Etymological Dictionary of Hungarian
Prof. Dr. Alfréd Tóth
History
of Sumerian-Hungarian research
The standard work that gives an overview of the beginnings of Sumerian-Hungarian research is:
- Érdy, Miklós
The Sumerian, Ural-Altaic, Magyar Relationship: A History of Research
A sumír, ural-altaji, magyar rokonság története
Part I : The 19th Century
I. Rész: A 19. század
New York 1974
This work has the advantage, that it is bilingual (Hungarian and English), but the disadvantage, that Part II (concerning the 20th century) never appeared. A relatively short, but reliable “substitute” for Part II with a long bibliography is the following article
- Dombi, Charles (Károly)
The controversy on the origins and early history of the Hungarians
In: www.hunmgyar.org/tor/controve.htm
Here we learn the names of the decipherers of Sumerian who also connected it immediately to the “Turanian” languages (the former name of the “Ural-Altaic” family), especially Hungarian: Edward Hincks (1792-1866), François Lenormant (1837-1883), Jules Oppert (1825-1905) and Henry C. Rawlinson (1792-1866). The decipherment of the Cuneiform writing, in which the two basic languages of ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Akkadian, were written between ca. 3000 – 400 B.C., was started by Georg Friedrich Grotefend as early as in 1802, but only in 1850, Rawlinson finished it.
Therefore, before 1850, there is also no Sumerian-Hungarian research. But since (as we will see in chapter 3), there are many Akkadian loanwords in Sumerian, one should never forget the following work whose aim was to prove that Hungarian is related to the Semitic languages:
- Kiss, Bálint
Magyar régiségek (Hungarian Antiquities)
Pest 1839
Hence, it is true, that the Finno-Ugric theory, initiated by János Sajnovics (1770) and Sámuel Gyarmathi (1799) is older and competed with the still older theory of the Turkish origin of Hungarian, but it is mistaken to speak about the so-called “second Hungarian-Turkish war” (“ a második Magyar-Török háború”) after 1850. The connections established between the newly detected Sumerian and the Hungarian language that were most strongly propagated by two non-Hungarians, the French archeologist Lenormant and the German linguist Fritz Hommel (1854-1936), both university professors, spread quickly all over the world and found their entrance f. ex. also in some editions of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” between 1860 and 1880.
But things changed: Already during the so-called Bach-era 1848-1859, but at last since the Hungarian-Austrian “Ausgleich” in 1867, the
Habsburgs ordered Austrian and German professors for the chairs in linguistics and history to Budapest. One of them was the German Josef Budenz who
published on behalf of the Viennese court between 1873 and 1881 his “Magyar-ugor összehasonlító szótár” (“Comparative Hungarian-Ugric
Dictionary”), where the long forgotten hypothesis of Sajnovics and Gyarmathi was freshened up again. It is obvious, what the Habsburgs wanted to
show: The Hungarians, who were not more than slaves in the eyes of the Habsburgs, were not allowed to trace
their origins back to the Sumerians,
the first high culture that existed on earth. Rather, a connection with the Lapps, the Voguls and the Ostyaks, who lived in the 19th century still in
the stone-Age, was established. Political propaganda and banishment of the adherents of the Sumerian-Hungarian theory helped a lot. After the downfall
of the Austrian-Hungarian double-monarchy in 1918, the communists took over Hungary already in 1919 under the leadership of Béla Kún, then
extensively in 1945 and from 1956-1989, so that the communists directly continued the Anti-Sumerian-Hungarian campaign started by their enemies, the
Habsburgs, since in the end, both the Habsburgs and the communists agreed in their opinion that the Hungarians are subhuman creatures.
