Talk:History of the Hungarian language

Argument on Finnish-Permic origin and "loaning" of words
It is true that Hungarian Science of Academy is proposing that Hungarian language has lent numerous words from Turkic and Slav languages, before 1000BC. But can this be true?

Using common sense only, the main contradiction is connecting Hungarian to Finnish-Permic; but why? Because they are both agglutinating language? Why don't we state that WE DO NOT KNOW, we only THINK it could be connected. Even after centuries of investigation, we still don't know, we have to admit it. This article is stating that Hungarian is Finno-Ugric, punctum, that's not true.
 * That's the impression you might get if you've only look'd at Finnish and Hungarian (and indeed, if we had only these two available, the "Finno-Hungarian hypothesis" would probably be still considered dubious). But Hungarian is not primarily related to Finno-Permic, it belongs in the Ugric languages. Study Mansi and it should be rather more apparent that it is related to Hungarian. Also, once the Ugric languages and the Finno-Permic languages are considered as a whole (not forgetting the Samoyedic languages either), their relationship too becomes more obvious. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah

Some facts:

Finnish and Hungarian have some words common, but around 600 word roots, they are all related to tundra climate (like hal/kala=fish) and basic words (like kéz/kessi=hand). The number is very small. This is why Hungarians DO NOT understand Finnish AT ALL (and vice versa). The distance is huge. Even for Estonia the distance is too large (see map). Nothing in between. Too many words of unknown origin in Hungarian (even in "Magyar Értelmező Szótár"), interestingly all words relating to religion is of unknown origin (isten=god, böjt=fasting, húsvét=easter)
 * Most languages have many words of unknown origin. What's "too much"?

and a lot of words are from Turkish and Slavic (at least this is official statement from Science of Academy). These words are animals (like kecske=goat), so they are still basic words.

So this is official explanation (with sarcastic comments):

Finno-Ugric nomadic tribes from Uralic Mountains speak very few words, as they are like half apes.
 * Nope. There are plenty of Finno-Ugric words that just have been lost, or replaced by loanwords, in either Finnic or Hungarian or even both, but are still recoverable from all the other twenty-odd Finno-Ugric languages.
 * (A separate section on common Ugric words (not found elsewhere in Uralic) would probably benefit this article…) -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah

They are waiting for other nations to develop words for goat and they know nothing about agriculture.
 * Yes, they would have been hunter-gatherers. Goats are not nativ to southern Siberia.

They are living on both sides of Ural, which is very difficult to cross, but the language is quite united.
 * The "wide homeland" theory is rather discredited by now.

Some part of the tribe decide to travel 6000km to South-West. They do this knowing it is very difficult to travel (with women, kids, houses) and we need not to forget that there were no highways at that time and no refrigerators. People needed to reserve food for long winters. I would say population of some ten thousands of Hungarians (at least!), to travel 6000km, is barely nothing.
 * This trek would take several generations, and nobody really decided to go to Europe; it just happens so that one split-off ended up going southwest (while the eventual ancestors of Sámi went northwest, the ancestors of Samoyeds northeast, etc.) And once they were in the steppes, they got all nomadic and could start roaming around a bit more effectivly. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah

They travel for long and then they arrive to Carpathian basin, where they immediately start Magyarization of all Slavs there (although there are no archeological sites showing any Slav tribe, its only taken from Chronicles), they do it very quickly, in less than 100 years everybody speaks Hungarian there. They should do this very agressively, and kill a lot of people, though no archeological sites could be found for mass murder. They still are half apes, as the language is still poor (yet the Hungarian craftmanship is very developed - what a paradox!). So the Hungarians start to migrate a lot of words from Slav, but they still need to wait till 13-14 century for the Ottomans to start to attack Hungary and hand over words so they can call the goat now "kecske", at last!
 * Like how the English had no word for "salmon" before the French invaded? ;)
 * Turkic influence would have begun much erlier than Slavic influence, anyway, back in the steppes.

See? If you look it this way, this is not corresponding to common sense!
 * Indeed not. They call this kind of a thing a straw man argument.

Here is a recommended part to include in this article:

Hungarian is agglutinating like Scythian, Hun language
 * And like a zillion other languages all over the world.

of which is probable relating to Hungarian (but we don't know!)
 * Not even a "probable" relationship has been demonstrated.

