Common Words in Slavic and Hungarian

These lists contain 'SIMILARITIES' not alleged Slav-Hungarian cognates!
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These pages contain 'similar' words in Magyar (organised by Slavic similarities) and as many language families as possible such as Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Austro-Asiatic, Basque, Caucasian, Dravidian, Etruscan, Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Sumerian etc., and NO claim of any relationship is made between any of them. No matter how many times I stress this, some people still make dogmatic statements about these comparisons. WATCH MY LIPS: nowhere do I claim that Magyar (Hungarian) is related to Etruscan, Sumerian, or Martian or whatever. I wouldn't dare to make such claims which are, after all, the sole prerogatives of Indo-European.

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 :-

"In the respective vocabularies of any two languages there are often 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 borrowings or native compounding."

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".

The basic premise of this apparently authoritative and oft repeated statement is sound, but it is not based on any hard evidence. With thousands of languages and thousands of words per language, coupled with a finite number of sounds, it does seem reasonable to expect some 'similarities' - whatever they are. Linguists haven't done the sums, so does this "appeal to authority" prove anything?

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.

A large problem with language isolates is that their prehistory cannot be reconstructed by means of the comparative method, and little is known of their origins. That substantial Magyar lexicon, which linguists haven't been able to tie to every other language as loans, is obviously also a problem.

Not being able to analyse the sound change rules across the thousands of languages of the past and of the present is a serious handicap. Not being able to include the history of every word (even if we knew it with any certainty) in every language both of the past and of the present is obviously a bummer. Not bothering to compare the 'grammatical similarities' of thousands of languages does not bode well, perhaps it's just too hard.

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] 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.

The Slavic languages (Slovak, Slovene, Serb, Croat, Russian etc.) are officially assigned to the Indo-European (IE) family of languages.

Magyar (Hungarian) is classed as belonging to the Uralic/Finno-Ugric/Ob-Ugric language group and it is not a Slavic language. Officially, the (linguistic) relatives of the Magyar language are to be found amongst the Uralic/Finno-Ugric/Ob-Ugric languages which include Khanty, Mansi, Ostyak and Vogul. Magyar is a very distant (linguistic) cousin of Finnish, Estonian and so on. Finnish and Magyar are supposedly separated by 4000 years and share no more than a few recognisably similar words.

It was not that long ago that the dogmatists insisted that the Magyar were related to the racially disparate Uralic Finno-Ugric peoples, based entirely on very narrow linguistic similarities alone. The theory has its roots in the work of Joannis Sajnovics published back in 1770 when linguistics had not as yet evolved into the 'exact' science it is today.

The winds appear to have changed. We can now read such comments from [jla] as "What has been falsified is probably the antiquated idea of Finno-Ugrian cultural or even racial relationship." Doesn't seem to be too sure, though. While [msz] says that "The linguistic affinity which ties the Hungarians to the Ugric language family does not mean ethnic relationship or common origin."

That enlightened view was not always the norm even among professionals. As recently as 1982 [sh] defined 'Magyar' as 'One of the Mongoloid Race (entering Europe in 884), dominant in Hungary'. Shades of Masaryk [as]

Map of the Uralic languages to which Magyar belongs, follows p. 459 in reference [ma].

Some linguists believe that the Uralic and IE languages have had previous contact in the remote past in which borrowing is seen as flowing mainly from IE to Uralic. In the recent past, the direction of borrowing is also assumed to be mainly from Slavic to Hungarian as the two have been officially in close contact since the Magyar tribes settled in the Carpathian Basin in 896 A.D. Very Indo-European-centric.

The negative view in vogue is that the 'primitive nomadic' Magyar/Hungarians had to borrow thousands of words from "...more civilised peoples before they could form their kingdom and adopt a sedentary lifestyle". Undeniably, borrowing did occur, but so what?

Look at how much was borrowed by English where approximately 65% or more of the lexicon is of foreign (non-Germanic) origin. Swedish also has more than 65% foreign (mostly Low German) vocabulary. While Albanian apparently draws 90% of its vocabulary from foreign sources such as Greek, Latin and Slavic. [dw: p.59] Of course, such statistics can be extremely misleading.