Nowadays, Finno-Ugristics is fully established, all Sumerian-Hungarian research is considered to be “unscientific”, representatives of this theory are blacklisted, publishing in Hungary is possible, but still difficult, because the communists are still sitting on key positions in all sectors of education (and elsewhere). Yet, there is hope, since the chairs of the FU representatives started to shake already a couple of years ago. The Tartu school of Uralistics has given up since a long time the concept of the Uralic tree-model and thus the genetic relationship of the Uralic languages:
- Künnap, Ago
Breakthrough in Present-Day Uralistics
Tartu 1998
Angela Marcantonio has proven, that there is no FU language family either:
- Marcantonio, Angela
The Uralic language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics
Oxford 2002
László Marácz, like the two fore-mentioned scholars a university professor, has shown both in Hungarian and in English, that in reality not the Sumerian-Hungarian, but the FU theory is unscientific:
- Marácz, László
A finnugor elmélet tarthatatlansága nyelvészeti szempontból (Original of the following English
translation)
In: www.kitalaltkozepkor.hu/maracz_finnugor.html - Marácz, László
The untenability of the Finno-Ugrian theory from a linguistic point of view
In: www.acronet.net/~magyar/english/1997-3/JRNL97B.htm
Marácz has shown, that the FU theory is circular and thus unscientific: One proves, what one already presupposes to have been proven. E.g. one
compares only languages of the Finno-Ugric family in order to “prove” that these languages belong to the Finno-Ugric family. Otherwise, no
Finno-Ugrist could refuse comparisons of Hungarian with Sumerian, Turkish, Japanese, etc. When the mathematician Bertrand Russell proved Gottlob Frege
in the end of the 19th century, that in his logic there is circularity – the so-called Russell-paradox of a set of sets that either contains or does
not contain itself -, then this result had devastating consequences for mathematics, since mathematics was based since Cantor on logic. Russell’s
paradox thus did not only split set theory in two different set theories, but changed the very fundament of mathematics (cf. e.g. the Bourbaki
School). But nothing like that happened until now in Finno-Ugristics. Even if circularity can be shown to a kindergarten child – for example with
Epimenides’ paradox: “I am lying” -, the vast majority of Finno-Ugrists do not show any understanding.
Marácz showed also a real
alternative to comparative historical reconstruction: the so-called “wordbushes” or “clusters”: One puts together words with identical or
similar form and content and orders them into bushes. This pure synchronic procedure is non-circular, because in an agglutinative language like
Hungarian there are no such phenomena like ablaut that involve previous diachronic knowledge in synchronic analysis. One should not forget, either,
that the method of historical reconstruction was adopted from the Indo-European languages and successfully applied to the Semitic languages - because
both of them have ablaut, but it has not proven to be valuable for any other language family. Moreover, in isolating languages like Chinese and the
almost whole range of Austronesian languages between Madagascar in the West and Easter Island in the East, one has no other possibility to decide, if
two or more words are genetically related or not, since in these languages we have to deal with monosyllabic roots (and not to speak about the total
absence of older texts in most of the latter languages). Here, too, Marácz’s method applies: If a certain word is a member of a word-bush, then all
the words, that belong to this bush are genetically related to one another, but if it stays alone, then it must be a borrowing. These bushes can be
taken easily from the huge Hungarian dictionary by Czuczor and Fogarasi:
- Czuczor, Gergely/Fogarasi, János
A magyar nyelv szótára (The Dicitonary of the Hungarian Language). 6 vols.
Pest 1862-74
Available since 2003 on CD at Arcanum Adatbázis Budapest
How Hungarian history looks like from the Sumerian-Hungarian point of view
The best and most exhaustive work on general Hungarian history (including linguistics, too) is:
- Götz, László
Keleten kél a nap (The Sun Rises in the East). 2 vols.
Budapest 1994
Original typewriter copy in 4 vols.: Altötting and Vienna 1981-84
An extremely well written and compact introduction into all aspects of Sumerian-Hungarian history (including linguistics, folklore and anthropology) gives:
- Bobula, Ida
Origin of the Hungarian Nation
Gainesville, FL 1966
This little book, that has only 68 pages (and for which one has to pay astronomical prices in antique book stores) is an abridged version of one of the three of the author’s more extensive PhD Dissertations:
- Bobula, Ida
Sumerian Affiliations
Washington, D.C. 1951
but unfortunately, this book has never been printed but only distributed in photocopies. (The Louis Szathmáry collection of the University of Chicago, who has the best collection of Sumerian-Hungarian studies throughout the US, has a copy, that can be borrowed.) But this book was revised and translated in Spanish:
- Bobula, Ida
Herencia de Sumeria
Mexico City 1967
and gives also many valuable maps about the early wanderings of the Sumerians into the Carpathian basin.
Amongst the other books of the same author, the following posthumous collection of minor writings is important:
- Bobula, Ida
A sumer-magyar rokonság (The Sumerian-Hungarian Relationship)
Buenos Aires 1982.
