South American Natives Speak Ancient European Language? Part 1
Author: Kartavirya | Categories: Metahistory
Meanwhile, the leaders of the greatly influential Mormon “church” became involved in the matter. This church has at its disposal a vast fortune, they engage in an active programme of expansion in the Americas. The church leaders stated, that they support any and all ventures which has as its goal to help clarify the origins of the human race and the origin of religion. They promised “unselfish” support, they only asked for one thing, that they would be entrusted with the decoding of the content of the golden plates.
After this János Moricz held a big press conference where he announced his discoveries to the press, radio and TV reporters. The atmosphere at the several hours long press conference was extraordinarily enthusiastic. It seemed, that a sensation concerning the whole world was beginning its journey, but instead what followed the press conference was solid silence and discourteous reservation. Not a single news report appeared about it. Then again, the main leaders of the Mormon church would not leave Moricz alone, continually harassing him to reveal to them the location of the cave.
It became clear from this hostile behaviour that they were not dealing with a trusting church but that this church was backed by an organization hungry for world power. Treasure discovery and other goals are their incentive. At this point Moricz decided he will not reveal the secrets of the cave. He became convinced that the time for the revelation of the caves was not yet come, therefore he decided to first discover the enigma of the arrival to the Americas of the Hungarian speaking tribes, or rather to prove the fact by pragmatic methods.
On May 28, 1970 a raft made of balsam wood, according to the ideas of Moricz, set sail from the Ecuadorian coast with a crew of four young men. Moricz guided them from the shore by radio. 159 days later the raft arrived on October 4 in Australia, not far from Sydney. Here they towed the sensational raft that sailed halfway around the globe.1)
Moricz’ theory is that the Hungarian speaking tribes arrived in South America by sea from the West. This is proven also by the geographical names of the Pacific ocean and East Asia. Bátor Vámos Tóth, a Hungarian emigrant teacher of geography living in Hawaii, has collected 50 Hungarian-sounding Hawaiian geographical names. And in the Pacific archipelago he found names that are identical to those around Lake Balaton in Hungary, for example: Aliga, Kiliti, Lelle etc. Substantiating with maps he indicated that in Indonesia and the Indus valley every 4th and every 3rd geographical name is Hungarian respectively.
In the question of the origins of the American ancient indigenous population, or rather its migration there we are provided with important data from the so-called Kland scrolls. In 1967 an archaeological group with American funding found, under s 20 metre thick layer of lava, a stone box containing an intact written scroll. C14 dating found it to be around 21 000 years old. Since then the writing has be decoded and it turns out they contain the history, culture and circumstances of the thousands of years ago sunken continent of Mu. A member of the group, Tony Earl, wrote a book detailing the process and the results of the archaeological dig, called ‘Mu Revealed’. The book triggered great interest at the time but today probably is unavailable.
The above text was prepared using data and manuscripts by Györgyné Hary (1977)
See also “Where the Shang and the Inca Really Frisians/Magyars?”
- See: Magyar Ifjúság 1970. issue 50 (↑)
October 31st, 2007 at 19:42 pm
Fortunately, DNA technology is now sufficiently advanced to corroborate or debunk the lineal descent of the tribes in question from the Magyars.
January 8th, 2008 at 0:14 am
Holy smoke (Laszlo V.)!
