Basque Hungarian
Word List

These lists contain 'SIMILARITIES' not alleged Basque-Hungarian cognates!
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These pages contain 'SIMILAR' words in Magyar (organised by Basque SIMILARITIES) which are a subset of the main Magyar Comparisons. NO claim of any relationship is made between Basque and Hungarian. No matter how many times I stress this, some people still make peculiar statements about these comparisons. Like talking to a brick wall.

Be aware that you might not agree with what I consider 'similar', so the whole exercise is not 'scientific' and as such is 'pseudo-science'. By including as many agglutinative languages as possible such as the taboo language isolates I lay myself open to such equally unscientific accusations as nationalism and/or pan-Hungarian fantasies! On the other hand, by using a restricted range of languages for comparisons, one might be accused of being highly selective. You can't win either way! But these are not the only obstacles in this emotionally charged area.

If we were dealing with the 'known' linguistic universe then word comparisons might elicit these words of wisdom :-

However the blanket claim that wordlist comparisons "are based on accidental, superficial resemblances" is not entirely justified. Historical linguists, in particular, insist "...that from a purely statistical point of view, even among any two unrelated languages, there will most likely be a number of similar-sounding words with similar meanings".

In an ideal linguistic world, "regular sound changes" should show which words are related and which are not. In this non-ideal world there seem to be annoying exceptions to those rules as well. Serious scrutiny is lacking in all quarters, it seems.

However, we aren't dealing with certainties in the case of the so-called language isolates nor in the case of the substantial Magyar lexicon of unknown origin.

Bickering aside, is it still unreasonable to suppose, without resorting to accusations of pan-Hungarian fantasies, that this material may have found its way into the Magyar lexicon over the unbelievable 5000 year-long trek [art:0] of the proto-Magyar nation, during which time many peoples joined them and whose variegated multi-cultural contribution eventually formed a vibrant and dynamic people and a new language? Included are words which are often declared as loans from Indo-European without regard to Caucasian, Middle Eastern and even Asian parallels.

Officially, Euskara (Basque) is considered an isolate, that is, linguists haven't been able to classify it.

The following crude map shows some, but not all of the Basque dialects.
For a more detailed map visit Dialectos Euskera.

(Based on the map in Gorka Aulestia's Basque-English Dictionary, University of Nevada Press, 1989)
Note :- this map does not show all the Basque dialects, just those depicted in the dictionary!

The only thing officially acknowledged to be common between Euskara (Basque) and Magyar (Hungarian) is that both are described as belonging to the 'agglutinative' languages, which means that grammatical relationships are expressed by prefixes or suffixes attached to the base (a noun or a verb).

Euskara is exclusively suffixing, apart from a few prefixes found in verbal morphology. Euskara is rich in word-forming suffixes, but word-forming prefixes are virtually absent, except in neologisms. In Euskara only 'noun phrases' may be inflected; nouns cannot be directly inflected. [lt] Magyar phrases cannot be inflected as in Euskara.

Having said that, some obvious similarities between Euskara and Magyar may be observed :-)

• Every sound or phonetic value found in Euskara can be found in Magyar, except for the dipthongs, see the page on the alphabets.

• Both Magyar and Euskara have no grammatical gender and no noun classes.

• In Euskara, a noun does not carry a plural marker when used with numbers. Similarly, after numbers or any quantifier (a lot, some, a few, how many, etc..) the Magyar noun always appears in the singular.

• Some Euskara suffixes whose function is to place their complement in some relation with space, and the Magyar 'counterpart'.
  

I repeat, in the respective Vocabularies of Euskara (Basque) and Magyar (Hungarian) there are words which are similar in form, meaning and sound. However, similar words with similar meanings do NOT prove that languages are related. It may point to a possible relationship; you would still need to examine the origin of each and every word in order to be certain that the similarity is not due to chance or to other factors such as being loan-words. Though, a bit difficult in the case of Euskara and Magyar when there is a large lexical stock of unknown origin.

You could, of course, examine such scholarly works for example, which prove that the Euskara word ARRAN (a bell worn by sheep and cattle) is derived from the word ARRAIN (fish) and therefore could not possibly be related to the similar Magyar word HARANG (bell).

Finally, the one dictionary that really needs to be consulted by every hopeful comparativist trying to work on Basque is Agud and Tovar's etymological dictionary. That one really does explain what is known about the origins of individual Basque words. [lt]

Now, you can look up Dr. Trask's work on Etymology Dictionary of Basque courtesy of the University of Sussex.

These lists contain 'SIMILARITIES' not alleged Basque-Hungarian cognates!
Do you understand?, Verstehen Sie?, Comprenez-vous?, ¿Entiende?, Capisce?

Last updated 27 October 2008