It is not my intent to list, in these webpages, many obvious borrowings in Magyar unless there are parallels to be found in unlikely places. However it is difficult to find sensible or reliable data about the constituent makeup of modern Magyar/Hungarian.

The following table shows some of the many 'influences' on Hungarian, which nevertheless still uses about 80% of native elements of the written and spoken language!

CONTACT	PERIOD
Iranian	Ancient Iranian/Finno-Ugrian contacts lasted from 4000BC to 800BC
	only about 6 words entered from Old Iranian period 8-2 centuries BC
	about 45 words from Middle Iranian 2nd century BC to 7/9th. centuries AD
	Iranian migration to Hungary in 13th. Century
Caucasian	Sometime during that 5000 year long migration period of the proto-Hungarians.
Turkic	pre-Settlement < 10th Century AD 300 words Chuvash-type Turkic animal husbandry, agriculture, accomodation, social life
	11-13th. Century AD Kipchak-type Turkic Due to Pecheneg and Cuman immigration into Hungary
	16-17th. Century AD Ottoman Turkish loans most of which are now obsolete with about 30 words remaining. Some of these may have also come into Hungarian from southern Slav languages.
	For an overview of Hungarian linguistic history and Turkish loans in the first half of the Middle Hungarian period check out this page.
Greek	Small number of loans came into Hungarian from contacts with Byzantium before Settlement in the Carpathian Basin right up to the 12th. Century AD
Slavic	Slavic Loans today number around 600 words. These came into Hungarian over different periods from Old Russian, Southern and Western Slav dialects.
German	Loans resulting mainly from immigrants to Hungary 12-13th. Century AD onwards
German	Intensified under Austrian Hapsburg Germanisation policy from the 17th. Century AD. on
Romance Languages	2000 words borrowed from Latin - religious, legal and scientific terminology, animal and plant names, names of months.
	Dynastic and cultural contacts resulted in loans from French during the 12-13th. centuries. Later loans came from French via German in the 18-19th. centuries.
	Loans from Italian came from early medieval political contacts.
	Rumanian influence is probably more evident in Transylvania than in Hungary proper.

But that hope is in vain. The popularity of these suspect figures sees them copied mindlessly and uncritically on Wikipedia, Answers.com, www.obnova.sk and on more than 50 websites as of 30th. August 2008. To be fair, Wikipedia, Answers.com do quote the following as the original source of these figures :-

That apparently academic source has the same figures, and they also add up to 101%! Remarkable. Perhaps that extra 1% is from some extra-terrestial language such as Martian. If loanwords 'prove' the lowly status of a language then Hungarian wouldn't be number one in the list. Do lots of loanwords mean that there is little worth in a language? Not at all. But in the case of Hungarian, these unreliable figures are often used by the ignorant, labouring under such a misconception.Note well, that the original source of these figures does warn the reader (in Hungarian) that such a misleading impression is due entirely to the statistical viewpoint :-

With all those alleged foreign loanwords in Hungarian, that quote should be almost understandable to a non-Hungarian. No, you say? A skeptic might just wonder how it is that with 70% of foreign loanwords in Hungarian, most people still find Hungarian too difficult to learn and to understand. Of course, you could argue that loanwords are often reconfigured phonologically as far as is practicable to match the rules of the borrowing language, presumably making it difficult to recognise such words by foreigners. However, assimilation of borrowed words is most efficient where the donor and borrower share phonological and structural similarities such as in the Uralic/Altaic/Yukaghir context [am], and therefore less so in the case of unrelated languages such as Slavic and Hungarian. That is, if Hungarian consisted of 40% Slovak loans or there were thousands of Slavic words in Hungarian in some other universe then these vastly different languages would, except for grammatical constructs, be mutually intelligible. But they are not.

