Similar 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.

There is often a deliberate confusion between racial and linguistic kinship.

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. Interestingly, such racist 'beliefs' did not arise in the case of equally, distant, linguistic relatives such as English and Hindi, for example.

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. And from [msz] "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'. The Finno-Ugric people somehow turned into Mongols! Shades of Masaryk [als]

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

It is easy to get the impression that borrowing is mainly from IE to Magyar. However, the direction of borrowing was sometimes both ways. For example, the Magyar word szabad 'free, allowed' is officially seen as a loan from Slavic, while its derivative szabadság 'freedom' was borrowed by Slovak (sabačák), Ukranian, and Rumanian (săbăceag). See [lr: vol 3, p. 29] for details.

Magyar and Slovak have been in close contact for over 1000 years. Words were also borrowed by both Magyar and Slovak from Latin, Italian, French, German, Semitic, Turkic and Slavic languages over that long period. According to [source p. 584] Slovak borrowed many German words and has still retained some 4000 words from German. Loans from Magyar have entered Slovak since the 12th. century but not with the same intensity as those from German. On the other hand, Magyar has some 2000 words of Latin origin such as dézsma 'tithe' according to [Helimski] which is found in Slovak as dežma - also a loan from Latin according to [source p. 584]. Such 'coincidences' also happened with 'mirror', derived from the original meaning of being 'round' found in Magyar and in the Slavic languages, where both words are loans from Turkic (see entry under zrkadlo 'mirror').

Slavic loans in Magyar today number around 600 words, and came into Magyar over different periods from Old Russian, Southern Slavic (Bosnian, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian etc.) and Western Slavic (Slovak, Czech, Polish, etc.) dialects according to [gp98: p.231 and art:0, p.96]. Let us not forget Eastern (Ukranian, Belarussian, etc.).

For the many Magyar words found in Slovak, perhaps you might be lucky enough to get your hands on this three volume reference :-

The reader hopefully realises that the adoption of a word signifying an object does not necessarily mean that the object was previously unknown to speakers of the recipient language, nor does it prove that the borrowing language or the speakers of that language are or were 'primitive'. For example in the case of Magyar, "...words for some human body parts were borrowed from Turkic languages, but that does not mean that originally the Magyar (Hungarians), before their contact with Turkic people, had no words of their own for 'knee', 'navel' and 'stomach'." [art:0 p.109]

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.

Such intensive borrowing of words is not peculiar to Hungarian but is found in many languages such as English, Slovak, Albanian and so on. Loanwords do not necessarily play a prime role in a given language. According to [ua97: p.307], loanwords in Hungarian are held to constitute about 45% of bases in the language and 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%)!

"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]

The tables on the right list 'similar' words in Slavic and Hungarian	BA-BE BI-CA CA- CO
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