History of the Hungarian language

The history of the Hungarian language begins with the Uralic era, in the Neolithic age, when the linguistic ancestors of all Uralic languages coexisted in the area of the Ural Mountains.[1]

Many Hungarian words, particularly among the language's most basic vocabulary (cf. Swadesh list) are traced back to common Uralic origin: words of a corresponding shape occur in other Uralic languages as well, and linguists have not been able to classify them as loanwords. Those that are not present in the Samoyedic languages are commonly also described as being of Finno-Ugric origin, but the existence of a definite distinction between "Uralic" and "Finno-Ugric" is disputed. (See Uralic languages#Traditional classification.)

As the Uralic unity disintegrated between the 4th and the 2nd millennium BC, the speakers of Samoyedic languages moved eastwards, while others, such as the Finnic and Hungarian speakers, moved westward. Hungarian and the Ob-Ugric languages show several similarities and are known as the Ugric group, which is commonly (but not universally) considered a proper sub-branch of Uralic: that is, the Hungarian and Ob-Ugric languages would descend from a common Proto-Ugric language. The speakers of Ugric languages were still living close together approximately until 1000 BC, when the ancestors of Hungarians separated for good from the Ob-Ugrians.

Around 1000 BC, the linguistic ancestors of the Hungarians had moved southwest from their previous territories, the region west of the Ural Mountains, the eastern frontier of Europe; hence the Hungarian language separated from its closest relatives, the Ob-Ugric languages, which further divided into the Mansi language and the Khanty language. (This split may have occurred only later, and their speakers were influenced by an Asian, possibly Western-Siberian tribe, as the Mansis and Khantys moved northeast.) Proto-Hungarian likely had contacts with the Permic languages at this time, as indicated by a nontrivial number of shared vocabulary and sound developments (which are not found in the other Uralic languages).

The Hungarians gradually changed their way of living from settled hunting to nomadic cattle-raising. Their most important animals included sheep and cattle. There are no written resources on the era, thus little is known about it.

After a long journey, the Hungarians had settled the coastal region of the northeastern Black Sea (Levédia). With the fall of Attila's empire, the Huns had receded to this area, and established their new state, which also ruled over the Hungarians. A possible memoir of this is a Hungarian myth of Hunor and Magor. According to the legend they were the twin sons of King Nimrod and the ancestors of the Huns and the Magyars (Hungarians) respectively.[5]

After the Hunnish rule ended, the Hungarians came into contact with the Göktürks and were significantly influenced by them. The Göktürk Turk Empire flourished in the 6th century. This is probably the time when the Hungarians started writing, using the Old Hungarian script (rovásírás). Later, the Hungarians also came into contact with the Khazars and moved westward to Etelköz, where the Magyars lived as an independent nation.

In 895–896, under the rulership of Prince Árpád, they crossed the Carpathian Mountains, and settled the Carpathian Basin, the area of present-day Hungary. They also began to establish their own state here, namely the Principality of Hungary. They launched a number of plundering raids both westward into former Francia and southward into the Byzantine Empire.

A saying or prayer mentioning the exonym "Hungarians" (Hungari) was common in the 10th century, at the time of intense raiding of various parts of Europe by these tribes. It's attested in the Song of the Watchmen of Modena in 924 AD:

    A sagittis Hungarorum libera nos Domine!
    ‘From the arrows of the Hungarians, O Lord deliver us!’

The Hungarians call themselves Magyar (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈmɒɟɒr]). The name Magyar once was the name of a Hungarian tribe, Megyer(i). It likely means "talking man". The first syllable may be cognate to the ethnonym Mansi, which in the Mansi language (манси mańśi) means simply 'man, Mansi'. The (Ob-)Ugric word has been proposed to be an old Indo-Iranian loan (cf. Sanskrit mānuṣa, Avestan manuš "man, male"). The external name 'Hungary' (Hungaria) was recorded in the 13th century by Anonymous in the Gesta Hungarorum ("The Deeds of the Hungarians)", the first extant Hungarian chronicle, as originating in the 9th century from the castle Ung (Hung) now in Slovakia.[6]