That stuff that Moricz (pronounced /mo-rits/, as you might know) spewed into the world is nonsense and shows him to have been a deceiver and a liar. As a fringe detriment, what he did also defames the Hungarian people. I understand that you as a Hungarian would feel proud that what Moricz allegedly found in South America with so-called Hungarian-speaking indigenous South Americans would be a good thing, but it just isn’t so and is beyond the fringe of linguistic reality. We linguists would love to have found such a relationship, but one should not be carried away by national or linguistic pride. There has already been too much of a flap with certain Hungarians maintaining that Sumerian is related to Finno-Ugric (specifically Hungarian) with poor or scanty linguistic evidence dropping below the statistic threshold of possible glottochronological data. Anyway, this is exasperating and overwhelming for me because I can counter some of his gross claims but have to use some of my free time today instead of studying other things! (For others to whom I am sending this, please see the following two Web sites:)
South American Natives Speak Ancient European Language? 3-page article: http://www.cakravartin.com/archives/south-american-natives-speak-ancient-european-language
and more on Janós Moricz: http://www.goldlibrary.com/moricz.html
All right, let me begin with stating that the South American language family Chipayan is an isolate or possibly a member of Penutian and rapidly becoming extinct and its sparse members had poorly recorded scant word data from centuries ago. Moricz states that he spoke Hungarian with members of those who spoke “Cahari, Mochica, and Puruha.” Well, first off “Cahari”is misspelled for extinct “Canari, Cañari, Canyari,”which with extinct Puruhá had so few word data that they cannot even be classified as either Chipayan or Macro-Chibchan, and NO ONE spoke it by the time of Moricz. As for Mochica, it is another name for Yunca/Yunga, which is Chipayan and also long extinct (check out the first date recorded below). (In comparison, by the 1970s Chipaya was spoken by 800 persons and Uru by about 100 persons.) So there is no way Moricz heard those three unrelated languages! Proof? Well, here are the Hungarian numbers. Please compare them with the actual recorded Amerindian forms below, showing no relationship to Hungarian (underlined is my respelling [lost here in this transmission]):
Hungarian: egy, két, három, négy, öt, hat, hét, nyolc, kilenc, tíz
Northern Chimú: Puruhá: only ‘2’ was recorded: pax
Southern Chimú: Chimú: onkó, atput. Eten: unik, atput (already quite divergent from Puruhá because they probably borrowed them from Yunga, as follows)
Chipayan: Yunga (1878): unnik, aput, sopit, nopit, igmets (egmets), cheiza, niete, khanges (khhañges), tap, cheche
Yunga (1939): onuc, aput, soc, noc, sec, secur, nete, jac, tap, sirti
Mochica (1633): onaec, oncaero; aput(aero); sopaet, soptaero; nopaet, noptaero; exllmaetzh(aero); tzhaxlltzha(ngo); ñite(ngo); langaess(aere [sic]); tap(aero); siaec(aero)
Mochica (1920): oneuqe, apud, sofite, nopite, cesmen, soccer, niete, jans, tap, sirti
For comparison: Chipaya: sintalla, pishk, chep, pakhkpik, (the rest are Aymara numbers)
While I’m at it, here’s Sumerian: ash, min, esh(shu), lammu, ia, ashsha, i-min, ussu, elimmu, (gh)u or (gh)a
Most people would never even see these number sets, but I collected the first ten numbers in over 3300 languages several decades ago and maintain contact with three others who have also done so. Moricz would have counted on this lack of availability, but some scholars could have pursued these data successfully back in his time.
I read quickly thru the pages of those two Internet sites and easily found lots of other discrepancies, which scholars shouldn’t even have to point out!
Because Andean indigenous peoples had no relation to Hungarian or Finno-Ugric languages, the unknown etymology of “Quito” from earlier “Quitos” or /kitus/ remains unknown.
As for Moricz’s claim of finding a box in a cave with a scroll or metal plates dated at 21,000 years ago as if from the country or continent of Mu, well, c’mon, that’s beyond the fringe of reality; those alleged plates are something the Mormons still hunger for. The earliest writing is in the Middle East as a precursor to Sumerian with marks or signs on clay at about 6000 years ago.
As for the 50 or more Pacific-region place names sounding like Hungarian Aliga, Kiliti, Lelle, well, lots of languages have a phonology that easily resembles that of other areas in the world, like Japanese sounding like Spanish. So what? It is nice to have some dedicated scholar search for years to collect similar words from dissimilar languages and write a paper and hope to get published after severe vetting and review by his or her peers, and this has happened for over two centuries. I’ve seen such fascinating papers, but a minimum of about 15% of a vocabulary set of basic common words in two groups of languages has to be met before some acceptance of relatedness is to occur. It is not easy to get into print the original meanings of so-called place names like Hungarian Aliga, Kiliti, and Lelle, for they would be either buried in some printed article or paper or just lost forever. It just so happens that Lelle is from Dutch and German; kiliti is only Tagálog for ‘tickling’, and Aliga is a deliberate deformation of Catalan àguila ‘eagle’ as a parade object and other possibilities. My huge gazetteer of 350,000 place names does not include them.
