Furthermore, if one compares the “crucial words” – alleged borrowings from Slavonic or Turkic and words of “unknown” or “doubtful origin” -, one will find, as a rule, in each of the fore-mentioned dictionaries quite different etymologies (cf. Chapter 4).

All these dictionaries are ordered alphabetically according to the Hungarian lemma and none of these books are written in English. EDH, however, differs in two ways from the already published etymological dictionaries of Hungarian: Firstly, it is written in English that is more widespread than Hungarian or German. Secondly, EDH is also ordered alphabetically according to the Hungarian lemma, but separately for each language or language family: Sumerian and Hungarian (Chapter 5), Hungarian and the other Finno-Ugric languages (Chapter 6), Caucasian and Hungarian (Chapter 7), Bantu and Hungarian (Chapter 8), Etruscan and Hungarian (Chapter 9), Tibeto-Burman and Hungarian (Chapter 10), Munda languages (Chapter 11), Dravidian languages and Hungarian (Chapter 12), Chinese and Hungarian (Chapter 13), Japanese and Hungarian (Chapter 14), Turkish and Hungarian (Chapter 15), Austronesian and Hungarian (16), Mayan Languages and Hungarian (Chapter 17). A chapter about conclusions (Chapter 18) and two indices (Chapters 19 and 20) conclude EDH. The fundament of all comparisons between Hungarian and Sumerian is the complete list, given in Chapter 5, from Colman-Gabriel Gostony’s “Dictionnarie d’etymologie sumerienne” (Paris 1975), a milestone for Sumerian-Hungarian research. This means: We do not take as a basis a regular Hungarian dictionary and compare all or some of its words with the words in a dictionary of another language, disregarding sound-laws and operating on kling-klang-etymologies (kling-klang is a good term, worth of further use). We set as only fact the hypothesis, that the 1042 etymologies in Gostony (1975) are correct, since they have never been disproved. In other words: We reduce the many then-thousands of Hungarian words of the following three best dictionaries:

to a relative small common Sumerian-Hungarian basis of 1042 entries and compare this list with the already mentioned languages: A word from another languages enters the list only, if it corresponds with one of the 1042 words and no other Hungarian word than one of these 1042 will be compared to another language, even if they are plenty of examples to be found in the extremely rich Sumerian-Hungarian literature (cf. Chapter 2). The only exception is Etruscan (cf. Chapter 9), being a corpus-language with an extremely restricted vocabulary. Of course, comparing three instead of two languages also reduces massively the chance of mistaken etymologies. For the sound rules I refer to Gostony (1975) concerning the Sumerian-Hungarian part and to the dictionaries of the other languages, from which we have taken our data, for the other parts, but I do not repeat the sound-rules here - neither do the FU dictionaries. Yet, almost all of the works used in EDH can be found in a big university library in America and in Europa or borrowed via interloan.
- 3 -

All the maps that are used in this book are copyrighted by Wikipedia.

The author hopes that EDH will be able to establish itself as a reference work for all the peoples who have always adhered to the Sumerian-Hungarian theory or do not believe anymore in FU and Uralic linguistics. If EDH will cause some adherents of FU/Uralic linguistics to convert to Sumerian-Hungarian linguistics, then it has reached more than its author ever could hope.

Finally, I give EDH two sad, but true quotations by two of the greatest Sumerian-Hungarian researchers on its way: Spread the word and be not surprised if you are assailed, perhaps even by people who call themselves Hungarians. (Ida Bobula, Budapest 1900 – Gaffney, SC, USA, 1981) Mert nem az az igaz, ami igaz, hanem amit a vilag igaznak – tart. (Because not that is true, what is true, but what the world – holds for true.) (Viktor Padany, Vatta (Borsod) 1906 – Melbourne, Australia 1963)

Tucson, AZ, USA, 29.10.2006
Alfred Toth
- 4 -

2. Introduction into Sumerian-Hungarian research

1. Preliminary remarks

Sumerian-Hungarian research has at least four drawbacks: First, there is – unlike in Finno-Ugristics and Uralistics - no complete bibliography of Sumerian-Hungarian studies, although the literature is enormous. Second, because during the communist era Sumerian-Hungarian research was forbidden in Hungary, many publications had to appear abroad in more or less ephemeral journals and obscure publishing houses. Third, the majority of these publications – again unlike FU- and Uralistic studies - are written in Hungarian, so they are not understandable for most non-Hungarians. Fourth, there are not only pearls amongst the Sumerian-Hungarian studies. Especially in linguistics, many works have been written by non-linguists, even by non-academics. Therefore, this introduction has also the purpose of leading the beginner to the scientifically valuable publications.

