowed to speak of linguistic and ethnic contacts between Iranians and Finno-Ugrians but not between Indians and Finno-Ugrians. There are Proto-Iranian loans in Finno-Ugrian languages in the period between 4 500-1600 B.C. and also Old-Iranian loans in the period between 800-300/200 B.C., however, among the Finno-Ugrian tribes Proto-Hungarians were lest influenced by Iranians in these early periods. As to Middle-Iranian the Hungarian was the most frequent borrower, but we have to keep in mind that Middle-Iranian loans in Hungarian derive from different languages and dialects. 5 0 In short, this is the position of modern scholarship today. At the same time we can appreciate Csoma's propositions from different viewpoints. Although linguistic research was in its embryo-state some scholars of the age were able to recognise some obvious regularities, however, they had no means to expound their observations at length. Csorna recorded these occurrences and perhaps might have returned to them had he been given time and better facilities in a European university. For instance, modern linguistics is concerned with those linguistic traits that are shared by languages in a certain linguistic area and the languages beyond. There are reasonable grounds for postulating linguistic transmission of features across language boundaries. Colin Masica compared the spread of some features, such as marked causative verbs, conjunctive