“Sumerian” in English should have been like German so as to be “Shumerian.” The ideographs for “Shumer” indicate ‘language + adoration’, thus ‘sacred-language’. So, when the Hungarian linguists want it to be “szem-úr”/sem-uur/ as if ‘eye-lord’, neither the first consonants match nor the attested forms, even if it was a scholarly name applied to that ancient country.
And then there is some claim as to affinity with the people of the Indus script and civilization. For that unknown language Russian scholars used a computer to find that grammar patterns seemed to match Dravidian, a language family one can expect to underlay the area northwest of their homeland in southern India. Indeed we still find the Dravidian Brahui spoken in southern Pakistan and on the left (Indian) bank of the southern course of the Indus River.
And then there is “Celtic” /keltic/ as if it’s only real origin were to lay in Hungarian or Finno-Ugric. Granted that the etymology is obscure: (1) Latin Celtae, Greek Keltoi, perhaps akin to Latin celsus ‘high’ but probably of Celtic origin, with the root *cel ‘to rise, mount’, akin to English hill. But why would one want to go to Hungarian for its origin?
First of all is that Hungarians migrated from Central Asia and had no influence on western Europe at all. In early times the Indo-European Iranian peoples were in eastern Europe (as shown by the river names Danube, Dniester, and so on) providing a buffer zone to the Indo-European Celts to their west. Later the Slavs formed a southward wedge pushing away both peoples. Second, per the Hungarian linguist Gyula Décsy (The linguistic identity of Europe: Part I, Bloomington, Ind., 2000, Eurolingua, page 227), the Votyaks [Udmurt] and the Zirians [Komi] “together form the Permian branch of the Finno-Ugric language family. They are settled even today in a region which belonged to the territory of the Finno-Ugrian original homeland [just west of the Urals and northward].” That’s at least 1200 miles away from Hungary; so maybe the Hungarians just got tired of the cold and moved south!
There are so many Hungarian scholars listed as confirming Moricz’s excesses I just wonder whether any of them actually checked Moricz’s claims. It makes me distrust work coming from that country even though such scholars have the Hungarian language as a nice working tool and do good work like Dr. Gyula Décsy.
Carl Masthay, St. Louis, Missouri, cmasthay at juno.com
January 13th, 2008 at 21:03 pm
Mr. Masthay!
First of all thank You for for the honour of Your taking the time to comment on our website and its content.
You have been incorrect in a few assumptions.
The article says Moricz “spoke Hungarian with the members of three Indian tribes: the Cahari, Mochica and Puruha”, not like You say, “he spoke Hungarian with members of those who spoke ‘Cahari, Mochica, and Puruha.’” You are misquoting the article. ‘Cahari’ and the other two names refer to the tribes of that name and not the languages, therefore it is correctly spelled, according to this sample Spanish text:
The name of this tribe or people can also be spelled ‘Cañari’, but let me again point out that the ‘Cahari’ in the Moricz article refers to a tribe of people and not the language. I don’t speak Spanish but I feel relatively safe referring to an article in Spanish in which the word in question is spelled ‘cahari’. Of course I cannot account for any alleged spelling mistakes made by Györgyné Hary, I merely translated her original text as it appears on the net in Hungarian.
You say that “the earliest writing is in the Middle East as a precursor to Sumerian with marks or signs on clay at about 6000 years ago.”
This is not correct. I refer You to the study made by Klára Friedrich concerning the so-called Tartaria Tablets. This archaeological find was discovered 1961 in Tatárlaka, Transylvania. However, it’s not an isolated find, since the Hungarian female archaeologist Zsófia Torma made a very similar discovery in 1870 in Torda, near Kolozsvár (present-day Cluj-Napoca, Romania) which contained over 10 000 clay pieces carved with rune and pictographs. The writing in both cases has been labelled “proto-Sumerian” but Friedrich claims they both are ancient Hungarian runes at least 1000 years older than any Sumerian script found until the present day as confirmed by dendrochronology and should therefore, in her opinion, be called Carpathian-Basin pictographs.
Zsófia Torma may have been right when she stated that the religious views of the population of Tatárlaka and Jamdet-Nasr (Sumer) originate from the same source. She acquaints us with the observations of Leonard Woolley (the archeologist and excavator of Uruk) who states that the people of Jamdet-Nasr arrived in Sumer from the Carpathian Basin, by way of the Balkans.