2. History of Sumerian-Hungarian research

The standard work that gives an overview of the beginnings of Sumerian-Hungarian research is:

Here we learn the names of the decipherers of Sumerian who also connected it immediately to the “Turanian” languages (the former name of the “Ural-Altaic” family), especially Hungarian: Edward Hincks (1792-1866), Francois Lenormant (1837-1883), Jules Oppert (1825-1905) and Henry C. Rawlinson (1792-1866). The decipherment of the Cuneiform writing, in which the two basic languages of ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Akkadian, were written between ca. 3000 –400 BC, was started by Georg Friedrich Grotefend as early as in 1802, but only in 1850, Rawlinson finished it.
- 5 -

Therefore, before 1850, there is also no Sumerian-Hungarian research. But since (as we will see in chapter 3), there are many Akkadian loanwords in Sumerian, one should never forget the following work whose aim was to prove that Hungarian is related to the Semitic languages:
Kiss, Balint
Magyar regisegek (Hungarian Antiquities)
Pest 1839

Hence, it is true, that the Finno-Ugric theory, initiated by Janos Sajnovics (1770) and Samuel Gyarmathi (1799) is older and competed with the still older theory of the Turkish origin of Hungarian, but it is mistaken to speak about the so-called “second Hungarian-Turkish war” (“ a masodik Magyar-Torok haboru”) after 1850. The connections established between the newly detected Sumerian and the Hungarian language that were most strongly propagated by two non-Hungarians, the French archeologist Lenormant and the German linguist Fritz Hommel (1854-1936), both university professors, spread quickly all over the world and found their entrance f. ex. also in some editions of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” between 1860 and 1880.

But things changed: Already during the so-called Bach-era 1848-1859, but at last since the Hungarian- Austrian “Ausgleich” in 1867, the Habsburgs ordered Austrian and German professors for the chairs in linguistics and history to Budapest. One of them was the German Josef Budenz who published on behalf of the Viennese court between 1873 and 1881 his “Magyar-ugor osszehasonlito szotar” (“Comparative Hungarian-Ugric Dictionary”), where the long forgotten hypothesis of Sajnovics and Gyarmathi was freshened up again. It is obvious, what the Habsburgs wanted to show: The Hungarians, who were not more than slaves in the eyes of the Habsburgs, were not allowed to trace their origins back to the Sumerians, the first high culture that existed on earth. Rather, a connection with the Lapps, the Voguls and the Ostyaks, who lived in the 19th century still in the stone-Age, was established. Political propaganda and banishment of the adherents of the Sumerian-Hungarian theory helped a lot. After the downfall of the Austrian-Hungarian double-monarchy in 1918, the communists took over Hungary already in 1919 under the leadership of Bela Kun, then extensively in 1945 and from 1956-1989, so that the communists directly continued the Anti-Sumerian-Hungarian campaign started by their enemies, the Habsburgs, since in the end, both the Habsburgs and the communists agreed in their opinion that the Hungarians are subhuman creatures.

Nowadays, Finno-Ugristics is fully established, all Sumerian-Hungarian research is considered to be “unscientific”, representatives of this theory are blacklisted, publishing in Hungary is possible, but still difficult, because the communists are still sitting on key positions in all sectors of education (and elsewhere). Yet, there is hope, since the chairs of the FU representatives started to shake already a couple of years ago. The Tartu school of Uralistics has given up since a long time the concept of the Uralic tree-model and thus the genetic relationship of the Uralic languages:

Angela Marcantonio has proven, that there is no FU language family either:
- 6 -

Maracz showed also a real alternative to comparative historical reconstruction: the so-called “wordbushes” or “clusters”: One puts together words with identical or similar form and content and orders them into bushes. This pure synchronic procedure is non-circular, because in an agglutinative language like Hungarian there are no such phenomena like ablaut that involve previous diachronic knowledge in synchronic analysis. One should not forget, either, that the method of historical reconstruction was adopted from the Indo-European languages and successfully applied to the Semitic languages - because both of them have ablaut, but it has not proven to be valuable for any other language family. Moreover, in isolating languages like Chinese and the almost whole range of Austronesian languages between Madagascar in the West and Easter Island in the East, one has no other possibility to decide, if two or more words are genetically related or not, since in these languages we have to deal with monosyllabic roots (and not to speak about the total absence of older texts in most of the latter languages). Here, too, Maracz’s method applies: If a certain word is a member of a word-bush, then all the words, that belong to this bush are genetically related to one another, but if it stays alone, then it must be a borrowing. These bushes can be taken easily from the huge Hungarian dictionary by Czuczor and Fogarasi:
- 7 -