Perhaps that is why the warning is always ignored when these figures are taken out of context and eagerly used to 'prove' how primitive Magyar must be because of all those loans. Maybe that is why the richness of native Magyar highlighted by the source is also ignored by the reader only interested in misleading statistics. Of course, such a reader is not interested in, nor even aware of the depth and complexity of the Magyar language which is reflected in the fact that in theory, the Magyar verb can have 5070 different forms! Check out Dr. Tamás Turányi 's effort here!

However, all is not lost. There is an academic article (see ref. [az] below in Hungarian) by the Slavic specialist Dr. András Zoltán of the Eötvös Loránd University which gives a hopefully more reliable set of percentages of loans in Hungarian. Ferenc Papp used a Hungarian root word dictionary by Géza Bárczi and found the following percentages using statistical analysis :-

Notice that these figures add up to only 29.48%, so what about the other 70.52%? Although, the earlier suspect figures in source seem to be inflated by a factor of 2, let us be generous and use its 8.5% of loanwords from Latin, Greek, Rumanian, and 1% of other loans of known origin, then we are still left with about 60% of Hungarian of native/unknown origin which falls into the linguistic, 'too-hard' basket. That figure tallies well with the following reference.

According to [ua: p.307] below, loanwords in Hungarian are held to constitute about 45% of bases in the language. Although the lexical percentage of native words in Hungarian is 55%, their use accounts for 88.4% of all words used (the percentage of loanwords used being just 11.6%)! Some sense at last.

People find Hungarian difficult because Hungarians use loanwords only 11.6% of the time. A far cry from the misleading figures we started with. Doh!

"It is disquieting, though, that a proportionally significant part of the Hungarian lexical stock is of unknown etymology. There are various theories to explain this. These words – mostly abstract verbs and nouns – could still be of Finno-Ugrian origin, except that they survive in no other Finno-Ugrian languages, or may have been distorted even beyond the recognition of trained linguists. Since there were a great number of languages spoken on the steppes about which we have no knowledge at all – in a few cases only their names are known – these mysterious loanwords could have come from any of these languages; there are words even in English which successfully defy all attempts to find their etymology, in spite of the fact that the etymology of English words has never been a tiresome subject..." [Czigány, Chap. 1.1]

'Could be, might be' is not science, but it seems OK for some to indulge in such speculation.

What is really disquieting is that we are still left to ponder how the 10% Finno-Ugric component (or even that earlier, inflated 21%) ultimately defines Hungarian linguistic relationships without regard for that substantial native Hungarian lexicon of 'unknown' origin which is frustratingly used 88.4% of the time?!

Of course, stereotypical views about the Magyar imply that other societies cannot be as complex and evolved as own's own. In fact, every society is simply different and no less intricate. The Magyar had highly evolved skills in the crafts, in animal husbandry, in weapon making, horsemanship and a complex societal structure comparable to any. It took organisation and skill to move the entire nation from the old homeland of Etelköz into the Carpathian Basin without suffering a complete disaster through presumably hostile (Slavic and Khazar) territories. If they were well settled in the Crimean homeland of Etelköz, and were vassals (or perhaps allies) of the Khazar Empire, then how can they still be described as 'primitive nomadic' tribes?

On the more positive side, there are claims that Magyar Runic writing (Rovás) existed long before the Magyar took up Christianity. [source] There are fantastic claims it has its origins in Sumerian. Others claim it derives from Indo-European runes. Some claim it derives from Turkic type runes. With all the raucous clamour, it seems the Hungarians are not allowed to claim anything as their own.

If the antiquity of this Magyar writing and alphabet is true, then labelling the Magyar as nothing more than an uncivilized, nomadic nation is completely unjustified. However, the proof of such claims is not easily forthcoming because a great deal of Magyar pagan culture was destroyed during the enforced conversion to Christianity around 1000 A.D.

Certainly, words to do with Christian ecclesiastical and Western political diplomacy were borrowed. However, in many other instances of alleged borrowing from Slavic to Hungarian there is often a parallel to be found in Altaic, Asian and Eastern languages such as IE (Iranian, Armenian), and the Semitic languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic), which is ignored, or not known. Such words are never mentioned even in passing conversation, considering that it is claimed that in the 9th. century "...a new threat to civilisation, posed by marauding Magyar tribes, appeared from the east". From the East? From Asia?