See further “The Mystery of Tatárlaka” by Klára Friedrich http://cakravartin.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/mystery-of-tatarlaka-klara-friedrich.pdf
The theory of a Finno-Ugric ancient language is fiction invented by Hunfalvy (Hunsdorfer) and Budenz and further propagated by others on the orders of the Habsburgs, in order to deny Hungarians their history and culture. It is a well-known fact that if you don’t know your history you will be robbed of your heritage and future. Therefore the research done in the 1800’s is not reliable due to non-Hungarians falsifying Hungarian history to suit their own and their masters’ political agenda. Neither Hunfalvy nor Budenz spoke the Hungarian language so any claim of theirs lack both merit and credibility. Furthermore, Hunfalvy and Budenz physically destroyed all research done until that time concerning the Scythian-Hun-Magyar connections and hence also the connection between the Magyars and the Sumerians.
For further research I recommend the work of the indologist, linguist and historian Dr. Éva Aradi and historian Dr. Ida Bobula.
Let me also quote the respected scholar Dr. István Kiszely on the issue of the Finno-Ugric fairy tale:
For those who have access to the book and know Hungarian it is called:
Kiszely István: A magyarok eredete és ôsi kultúrája I. Püski Kiadó, Budapest, 2000.
On page 109 Kiszely quotes another veteran historian and archaeologist – awarded in September 2007 with the Hungarian Heritage Award (Magyar Örökség Díj) by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, despite his politically incorrect discoveries – professor Kornél Bakay:
On page 110:
On page 112:
The Hungarian scholars and scientists are not alone on this issue. One example out of a number is Japanese historian Shokotu Faisi, who wrote a letter addressed to the Hungarian people in general and to the Hungarian scholars and scientists in particular, dated July 2nd 2007. The source of this letter is unclear and there is an ongoing discussion on the net concerning its authenticity. Nevertheless, I’ve translated it here from the original Hungarian, because what has been written in it is true:
* This Japanese name has been written with Hungarian spelling. The original spelling in Latin letters should be something like Imaoka Juichiro./Kartavirya
Naturally, studying the Hungarian language is in the interest of the Hungarian people, but there will be a lot of research unavailable to scholars who are unable to speak the Hungarian language.
You say you distrust the academic work by Hungarian scholars because of their support for researchers like Moricz. It seems to me this distrust is due to the fact that their discoveries, claims and theories don’t fit Your own world view and therefore You reject them. Why would Hungarian scientists and scholars – more than scientists and scholars from any other nationality – be lying about their findings concerning their own history?
Could the reason why so many Hungarian scientists and scholars put their name down in support of Moricz be that he was on to something; that he, at least in part, was right?
A lot of Hungarian scholars support Moricz and his claims, so Your conclusion is that they can’t have checked his claims? Why would they risk their career and reputation on such an outlandish theory “beyond the fringe of linguistic reality” if they didn’t think there was something to it? I wonder who has not checked who’s claims. It seems You have already decided that whatever Moricz claimed can’t be true and adjust Your arguments accordingly.
You’re saying that:
since many Hungarian scholars support Moricz then they can’t have checked his claims; which seems to suggest that if only a few or none of the Hungarian scholars would have supported Moricz then You would have asked where is the support from his peers, or that they did check his claims and found nothing in them.
Either way You seem to end up rejecting Moricz’ claims.
You seem to consider the possibility of the Hungarian scholars checking and actually finding Moricz’ claims to be accurate – at least in part – an impossibility. Why?
Verifying the existence of the so-called ‘Gold Library’ and its alleged contents is impossible at present since nobody knows where to even start looking. But verifying whether indigenous peoples in South America speak and/or understand the modern Hungarian language is very possible, by sending a professional research team to Ecuador to talk to these tribal people. Of course, it would have to be researchers and scholars who understand perfectly both the Hungarian language and the language of the Indians, without any bias from the Spanish or any other people. This should really only concern the Hungarian people and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is interesting and very telling to see how others are very quick to dismiss any connection between Hungarians and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. I wonder why? What does it matter to them?