    ...et uocatus est Arpad Dux Hunguarie, et ab Hungu omnes sui milites uocati sunt Hunguari... 
    ‘...and he was called Árpád Duke of Hungary, and from Ung all his warriors were called Hungarians...’[7]

There are some really early loanwords in Hungarian, which enriched the language's vocabulary, estimated to 25,000 words at the time. Here are some examples:

In the era of the Turkic influences, Hungarians developed especially culturally: the borrowed vocabulary consists of terms referring to sophisticated dressing, and the words of a learned upper class society. The phrases of basic literacy are also of Turkic origin. A number of words related to agriculture and viticulture have the same background.

The phonetic system of Hungarian went through large changes in the Old Hungarian period. The most important change was the disappearance of the original Uralic word-ending vowels, which eroded in many descendant languages (among others Finnish, however, largely preserves these sounds; see the table on the right). Even so, declined forms of the nouns and inflected verbs of Uralic origin still show traces of the lost sounds: ló (horse)—lovas (rider); kő (stone)—köves (stony). This was the process of phonetic reduction. The earliest written records of Hungarian from the 9th century still show some retained word-final vowels, e.g. in hodu 'army' > modern had.

Possibly there had been also present a velar ï sound as well, later replaced by a palatal i. Today, since Hungarian has vowel harmony, some words containing the palatal sound i pick up the back suffix when conjugated or declined—instead of the front suffix, which is usual for i's of other origin. Some examples: nyíl (arrow) → nyilat (accusative; instead of *nyilet); inni ([v inf], to drink) → ivás (drinking [n], instead of *ivés).

The transition from diphthongs to simple vowels had already begun in the Proto-Hungarian period.

Plosives between vowels developed to spirants, and those after nasal stops became voiced:

The language developed its interesting features, the transitive and intransitive verb conjugations. (See Hungarian grammar (verbs).) Marked possessive relations appeared. The accusative marker -t was developed, as well as many verb tenses.

The Latin language was made official in the country—especially in the 11th to 15th centuries, the language of literature and religion was Latin. However, Hungarian was used in certain cases; sometimes it was fitted into Latin documents, to avoid later disputes about proprietary rights.

However, the first official document of Hungary is not in Latin, but in Greek—this is the "Charter of the nuns of Veszprémvölgy",[10] dated to 997. The text contains some Hungarian (and also some Slavic) place names: e.g. saɣarbrien (compound formed from saɣar 'shaft' + an obsolete Turkic loanword, brien 'coalition'—today Szárberény); saːmtaɣ 'plough'; meleɡdi (from meleg 'warm' + -di diminutive suffix).

Hungarian words in the founding declaration of the Benedictine Abbey of Tihany, 1055

The Old Hungarian poem "Laments of Mary"

The next most important document is the "Establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany", dated to 1055. In the Latin text, 3 Hungarian sentences, 58 words, and 33 suffixes are present. The longest sentence is, in the original spelling, feheruuaru rea meneh hodu utu rea (reconstructed pronunciation: /fɛhɛːrvaːru reaː mɛnɛɣ hɔdu utu reaː/; modern Hungarian: "Fehérvárra menő hadi útra"—the postposition "rea", meaning "onto", became the suffix "-ra/-re"—English: 'up to the military road going to Fehérvár'). Today, the vellum is kept in the abbey of Pannonhalma.

Skipping intermediate Hungarian relics, the next important item is the "Funeral Sermon and Prayer" from 1192. This is the first text completely in Hungarian. The document is found on the 154th page of the Codex Pray (Pray here is not an English word but a name).

Literature in Hungarian is counted since the previous writing. The first known Hungarian poem has the title 'Laments of Mary'—its theme is the story of Jesus' crucifixion, from the viewpoint of Mary. It was denoted around 1300, but possibly it is not the first version. Its text is clear, easy to understand and logical, free of latinisms. The first verse:

The next important relic—with a cheerless history—is the "Fragment of Königsberg", dated approximately to the 1350s. This is the remains of the first known, explicitly proven Hungarian book. The codex had arrived at Wrocław, Poland, by the end of the century; there, because it was not understandable to the Polish bookbinder, it was chopped and used to bind a Latin book. The other important book from the time is the Codex Jókay; a 15th-century copy of an original from 1372. The codex is about the life of Francis of Assisi.