3. How Hungarian history looks like from the Sumerian-Hungarian point of view

The best and most exhaustive work on general Hungarian history (including linguistics, too) is:

Amongst the other books of the same author, the following posthumous collection of minor writings is important:
 

Of special value is the following truthfully monumental work:
 

The best overview of Hungarian’s whole history from the beginnings to our time in a very broad scientific and political context gives
 

Besides the already cited linguistic works of the same author, the only reliable linguistic studies are:

Especially interesting for place and proper names are the two following works:
 

The best and only one written in a sort of English is:
 

Characteristic of all of the many books and articles by Badiny is, that he presupposes a continuity between Sumerian and Hungarian, i.e. according to him and his followers, Sumerian never died out, and today’s Hungarian is thus nothing but a late form of Sumerian. In the following, we will present an outline of the main points of Sumerian-Hungarian history from the following article by Charles Dombi. (All quotations from Dombi, whose article is not paginated, are nmarked; what is not marked, is by me, especially the passage about the Transilvanian origin of the Sumerians: Dombi assumes that the Sumerians are autochthonous in Mesopotamia and wandered from there to Transilvania):

The standard works for Hungarian mythology are:

“Byzantine sources mention that the Magyars were also known as the Sabirs who originated from Northern Mesopotamia, which was referred to as Subir-ki by the Sumerians who also originated from this land. Numerous other ancient and medieval sources also refer to the Scythians, Huns, Avars and Magyars as identical people. Independently from the various political regimes which have ruled over Hungary and which have imposed the current official version of the origins and history of the Hungarians, modern scientific and scholarly research has confirmed the Sumerian-Scythian-Hun-Avar-Magyar ethnolinguistic relationship and continuity”.

The following map shows the antique Mesopotamia. The Sabirs came perhaps from the Zagros Mountains:

The standard work for the antique and medieval testimonies of the peoples mentioned is:
 

5500 BC The Proto-Sumerians wander from Transylvania, where the age of the clay tablets of Tatarlaka has been testified by C14 analysis, towards Mesopotamia, where they start the Copper Age. Since Hungary is rich in copper, the Proto-Sumerian metallurgists may have brought their technical knowledge from their homeland into Mesopotamia. These Proto-Sumerians may be considered already as Hungarians, since their writing, that is identical with early Sumerian pictographic writing found in the cultures of Uruk-Warka IV- (ca. 3500-3200 v. Chr.) and Jemdet-Nasr (ca. 3100-2900 v. Chr.), corresponds to the Szekely runes (Hung. rovasiras, literally “carve-writing”, from Hung. roni “to carve” and from here English rune, German Rune).

The standard works to these topics are:

3000 BC “Sumerian colonies are established from the Atlantic Ocean through the Mediterranean and Danubian basins to India and Central Asia (Turan), and from the Caucasus to Northeast Africa. The vast belt of Eurasian grasslands stretching from the Carpathian mountains to the Altai range, bordered in the North by the Eurasian forest belt and in the South by the Caucasus and Iranian plateau, is gradually settled by Sumerians and Sumerian-related people from Mesopotamia, Transcaucasia and Iran. These Near Eastern settlers became the peoples which were later referred to as the Scythians, Huns, Avars and Magyars among others”. The Carpathian basin was reached by the Scythians in the 6th century BC, the Huns in the 5th century A.D., the Avars in the 6th century A.D. and by the Magyars in the 9th century BC

“First appearance of nomadic Semitic tribes in Sumerian Mesopotamia. Semitic people begin to settle in increasing numbers in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian civilization exerts a dominant influence upon the development of later Semitic cultures”.
- 12 -

2455 BC “The Semitic Akkadians impose their hegemony upon the Sumerian city-states. Mesopotamia is devastated by wars, the population is decimated, oppressed and enslaved by the Akkadians. Many Sumerians flee to their colonies”. 1900 B.C “The Semitic Babylonians impose their hegemony upon Mesopotamia”.

1115 BC “The Semitic Assyrians impose their hegemony over the Near East after centuries of warfare. The ensuing devastation, decimation, deportations and oppression alter the ethnic composition of the Near East, including Mesopotamia, as the Semitic element increases and the Sumerians decrease”.