For further research I recommend the following websites which both have published material in English.
INSTITUTE OF HUNGARIAN STUDIES
http://www.magtudin.org/
HUNMAGYAR.ORG
http://www.hunmagyar.org/
The article below is a good place to start:
THE CONTROVERSY ON THE ORIGINS AND EARLY HISTORY OF THE HUNGARIANS
http://www.hunmagyar.org/tor/controve.htm
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:56 am
To Laszlo and Kârtavîrya (‘son of Made-Virility’ in Sanskrit, a nom de plume for hiding, but what is your real Hungarian name?),
OK, this is going to be long. Sorry. [Arial Unicode MS is what I am sending this in; you might want to change your toolbar: View > Encoding > menu and choose.]
Seemingly neither of you have paid attention to what I have actually written but only to your possible ethnic insecurities and defensiveness. Let me state right away that until László V. (a friend whom I have known since about 2000 because our introduction by Kathy Mills, a Schaghticoke Indian from my home state of Connecticut) had sent me that unexpected e-mail titled “South American natives speak ancient European language”from http://www.cakravartin.com/archives/south-american-natives-speak-ancient-european-language, I had never had any bias toward Hungarians or their culture or language. Since you, László, know that I “do” languages, that is why you sent it to me—something so rare, and so I took considerable interest in pursuing its subject matter. I must assume that you wanted my opinion or to inform me about it. I spent a lifetime in these matters, and it just looks to me made up by János Móricz, and I “proved” it with the linguistic data using Chipayan numerals. As an aside, I used a standard traditional English spelling method as /mo-rits/ to help one to pronounce it properly. You used /moo-ric/. Yes, that fits the Hungarian spelling system but not for English speakers, who would pronounce that as /muu-rik/. We dispense with long vowels in this traditional method because English speakers are not sensitive to true temporal lengthening (such as our “foot” versus similar “food,” the latter being temporally longer than the former). In addition, Prof. György Kara (gkara@indiana.edu), a Hungarian scholar working in Central Asian languages including Chinese, had read my message too and agreed that indeed I had supplied the correct pronunciation as /mo-rits/ and gave a historical background to it.
Also you are right that ‘2’ is properly kettő, whereas két is properly a bound form. I had always assumed that it was a form used for counting off and was influenced by the short form in Vogul. Sorry. [Also my previously supplied etymology for the word “Sumer” was so old that it was wrong.]
László, in your letter you wrote that you had “been warned that [I was] ‘strange’, which [you had] experienced in our personal meeting at [my] home.” That warning probably came from business-like Kathy Mills, with whom I had been in contact for some years earlier. She eventually came to St. Louis on business, called me up, and wanted to go to a good restaurant. We went to Stouffer’s moving circular restaurant high beside the Mississippi where the meeting cost me $100. I had edited Schmick’s Mahican Dictionary for 11 years before getting it published. That language was also of her tribe. I can’t follow the normal values of average Americans to have done such a huge project. Of course I am “strange”! So what?! That’s why it works, but I don’t harm anyone. Furthermore, when I was an atheist teen-ager contemplating my future world, I wanted to know languages and wanted to help others in this monoglot country called the USA with the best way to use words and writing and in other languages. There are already too many people on this earth, and so I knew that I would never marry though I do love women and stayed with only seven or so with long hiatuses. Does that make me strange? And I am a life member of Mensa; of course that too makes me strange and out of the thinking ways of the average Joe. You state that I am one “who wants to be a know-it-all.” Well, so what?! When I was that teen-ager, I knew that I would spend a lifetime studying, unlike what the average American does with watching television, following sports, and getting overly religious. I was a medical editor, fulfilling my life’s dream with the best written word possible for 33 working years at Mosby (now Elsevier). Editors have a wide-ranging hidden set of obscure knowledge. Why, I have to be a disparageable virtual “know-it-all” to make that occupation work! Thanks for the compliment! Köszönöm szépen!