A copy of the Hussite Bible, in the Codex of Munich, dated to 1466

In the early 15th century, some non-comprehensive Latin-Hungarian dictionaries, or rather word lists, were composed. Some shorter texts are also known. The most important work is however the first translation of the Bible: the Hussite Bible, dated to 1416. The Bible was translated by priests Tamás Pécsi and Bálint Ujlaki. They were affected by the concepts of Jan Hus during their university years (1399–1411) in Prague. The Inquisition pursued Hussitism, and the translation was confiscated from the translators; regardless it became so popular that several authentic copies of the original survive.

More and more Hungarian books were written, most of them religious. Over and above the "Laments of Mary", the other important item of Old Hungarian poetry is Szabács viadala ("Triumph of Šabac"). Reputedly, it was denoted in the year of the battle (1476); in this, Hungarian troops led by King Matthias of Hungary had a glorious victory over the Ottoman army — its issue is secular. It is possibly a fragment of a longer poem. A quotation:

Some Old Hungarian script inscriptions are also known, such as the "Alphabet of Nikolsburg" (1483) and a number of deciphered and undeciphered inscriptions.

In this period, Hungarian developed several new words. One way this happened was through loanwords coming from languages whose speakers mediated the new concepts. On the other hand, internal word formation also took place, in which the words for new concepts were derived from earlier words.

Compared to Modern Hungarian, Old Hungarian was rich in derivative suffixes. Most of these suffixes are also derived from other suffixes, so they can be aligned in "suffix-bushes". There were numerous diminutive suffixes, non-productive in today's Hungarian, e.g. -d ("holmod", from "holom"—"tiny hill"); -t (it left its trace in some geographic names); -n, -ny, -m (as in kicsiny, from kicsi—very little).

Forming compounds was also a way to coin new terms.

But then again, there are several loanwords dating back to the period 896–1526. Loans were mainly acquired from Slavic languages (for example, kiraːʎ 'king'), German (e. g. hɛrtsɛɡ 'prince'), and Latin (e. g., tɛmplom 'church'). As emerges from the previous examples, these words are primarily associated with Christianity and politics. Other loans are the names of animals living outside Hungary, terms of technology, and so on.

Verbs

Like English, Modern Hungarian has two verb tenses: past and nonpast. Futurity is expressed using the auxiliary verb foɡ. However, Old Hungarian had six verb tenses: Past Narrative (Latin: praeteritum), Past Finite, Past Complex, Present, Future Simple, and Future Complex.

Past Narrative was marked using the suffixes -é, -á in transitive and -e, -a in intransitive. The tense was used to describe an array of past events originally. The verb várni 'to wait' conjugated in this tense:

Future simple was expressed using the suffix -nd.[11] Future complex (the present-day future tense of the language) is conjugated in the following way:

Infinitive + auxiliary verb 'fog'

menni fog—he/she is going to go

The vowel system of Hungarian had developed roughly to its current shape by the 16th century. At its fullest the system included eight phonemes occurring both short and long:[12]

This largely symmetric system was complicated only by the presence of open illabial /aː/ as the long counterpart of short /ɔ/. In modern Hungarian this is mainly found as a front vowel.

The contrasts between mid /e/ and open-mid /ɛ/ (including their long counterparts) have later been mostly lost. The shift /ɛː/ > /eː/ took place widely during the 16th and 17th centuries, across most of the Hungarian-speaking area. In several dialects this however did not lead to a merger; in response, /eː/ may have been either raised to /iː/, or (in northeastern dialects) diphthongized to /ie/. The shift /e/ > /ɛ/ also arose equally early in the central dialects underlying Standard Hungarian. Its spread to the other Hungarian dialects has however been much slower.