612 BC “The Sumerian-related Chaldeans, Medes and Scythians annihilate the Assyrian empire. The Scythians dominate the vast Eurasian grasslands from the Carpathian basin to the Altai during centuries”

539 BC “After overthrowing the Median Empire, the Persians conquer Mesopotamia and the rest of the Near East”.

256 BC “After the fall of Persia, the Parthian Empire rules over Mesopotamia, Armenia and Iran. The Turanian Parthians, custodians of the ancient Sumerian civilization, resist the Eastern expansion of the Roman Empire.

In 226 A.D., the Persian Sassanids overthrow the Parthian Empire which experiences a revival between 272 and 326 A.D. 2nd c. A.D. “The Hun empire reaches its greatest extent from the Pacific to the Aral sea, from Siberia to the Partian Empire and China. The Huns face centuries of struggle against an increasingly offensive and encroaching Chinese imperialism and expanionism. Facing mounting pressures from China in the East, the Huns begin the expand into Europe.

In the 4th century A.D., the Huns begin their Western military campaigns,

In 375 A.D., the Huns defeat the Goths, setting in motion the great migration of Germanic tribes which also contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire”.

5th c. “The Huns continue their crushing military campaigns against the Roman Empire. The Huns expel the Romans from the Carpathian basin (Pannonia and Dacia were occupied by the Romans after they had perpetrated genocidal warfare against the indigenous inhabitants of these Carpathian regions) and the Hun empire establishes its center of power in the Carpathian-Danubian region.

Following Atilla’s death under suspicious circumstances in 453, the Hun’s Germanic allies turn against them and the bulk of the Hunnic tribes regroups to the East of the Carpathians, leaving a rear-guard tribe in the Eastern Carpathians. This Hunnic tribe still inhabits this region today and they are the Hungarian Szekely people”.

562 “The Avar-Huns establish their empire in Central and Eastern Europe, with the Carpathian basin as the center of power. The Avars continue their centuries-long struggle against the encroaching German and Byzantine empires”.
- 13 -

9th c. “Following the settlements of Jewish refugees from the Near East in the Khazar empire, the ruling dynasty of the Khazars, another Turanian people, is converted to Judaism and seeks to impose this religion upon all its subjects. This precipitates a civil war which leads to the collapse of the Khazar empire. Several rebel Khazar tribes join the Hungarian federation which was led by the Magyar tribe. At that time the Hungarians were established in their own independent state of Dentumagyaria, between the Avar and Khazar empires”.

859-96 “After the collapse of the Khazar Empire, the Magyars and the other Hungarian tribes move West into the Etelkoz region, where the Covenant of Blood takes place. This Covenant effectively creates the Magyar (Hungarian) nation which proceeds with the reconquest of the Carpathian basin and its surrounding regions. After expelling foreign encroaching powers from the Carpathian region and uniting with their previously settled Hun-Avar ethnic kin, the Magyars establish the Hungarian state in 896 as the successor state to the Hun and Avar empires”.

After around 3000 BC, the Akkadians started to torment the Sumerians, which led them to emigration, but only a part of them became the later Scythians, Huns, Avars, Parthians and Magyars. As will be shown in this book, a relatively big part of the Sumerians wandered not to the North, but to the South, they spread out all over Tibet, India, China, Japan, etc. and as far as to the South Sea, where they left their traces in the languages and cultures of the Oceanian people. That part of the Sumerians, however, who took the way North via Caucasus into the Carpathian basin must have met on its way one ore more aboriginal peoples, who may have joined the later Hungarians before they separated and spread out as far as to the later Finland, Estonia and Lappland: They became what is mistakenly called today the “Finno-Ugrians”, and the small common stock of cognates (cf. chapters 3 and 4) may find its explication by borrowing from the Sumerian-Hungarians.
- 14 -

3. Is there a Finno-Ugric or Uralic language family?

Even in traditional Finno-Ugric or Uralic departments, the existence of a Finno-Ugric or Uralic language family has been doubted for a couple of years. But while more and more scholars are convinced, that the former Uralic language family is nothing but a Sprachbund, most Finno-Ugrists defend their position as representatives of a language family. In this chapter, using the 100 words Swadesh-list and considering 10 Finno-Ugric and 2 Samoyed languages, it will be shown that neither the one nor the other assumption is justified. The politically motivated construction of a Finno-Ugric language family in the 18th century shows such a small basis of common words that would put back Proto-Finno-Ugric or Proto-Uralic long before 10’000 BC and therefore leads itself ad absurdum. On the other side, it will be shown that the theory of the Sumerian origin of Hungarian, commonly accepted before the invention of the Finno-Ugric and Uralic language families (cf. Erdy 1974), is acceptable also from a language-statistical point.