Getting back to Kathy Mills, I hope you remember that she brought us together for a special reason—to have you show me your step-father’s long, hard-bound, published work in Hungarian featuring information about her tribe, the Schaghticoke (Scatticook) of Kent, Connecticut, so that you could translate it into English and then have me edit it professionally for future publication. I looked at it with considerable interest and did not copy down the bibliographic data because I just felt that I could trust you for future communications about it. I’m sorry that I failed to write down his name as author, the title, the city, the year, and the publisher—that is all I was asking from you later on, long after you and your wife, Joy, left my driveway in your huge trailer, and then you began to withdraw from the project that Kathy had her hopes on. Over the many months I tried to figure out why. I had assumed that you as a well-known filmmaker for famous movies had worried about copyright ownership of the information in that rare book by your step-father, or I felt that, as a Hungarian from communist Hungary where suspicion was easily aroused, you began to mistrust me, a person in wide-open America where we automatically assume trustworthiness in others. Finally I just gave up over your defensiveness. All I wanted was the bibliographic information of an already published Hungarian work to be able to describe it to my fellow Algonquianists and to people with Mahican blood—the Schaghticokes and the Stockbridge-Munsees of the Mohican Band in Wisconsin. Even the description of another lost “tool” of their culture was denied me—so how could I otherwise feel? And while I am at it, what did happen to that project—was it translated by you, did Kathy Mills pursue it further with you or give up, is it still hidden away never to be seen by the Amerindians it describes and locked into a distant European language?
The use of comparative linguistics is to show relatedness in masses of languages around the world. The real purpose of my collecting all those sets of numerals in 3300 languages was to get a “physical” feel for which peoples are related and automatically know which obscure tribes have an affinity to each other. It was not a jumble of lists but a systematic matching of sets with aid of two major language-classification sources: the Voegelins’ and Ruhlen’s (who does imperfect lumping). If you want to promote a lineal descent of some tribes of South America, you have to work with valid language specimens. Comparative genetics has been done by Cavalli-Sforza’s group, which doesn’t show a Hungarian-Chipayan or Macro-Chibchan connection (as James Bowery, 31 Oct. 2007, had wished). So that’s already been answered. Kartavirya said that it wasn’t those extinct languages but the tribe that was using Hungarian. Well, that’s a circular or non sequitur argument indeed! Those languages are the markers representing usual genetic relatedness if they have been conserved over time, and there isn’t any relation to Hungarian, as I showed by their numerals one to ten. Of course the claim is nonsense. The only thing left is that some members might have been studying Hungarian to the point of fluency, an artificial modern relatedness for which no newspaper article or scholarly approval should have appeared for such a specious claim by Móricz. How could anyone be so duped?
Also, Kartavirya, you stated that those South American Andean languages were “Mayan” genetically. Well, there is no Mayan language in South America, but the Mayan family is in the Penutian phylum, and, doing respect to your words, I find that the Voegelins, 1977, p. 117 under CHIPAYAN, surprisingly state the following: “Affiliation. Member of Penutian phylum, with relatively close affinities to Mayan (Olsen 1964; Stark 1968; Hamp 1967a, 1971), though Lyle Campbell (1973) presents a negative case for this relationship. [Superseded is Chipayan as being included in either Arawakan or Macro-Chibchan, whereas Yunca/Mochica is under Macro-Chibchan or a language isolate.]”
So now you have assumed that I was under the influence of Hungarian haters in past-century Germans. Please don’t count me as one of them. It never was and never will be within me to hate Hungarians, such a fine European people who came from Central Asia long ago. Until you sent that article, I had not the least inkling of any ethnic bias over there, but now, with all the word shouting and the long defensive positions about a subject irrelevant to whether South American tribes are related to Hungarians, I am beginning to worry that you both have taught me and others in the world to be wary of Hungarian scholarship after all if this is a representative sample of such scholarship, that arising from Móricz. The issues of Germans and Hungarians were the problem of another age of which I am so glad to be ignorant of till now.
It is important for me to state that the whole mass of data about linguistic relatedness of over 6700 world languages is pretty well classified, except for poor data from the past or insufficient scholars to process it or just plain guessing on the part of Greenberg and of Ruhlen. South America, Africa, and much of New Guinea still require massive amounts of good scholarly work on protoforms of language groups for comparative linguistics to result in good classifications. Nevertheless, the work on Finno-Ugric is solidified within Uralic—an unquestioned language family. The next step up is Ural-Altaic, but Altaic comprises the assumedly remotely related Turkic, Mongol, Tungus (= Manchu), and then Korean-Japanese, all of which have surprisingly similar typological features even though the words don’t match well. Was is widespread areal borrowing or an extremely deep time frame before a splitting away?