The root words of Hungarian is very rich, some linguists say its roots are 60,000 root words (like "szer" where it is used in "szeret"=love and "szerződés"=contract, yes they have a lot in common as ancient contracts were made on love=trust, not on interest).
 * , but would be an interesting addition (perhaps for the main Hungarian language article however).

Relation with Finno-Ugric is still feasible, as Scythian and Finno-Ugric had a "lingua franca", as the two types of people were bordering each other. So the 600 words were used to understand each other on basic level (most probably!). During this period, the grammar was also shared (probably).
 * If you're talking of the Ural-Altaic theory, that's currently quite a minority view.

As Hungarian had sophisticated craftmanship, even before the "ingressus"(=entering, incoming) to Carpathian Basin, it is highly questionable that the "ancient" Hungarian language was a primitive one.


 * You're probably confusing Ancient Hungarian and Proto-Uralic. There would be a few millennia between those stages of the language development…
 * As an aside, vocabulary can be "primitive", but no sect, tribe, or people of Homo sapiens is known to speak or have spoken a "primitive language". -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah

Words taken from Slavic and Turkish could not happen (taken only from common sense, pls note there is no evidence!). In fact, we should start talking about a process of reverse order: Slavic languge taking words from Hungarian.It is well known that Romanian (or Wallachian) language took a lot of words like "city" and even "Erdély"(Ardeul)=Transylvania, so I am pointing that it is possible from Slavic, too. An example could be "král"="király"=king, which is supposed to come from Charlemagne, but maybe, "király" is referring to "kerül"=to border something? I could cite more examples.
 * If a theory of this sort has been publish'd anywhere, then yes, it would make a good addition to the article. Not otherwise, however (see WP:NOR.) -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah

Where are all the loads of words with unknown origin come from (like words of religion)? Why not from Hungary?? If I was offending, pls note it was not my intension. My intension was not to put a "theory" as it is a "fact", it is dangerous. Please don't let linguists play the role of historians, and do not let them be driven by politics. Abdulka (talk) 22:46, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Origin of the Magyar [Hungarian]Language How old is the hungarian language?

Many Philologists are wondering about the origin of the Magyar (Hungarian) Language. Hungary is located in the middle of Central Europe, yet her language is neither Germanic, nor Slavic, and not related even to Latin.

The English Philologist Sir John Bowring (1792 - 1872) spoke many languages, and Hungarian was one of them. He even had translated many Hungarian poems into English and published a collection of essays about language. In ist foreword he wrote following:

"The Hungarian language goes far back. It developed in a very peculiar manner, and its structure reaches back to times when most of the spoken European languages did not even exist. It is a language in which there is a logic and mathematics with the adaptability and malleability of strength and chords. The Englishman should be proud that his laguage indicated an epic of human history. Ohne can show forth its origin, and alien layers can be distinguished in it, which gathered together during the contacts whith different nations.

Whereas the Hungarian language is like a rubble stone, consisting of only on piece on which the storm of time left no scrach. It is not a calendar that adjust to the changes of the ages. It needs no one, it does not borrow and does not give or take from anyone. This language is the oldest and most glorius monument of national sovereignty and mental independence.

What scholars could not solve, they ignore. In philology it is the same as in archeology. The floors of the old Egyptian temples, which were made out of a single rock cannot be explained. No one knows where they came from, from which mountain the wondrous mass was taken, or how they were transported and lifted in place in the temples.

The genuineness of the Hungarian language is much mor wondrous than that. He who solves it shall be analyzing the divine secret: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. "