Notice how this style of phrasing carries with it, its own chauvenist mental baggage concerning the so-called civilised West and the alleged barbarian East. Let us remember that the Dark Ages in Europe lasted from around 400-1500 AD during which life was very hard and not many could read nor write. In this period the rest of the world had left Europe far behind in the sciences which were all but forgotten in the West that was mainly obsessed with religion. Let us not kid ourselves concerning the quality of life in the Christian West and the Muslim East in this period.

Life was hard everywhere and not just in Europe. It was no picnic during Islam's much idealised Golden Age either. Nevertheless, it was fortunate for Europe, that Muslims in the Middle East, North Africa and Spain kept alive and held in trust the great works of the ancient Greeks and even improved upon them until the great European Renaissance in the 15th. Century. This rebirth marked the beginning of European "civilisation" and modern history.

With this in mind, one might ask whether the Magyar who had been in contact with, and who had been joined by, Middle Eastern, Caucasian, and Turkic tribes also introduced new Eastern ideas to the backwaters of Europe? If the Magyar allegedly came from the East why did they need to borrow words which probably originated there anyway and not in the West? The reality is undoubtedly much more different than any of the more prejudiced 'theories' littering the web concerning the Magyar and their language.

Take for example, the Hungarian word - kormány 'steering-wheel; handelbar; government, cabinet' which is seen as a loan from Slavic [Old Church Slavic kr?ma `stern, helm'; Russian korma/ `stern'; Serbo-Croatian kr/ma `stern, helm'; Slovene kr/ma `stern'] without regard to Eastern parallels such as Classical Armenian hraman 'order'; hramanatu 'ordering, commanding; (subst.) commander' and Persian qahraman 'a valiant warrior', 'an invincible hero'; 'name of a celebrated fabulous hero of Persia'; 'power, authority'; 'an administrator, curator, prefect'.

Example:- Hungarian kalács 'cake' which is linked to Slavic (Serbo-Croatian kolac 'cake, pastry, tart'; Slovak kolác 'cake'). It also has Iranian parallels with Persian gulaj 'a Persian cake of flour, honey, and sesame-oil; a delicate confectionary made of starch and eggs'; gulan 'a kind of cake fried in butter and eaten with syrup'; gulicha 'sob; the hiccough; the sun or moon's disc; a small round cake'; kulcha (for kulicha), 'a small disc-shaped loaf, a cake of bread; a kind of sweetmeat; a circular piece of wood which rests on a tent-pole near its upper extremity'; kulicha 'the disc or body of the sun or moon; a small buttered loaf; a splendid garment closely sewed; stitched, quilted'; kulij 'bread which, having fallen from the side of the oven (the ovens in Asia are often mere holes in the ground), has been baked in the ashes; a large cake'.

Example:- Hungarian tak-ács 'weaver' is seen as a loan from Slavic (Serbo-Croatian tkac, tkalac 'weaver'; tkati 'to weave'; Russian tkat' 'weave'; Slovak tkat 'weave'; tkác 'weaver';Chech tkat 'weave'; tkadlec 'weaver') but it has parallels in Sino-Tibetan *t@>k 'weave'; Altaic *tok`V ( ~ -k-) 'to plait, weave'; and yes, even (IE) Iranian/Persian dokhtan 'to sew; etc.'.

There are many such parallels in these pages which don't seem to rate a mention in all the reams of material I have read so far. Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough. I'm sure there is a very scientific and logical explanation connected with those exact sound change rules that determine which words are related and which are not. That's assuming we have enough information to know how things were, not how we imagine them to be with such limited data.

[az] Zoltán András Dr., lecturer at the Eötvös Loránd University

The tables on the right list common words in Slavic and Hungarian	BA-BE BI-CA CA- CO
	CO-DŽ DŽ-GO GO-IS
	IS-KI KI-LE LI-NA
	NA-OR OS-PO PO-SH
	SI-TI TK-VI VL-ZU

The Structure and Development of the Finnish Language