The 12 Uralic as well as the Sumerian and Akkadian Swadesh lists were compiled from dictionaries (cf. the bibliography, Chapter 19). Unfortunately, the Ostyak dictionary of Karjalainen (1948) and the Mordwin dictionary of Paasonen (1990-96) were not available to me, because the Library of Congress does not borrow reference works. From the living languages only the Finnic and Estonian lists could be controlled by native speakers in the spring of 2003 in the Institute of Uralistics of the University of Szombathely (Hungary).

The Hungarian list was compiled by the present author according to his native speaker’s proficiency. Since, as it is known, the Swadesh list was and is still discussed controversely, I would like to mention here only a few recent cases, in which the list could be applied successfully, i.e. where the calculations that follow from the list are matching with the chronological data of non-statistical linguistics: Elbert (1953) for Polynesian languages; Rabin (1975) for Semitic languages, Blažk for Sumerian (including Emesal), Akkadian, Elamitic, Kassitic, Hurrian, Urartian and Hattic; Forster, Toth and Bandelt (1998) for 17 Retoromance/Ladinic dialects and recently Forster and Toth (2003) for Celtic languages.
- 15 -

- 22 -

         
- 29 -

The evaluation of the three Swadesh lists results in the following percentages:

Hungarian = Sumerian: 91%
Hungarian = Akkadian: 27% (2%)

These indications that are on the first sight contradictory, have to been understood as follows:

From the 27 words that Hungarian shares with Akkadian, 25% are to be considered either as Sumerian borrowings in Akkadian or as Akkadian borrowings in Sumerian. For 2 Hungarian words there is not (yet?) a Sumerian etymology. To say it in other words: 93% of the (Hungarian)Swadesh list has a Mesopotamian etymology – while, as one remembers, Proto-Uralic has only 24.54% and Proto-Finno-Ugrian-Uralic even only 23.33% common words.

The extremely high percentage of 27% Akkadian-Semitic words in Hungarian goes along with an observation by Ida Bobula: „I am convinced that the Hungarian language bears the stamp of not an early, but of a very late stage of Sumerian culture. This is shown by the quantity of Semitic cultural loanwords in Hungarian; from Akkadian and Babylonian“ (Bobula 1996, p. 51; cf. also Bobula 1951, p. 11, note 3).

Gostony, too, who did not work with the Swadesh list either, but etymologized all available Hungarian words, came to the conclusions that from the (according to his counting) 1050 words in his Sumerian etymological dictionary 923 are shared with Hungarian words, this are 87.9% (cf. also Olah 1980, p. 12). These results show firstly a pretty exact correspondence between two methodically fully different approaches and secondly their independency of the Swadesh list.

Aside from that, Gostony has shown that Hungarian and Sumerian correspond in 51 of 53 grammatical phonetical, morphological and syntactical) features (Gostony 1975, pp. 175ss., esp. 194ss.).

The correspondences between Hungarian and the „Turanian“ and „Non-Turanian“ languages are according to Gostony (1975, pp. 201s.):

Hungarian: 51%;
Turk languages: 29%;
Caucasian languages: 24%,
Northern Finno-Ugric languages: 21%;
Tibeto-Burmanic languages: 12%;
Munda-Khol languages: 9%;
Paleo-Sibirian languages: 8%;
Oceanic languages: 7%;
Akkadian: 55;
Sanskrit: 5%;
Dravidian languages: 5%;
Chinese: 5%,
Indo- European languages: 4%;
Bask: 4%;
Hamitic languages: 3%;
Japanese: 3%.

In view of that, Charles Dombi comes to the following conclusion: “Thus, from the evidence left by this process of colonization, it appears that the Sumerian city-states were able to exert a preponderant economic, cultural, linguistic and ethnic influence during several thousand years not only in Mesopotamia and the rest of the Near East, but also beyond, in the Mediterranean Basin, in the Danubian Basin, in the regions North of the Caucasus and of the Black Sea, the Caspian-Aral, Volga- Ural, and Altai regions, as well as in Iran and India. It seems therefore that the Sumerians and their civilization had a determining influence not only on later Near-Eastern civilizations, but also on the Mediterranean, Indian, and even Chinese civilizations, as well as on the formation of the various Eurasian ethno-linguistic groups" (Dombi 2001, p. 7).