Sir John Bowring


 * His opinion is pretty irrelevant, even if he had been a linguist, considering that he lived prior to the development of historical linguistics into a rigorous science. Similarly, you cannot use Darwin as an authority for modern biology, because he knew nothing of genes.
 * As for Scythian, it was a typical inflecting and not at all agglutinative language, as it was an ancient Iranian language closely related to Avestan and Old Persian and Sanskrit as well, not a Turkic language. Turkic peoples have mixed with Iranian-speaking peoples such as the Scythians in Central Asia and absorbed them, though, and taken over much of their equestrian culture. That's why archaeologically and genetically, there may appear to be continuity between ancient Iranian and medieval Turkic-dominated Central Asia despite the change of language. That's quite similar to the change in the Pannonian basin from Indo-European Slavic to Uralic Hungarian, and the reason why archaeological and genetic arguments can never prove or disprove linguistic theories. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:54, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Vandalism on this page... somewhere
There's vandalism on this page. It's been here for months. Let's see if you idiots can find it! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.82.26.22 (talk) 23:09, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Recent expansion.
It should be mentioned that 200 years ago only 29% of the population on the territory of modern Hungary spoke Hungarian. СЛУЖБА (talk) 00:02, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
 * What languages did the remaining 71% speak, then? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:37, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The percentage of speakers in a once-existed multiethnic kingdom is irrelevant from the point of a language history. Also I find such estimates dubious. -- Cserlajos  (talk) (contribs) 16:36, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Article BADLY needs work in the area of referencing, and possible OR
I tagged this article for possible inclusion of Original Research, and also the need for in-line citations. Phrases such as "Maybe a memoir ..." and many others do not sound very encyclopedic. When writing material, you are required to add a reference from which you got the information from. Just making a list of references is not good enough. There are less than a dozen citations for a lengthy article which is supposedly grounded in documented history. Please clean it up. It's just slightly beyond start-class as it stands. HammerFilmFan (talk) 17:44, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Hey, I'm the original author of this article. It was written like 8, or 9 years ago (the whole site started in 2005 I guess), and Wikipedia's standards of quality were much lower in those days. However, I had no intent to publish OR; every statement is based on the referenced works. Unfortunately I don't remember page numbers after a decade of time. Good thing you came and tagged the article. Well, if I can still find the books, maybe I'll do the citation sometime soon.   -- Cserlajos  (talk)  (contribs) 16:51, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

IPA stuff in Old Hungarian part
What are those based on, and why are they preferred to the original text? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.139.93.230 (talk) 18:05, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

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14th century source for old Hungarian numbers
I just ran across an interesting old source listing Old Hungarian numbers.

Newberry Library VAULT Case MS 54.1, folio 57v

MS 54.1 is a collection of medieval musical treatises. One of the treatises additionally lists the alphabets and numerals for a number of languages, including Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and... on a later page: Hungarian.

"Iggi, kettu, harum, niggi, ut, hot, hette, nolch, kilenz, tyz, tyzeneggi, hohzz, honzniggi, honziketu, harmiggi, negevey, utven, hetven, khotvan, noltsalz, kilensaz, saaz" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.254.153.71 (talk) 08:46, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

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Recent edits
Brutal Russian, could you tell me where this diacritics come from:

- Hungarī - sagíttis - Hungarórum - líbera - Dómine?(KIENGIR (talk) 21:00, 8 December 2020 (UTC))
 * Hungarī comes from the fact that the Latin ending in question is -ī if one choses to use macrons to display vowel length: Wiktionary, parallel example word. I chose to use the macrons, which are not strictly necessary and can easily be removed, but cannot be wrong either. The diacritics in the song are marking the accented syllables (the song is a trochaic tetrameter - search for "latin") to help the reader read the song as intended. Do you think using the two types of diacritics is confusing? Brutal Russian (talk) 21:58, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes for an average reader it is not necessarily clear, may think this would be the original quote of the Latin text.(KIENGIR (talk) 23:48, 8 December 2020 (UTC))
 * The original Latin text from the manuscript looks like this, and Latin text is never given in this form on wikipedia but is adapted to modern scripts and spelling conventions. Readers don't normally encounter direct transcriptions of manuscripts on wikipedia, and and as such aren't explained that what they're reading is never what is actually written. Two sets of diacritics is what I can imagine being confusing, but not simple accent marks in a Latin song excerpt - but of course it's no problem to add a clarifying note. Brutal Russian (talk) 03:24, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I think they should be left as they are now, the average standard used by most of the Latin texts people read.(KIENGIR (talk) 16:14, 9 December 2020 (UTC))
 * I think the accents need to be marked as in most Latin texts intended for sung performance (such as found in music scores). This article is not for people who normally read Latin, and they can't be expected to know the correct accentuation, nor to recognise the metre - even professional singers need the accent marks. If a change in orthography helps the reader, then that change is justified. "Most text don't want to help the reader" is not a valid justification for not helping the reader. Note that there's no standard of Latin orthography, and there never was. —Now, unless you reverted my edit three times because you wanted to discuss spelling with me, I'd like you to either discuss factual reasons for the reverts - if there are none, please undo your reverts. Brutal Russian (talk) 15:50, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Just because it was a prayer and may be sunged, it does not necessarily mean accents are needed, most of the Latin texts are presented with no accents, they are as well not necessary here. I already explained my reasons, and the reverts you already undid.(KIENGIR (talk) 02:07, 11 December 2020 (UTC))