Dr. Gyula Décsy is an established Hungarian linguist in Bloomington, Indiana, who has written many books of great complexity—a glory to Magyar! In my last communication to you, László and Kartavirya, I mentioned his book (The linguistic identity of Europe: Part I, Bloomington, Ind., 2000, Eurolingua, page 227) and quote his all-important statement that the Votyaks [Udmurt] and the Zirians [Komi] “together form the Permian branch of the Finno-Ugric language family. They are settled even today in a region which belonged to the territory of the Finno-Ugrian original homeland [(my emphasis) just west of the Urals and northward].” That’s at least 1200 miles away from Hungary. How much clearer can it get? This is not a scholar under the old biased German influence you dislike but your fellow countryman, one who is following proper and logical linguistic data patterns in his field of study.
All right then, let me display the numerals for some of these Finno-Ugric and Altaic languages so that you can see the relatedness for yourselves. (Unfortunately I will have to level down the phonetic clarity of the original transcription so that the e-mail transmission won’t drop the symbols.)
Finno-Ugric:
Hungarian: egy, kettő (long ö), három, négy, öt, hat, hét, nyolc, kilenc, tíz
Ostyak, 1870 (Xanty): ögy (it), katxen, xûdem, neta, vet, kût, sabat, nigdax, killien, yang
Vogul (Mansi): akva, kitigh (kit), xûrm, n’ila, at, xôt, sât, n’ollow, ôntollow, low
Votyak (Udmurt): odig, kyk, kuin’, n’yl’, vit’, kuat’, siz’ym, t’amys, ukmys, das (Iranian loan)
Zirian (Komi): ötik, kyk, kuim, nyol’, vit, kvait, sizim, kökyamys, ökmys, das (Iranian loan)
Cheremis (Mari) short: ik, kak, kum, nil, vits, kut, sim, kändäxshe, endexshe, lu
Lapp (Saami) leveled: aht, kuht, kolm, niell, vidt, kudt, kidjem, kaxts, axts, log’k’
Finnish: yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi, kuusi, seitsemän, kahdeksan, yhdeksän, kymmenen
Estonian: üks, kaks, kolm, neli, viis, kuus, seitse, kaheksa, üheksa, kümme
Altaic:
Turkish: bir, ikí, üch, dört, besh, altí, yedí, sekíz, dokúz, on
Mongolian (Kalmyk): negn, khoir, gurvn, dörvn, tavn, zurghan, dolan, näämn, yisn, arvn
Common Tungusic: ämün, djör, ilan, dügün, tunga, n’öngün, nadan, djapkun, xüyägün, djuwan
Manchu: emu, juwe, ilan, duin, sunja, ninggun, nadan, jakuun, uyun, juwan
Korean (South): hana, tul, seit, neit, tasot, yasot, ilgop, yadol, ahop, yol
Japanese (shortened in counting): hí, fú, mí, yó, í, mú, ná, yá, kóko, tó
After examination of this “boring, eye-tiring” list one can easily see that Finno-Ugric is closely related in its member languages, whereas Altaic is very loosely bound, and only ‘4’ is clearly similar and maybe ‘10’. So when that enthusiastic Japanese scholar praised Magyar as being the basis of Japanese, he went for a long, long stretch of plausibility. It was Roy Miller who enhanced the status of Korean-Japanese within Altaic. The evidence is weak but plausible, as most scholars now agree with some reluctance.
I hope that I have given you a useful tool to understand why we scholars are not demeaning beautiful Hungarian (Magyar) at all but simply showing its great relationship to a larger family, one they migrated from so very long ago 1200 miles away into the European realm and where they cannot claim ancestry for the previous peoples who did live there in the Hungarian-Romanian lands where ancient tablets were found, said to be “Sumerian,” which could very well be.