Of special value is the following truthfully monumental work:
- Padányi, Viktor
Dentumagyaria
Buenos Aires 1963, new impressions Veszprém 1989, Budapest 2000 and others
The best overview of Hungarian’s whole history from the beginnings to our time in a very broad scientific and political context gives
- Marácz, László
Hungarian Revival. Political Reflexions on Central Europe
Nieuwegein (Netherlands) 1996; The Hague (Netherlands) 2007, Mikes International
(http://www.federatio.org/mikes_bibl.html)
Besides the already cited linguistic works of the same author, the only reliable linguistic studies are:
- Csőke, Sándor
Szumir-magyar egyeztető szótár (Sumerian-Hungarian Comparative Dictionary)
Buenos Aires s.a. - Csőke, Sándor
A sumér ősnyelvről a magyar élőnyelvig (From the Sumerian Primeval Languages to the
Hungarian Living Language)
New York 1969 - Csőke, Sándor
Sumér-magyar összehasonlító nyelvtan (Sumerian-Hungarian Comparative Grammar)
Buenos Aires 1972 - Csőke, Sándor
Sumér-finn-mongol-török összehasonlító nyelvtan. 2 vols. (Sumerian-Finnic-Mongolian-
Turkish Comparative Grammar)
Buenos Aires 1974 - Csőke, Sándor
Három tanulmány (Three Studies)
1. Finnugor nyelvek nincsenek (There are no finno-Ugric languages)
2. As ószláv nyelv sumér-urálaltáji elemei (The Sumerian-Ural-Altaic elements of the primeval
Slavonic language)
3. A magyar nyelv állítólagos szláv jövevényszavai (The alleged Slavonic loanwords of the
Hungarian language)
Eberstein (Austria) 1977
Especially interesting for place and proper names are the two following works:
- Bobula, Ida
Kétezer magyar név sumir eredete (Ten thousand Hungarian names of Sumerian Origin)
Montreal 1970
- Novotny, Elemér
A sumer és a magyar alapszókincs egyezése (Comparison of the Sumerian and the Hungarian
basic vocabularies)
Budapest 1985
(A privately bound big collection of photocopied typewritten essays that exist only in 1 copy in
the US: in the University of Chicago Library under the calling number PH2074.N686 1985.)
To use only with care are all works by Jós Ferenc Badiny (also known as Francisco Badiny Jos and
Francisco Jos Badiny). The best and only one
written in a sort of English is:
- Badiny, Francisco Jos
The Sumerian Wonder. With the collaboration of M. Brady, M. von Haynal, G. Enderlin and Dr. E. Novotny
Buenos Aires 1974
Characteristic of all of the many books and articles by Badiny is, that he presupposes a continuity between Sumerian and Hungarian, i.e. according to him and his followers, Sumerian never died out, and today’s Hungarian is thus nothing but a late form of Sumerian.
In the following, we will present an outline of the main points of Sumerian-Hungarian history from the following article by Charles Dombi. (All quotations from Dombi, whose article is not paginated, are marked; what is not marked, is by me, especially the passage about the Transilvanian origin of the Sumerians: Dombi assumes that the Sumerians are autochthonous in Mesopotamia and wandered from there to Transilvania):
- Dombi, Charles (Károly)
Hungarian historical chronology
In: www.hunmagyar.org/tor/mythist.htm
The Hungarians trace their origin back to Nimrod, who lives in the Hungarian mythology as Mén-Marót (pseudo-etymologically influenced by Hung. mén “stallion”). He as his wife Eneth had two sons, Magor and Hunor, who became the forefathers of the Magyars (Hungarians) and the Huns. The standard works for Hungarian mythology are:
- Kandra, Kabos
Magyar mythologia (Hungarian mythology)
Eger 1897, new impression San Francisco 1978
- Ipoly, Arnold
Magyar mythologia. 2 vols. (Hungarian mythology)
Pest 1854, 2nd edition Budapest 1929
“Byzantine sources mention that the Magyars were also known as the Sabirs who originated from Northern Mesopotamia, which was referred to as Subir-ki by the Sumerians who also originated from this land. Numerous other ancient and medieval sources also refer to the Scythians, Huns, Avars and Magyars as identical people. Independently from the various political regimes which have ruled over Hungary and which have imposed the current official version of the origins and history of the Hungarians, modern scientific and scholarly research has confirmed the Sumerian-Scythian-Hun-Avar- Magyar ethnolinguistic relationship and continuity”.