The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1982 (9. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1982-12-01 / 12. szám
December, 1982 THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE Page S A year and a few months passed that Dr. IDA BOBULA died in October, 1981. Let us now pay tribute to this great lady, through these pages in this magazine, for her devotion and love for her people and country. Dr. Bobula’s life-long research, in the history of the Hungarian Nation, was a constant turmoil, because she dared to challenge false immages concerning the identity of the Magyar’s past history. Her devotion and love was her faith that lead her through a long life of misery, constant fight with irresponsible persons, even her life was threatened. She lost her faculty position and bearly managed a meager living. She became very ill, but she did not stop her work. We should learn from this great lady: how to love, have faith for truth! We all should treasure and preserve our Hungarian Heritage for the future generation of all nations. The Family of the Eighth Tribe must carry on the work that our beloved Ida Nénénk started and carried on till death. In her memory we present two chapters from her book “Origin of the Hungarian Nation”1 “Is the Relationship of Sumerian and Hungarian proven?: and the “Conclusion”. — The Hadúr be with your soul Ida Nénénk. Joseph Szfircsik IS THE RELATIONSHIP OF SUMERIAN AND HUNGARIAN PROVEN? The mass of grammatical correspondences betbetween Sumerian and Hungarian, as seen by Oppert and Lenormant many years ago, plus the mass of lexical correspondences, established by recent research, show clearly to the unbiased student that there is a relationship. Strong emotional factors, taboos and prejudices, the well-known conservatism of the average scholarly authority militate against accepting the fact. This attitude has its legitimations. The scholar has to defend the confines of his territory against the uninitiated outsider, the irresponsible lunatic, the unconscientous lay seeker of profit and publicity. Alas, this conservative attitude has also been responsible for chronic hostility towards the really revolutionary ideas. The history of science abounds in shameful examples. Geniuses, who submitted to scholarly authority their well-documented discoveries, like Boucher de Perthes, discoverer of prehistoric man’s artifacts, were publicly ridiculed, even accused of fraud by the great of their day. This also happened to De Sautola, discoverer of the prehistoric cave-paintings. Grotefend, who solved the riddle of the cuneiform script, was unable to get his dissertation published. The Academy of Goettingen, where he presented his thesis, refused to print it. Forty years after the author’s death his rejected manuscripts were unearthed and hailed as the turning-point in Assyriology. The scholars of his day have been unwilling to listen and believe. The genious Mendel wrote and spoke in vain during his lifetime. Only after his death did the scholarly world awake to the fact that Mendel has established the long-sought laws of heredity. Schliemann, excavator of Troy, was badly treated and Semmelweiss, who discovered the cause of puerperal fever, was practically hounded to death by his angry colleagues. Semmelweiss long ago had proved his thesis: puerperal fever was caused by infection. He had tangible, absolute proof: in his desinfected hospital wards there was no mortality, while in the next wards the mothers kept dying in droves. Authorities shrugged their shoulders, they had chosen not to accept the facts, though many lives were at stake. Rejection by current scholarly authority is almost the usual ritual for new truths and certainly not proof against them. As always, there are, in a small number, really fearless scholars, who can perceive the truth and even support it. Their number grows, as time passes. The quality and courage of such scholars decides, how much time must pass before a proven truth becomes accepted truth. Meanwhile, let us consider the strongest arguments, against accepting Sumerian-Hungarian relationship. The first one is, that there are still many uncertainties in Sumerian, which make comparisons difficult. This is true. But what is difficult is not impossible. The fact that there were several dialects of Sumerian, does certainly complicate the problem, but this can be taken in stride. We do not have to wait until all uncertainties about these dialects and their phonetic history and correspondences are cleared up. This may take a long time. We should not wait until scholarship is agreed on readings of signs designated by totally different names. We are told now, that the sign AB should read ES ‘house’. — This may have been so at a certain period of the long Sumerian history, hut was it always so? I dare to suggest, that at one time the sign AB may have sounded somewhere as AB, also that both have their Hungarian correspondences. AB corresponds to the Hungarian root EP in épít ‘builds’, epulet ‘building’; while ES corresponds to HÁZ ‘house’. May we suggest, that if anywhere in time and space, in any of the Sumerian dialects or artifical ways of speaking, we discover a word, that corresponds obviously to a word either in the archaic or the modern literary Hungarian, or any of its different provincial dialects, we should add our finding to the body of Sumerian-Hungarian correspon