As for me, I am fluent in Chinese, French, and Spanish, read at least 8 languages, and have studied over 50 of them (not remembering anything of course!). I have produced two published works on Mahican and one huge one on Kaskaskia Illinois, both Algonquian languages, after 30 years of self-study of Algonquian languages, Cherokee, Navajo, Mayan, and Nahuatl. Back in 1960 while learning Chinese in the US Air Force and technical training, I borrowed study books from an airman studying Hungarian and studied a smattering of Hungarian over 2 weeks till I realized that I had to concentrate on other matters lest there be interference in language learning. Over these many decades from time to time I have needed to look up Hungarian words and still consult my Hungarian dictionary many times per year, as well as how to spell Hungarian surnames properly from an old 1981 Budapest telephone directory I was able to buy from someone in New York. There is no way I can disparage either Hungarian or the classy people who speak it.
I hope that this is enough to mitigate any hard feelings from anyone and to present the real facts countering those other claims.
Carl Masthay, St. Louis, of Polish ancestry
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February 22nd, 2008 at 3:08 am
Carl, are you sure that Uralic is an “unquestioned language family”? You should read “The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics by Angela Marcantonio (The Philological Society, 2002) as well as papers by the Hungarian linguist dr Marácz László living in the Netherlands.It is really high time you got acquainted with the real facts about Hungarian!
April 15th, 2008 at 20:21 pm
Mr. Kartaviya:
Last year I introduced in Argentina, one of the plates found by Juan Moricz in Tayos. Four years ago which investigated the matter. The Library Steel is a reality, as well as studies of linguistic Moricz, with regard to the origins of the people magyar. I would like to contact me.
Débora Goldstern
Crónicas Subterráneas
Http://deboragoldstern.webcindario.com/
October 29th, 2008 at 19:21 pm
Mr. Masthay:
I wish to support Kartavirya’s suggestion that you thoroughly examine not only the work of the Finno-Ugric theorists — whose work is by all means anti-Hungarian — but also the studies by scholars who have written with more credibility about the Hungarian connections with the Scythian-Hun and Sumerian peoples and who oppose the Finno Ugric theory which cannot be proven. The Hungarians do not originate from the Finno-Ugric peoples but as their neigbors they have some common vocabulary. At the VII World Congress of Hungarians in Budapest in August, Dr. Judit Béres, a geneticist, proved that there was no genetic connection between the Hungarians and the Finno-Ugric peoples, indeed they have the most distant connection.
I recommend that you read the following books:
Bobula Ida: A magyar nép eredete
Bobula Ida: The Origin of the Hungarian Nation
Bobula Ida: Szumir-magyar rokonság
Csőke S: Sumerian and Ural-Altaic Elements in the Old Slavic language
Csőke Sándor: Szumir-finn-mongol-török összehasonlitó nyelvtan
Csőke S. : Az ősszláv nyelv sumer ural-altaji elemei
Csőke S. : A magyar nyelv szláv jövevény szavai
Csőke S. : Finn-ugor nyelvek nincsenek
Csőke S. : A sumer ősnyelvtől a magyar élőnyelvig
Csőke S. : Sumér ural-altai nyelvek hatása a szláv nyelvek fejlődésére
Csőke S. : Sumér-magyar összehasonlító nyelvtan
Csőke S. : Szumir-magyar egyeztető szótár
Nagy Sándor: The Forgotten Cradle of the Hungarian Culture
Szentkátolnai Bálint Gábor: Magyar nyelv Dél-Indiában
Unfortunately most of these books have only been published in Hungarian because their authors could not publish them in English because the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, following the directive of Agoston Trefort, Minister of Culture, would not support them and they had to rely on their own resources to publish their books.
We have translated and published one book by Sándor Csőke and one by Sándor Nagy.
Dr. Lajos Kazár’s work is important because he demonstrates the far reaching scope of the Hungarian language in his book:
Japanese-Uralic Language Comparison
Locating Japanese Origins with the Help of Samoyed, Finnish, Hungarian etc.
Dr. Marácz László, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, Holland has written an article entitled:
The Untenability of the Finno-Ugric Theory
Dr Angela Marcantonio has written several books and articles to refute the Finno-Ugric theory, among them:
A történelmi nyelvészet és a magyar nyelv eredete
Uralic Languages in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics
Several of these books can be found on our website in English: http://www.magtudin.org
I hope this information is helpful and will show you that the “infallibility” of the Finno-Ugric theory can be questioned.
László Botos