Bibliography

Blažek, Vaclav, Basic word lists of ancient languages of the Near East. In: Dhumbadji! 3/1, 1997, pp.  7- 14
Bobula, Ida, Sumerian Affiliations. Washington, DC 1951
Bobula, Ida, A sumir-magyar rokonsag kerdese. Buenos Aires 1982
Bobula, Ida, Herencia de Sumeria. Cordoba 1967
Bobula, Ida, Ketezer magyar nev sumir eredete. Montreal 1970
Bobula, Ida, Origin of the Hungarian Nation. Gainesville FL 1966
Dombi, Charles (Karoly), The controversy of the origins and early history of the Hungarians. In: http://www.hunmagyar.org/history/hungaria.htm
Elbert, Samuel H., Internal relationships of polynesian languages and dialects, in: Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 9, 1953, pp. 147-153
Erdelyi, Istvan, Selkupisches Worterverzeichnis. Budapest 1970
Erdy, Miklos, A sumir, ural-altaji, magyar rokonsag kutatasanak tortenete. New York 1974
Forster, Peter, Toth, Alfred und Bandelt, Hans-Jurgen, Evolutionary network analysis of word lists: visualising the relationship between Alpine Romance languages. In: Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 5/3, 1998, pp.
 174-187
Forster, Peter und Toth, Alfred, Toward a phylogenetic chronology of ancient Gaulish, Celtic, and Indo-European. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 100/15 (July 2003), pp. 9079-9084
Gostony, Colman-Gabriel, Dictionnaire d’etymologie sumerienne et grammaire comparee. Paris 1975
Gulya, Janos, Eastern Ostyak Chrestomathy. Bloomington 1966
Halloran, J.A. und Hamori, Fred, Sumir-Ural-Altaic Dictionary. http://www2.4dcomm.com
Katzschmann, Michael, Deutsch-nganasanisches Worterverzeichnis. Nganasanisches http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~mkatzsc/d2_a_h.htm
Lagercrantz, Eliel, Worterbuch des Sudlappischen. Oslo 1926
Lako, Gyorgy et al., A magyar szokeszlet finnugor elemei. 3 Bde. Budapest 1967-1978
Marcantonio, Angela, The Uralic language family. Oxford 2002
Molnar, Ferenc A., On the history of word-final vowels in the Permian languages. Szeged 1974
Munkacsi, Bernat and Kalman, Bela, Wogulisches Worterbuch. Budapest 1986
Neumann, W., Sistematikaline Eesti-Saksa Sonaraamat. Tallinnas 1923
Olah, Bela, Edes magyar nyelvunk szumer erdete. Buenos Aires 1980
Rabin, Chaim, Lexicostatistics and the internal divisions of Semitic. In: Bynon, James and Theodora (Hrsg.), Hamito-Semitica. The Hague, Paris 1975, pp. 85-99
Redei, Karoly, Northern Ostyak Chrestomathy. Bloomington 1965
Schulze, Brigitte, Der Wortparallelismus als ein Stilmittel der (nord-)ostjakischen Volksdichtung. Szeged 1988
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Sebeok, Thomas A. and Raun, Alo, The first Cheremis grammar (1775). Chicago 1956
Sebeok, Thomas A. and Zeps, Valdis J., Concordance and thesaurus of Cheremis poetic language. ’S-Gravenhage 1961
Steinitz, Wolfgang, Ostjakische Grammatik und Chrestomathie. Leipzig 1950
Swadesh, Morris, Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. In: International Journal of American Lingusitics 21, 1955, pp. 121-137
Swadesh-Liste Estnisch: http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/search/contribute/swadesh/view?ethnocode = EST
Swadesh-Liste Finnisch: http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/search/contribute/swadesh/view?ethnocode = FINN
Swadesh-Liste Mordwinisch: http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/search/contribute/swadesh/view?ethnocode = MYV (Erzya)
Szabo, Laszlo, Selkup texts. Bloomington 1967
Wichmann, Yrjo, Syrjanischer Wortschatz, hrsg. von T.E. Uotila. Helsinki 1942
Wiedemann, F.J., Syrjanisch-deutsches Worterbuch mit einem wotjakisch-deutschen Anhange. St.Petersburg 1880
Wiklund, K.B., Lule-Lappisches Worterbuch. Helsingfors 1890
Winkler, Eberhard, Udmurt. Munchen 2001
Zakar, Andras, A sumer nyelvbCl. Fahrwangen 1975
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The evaluation of the 12 Uralic lists results in the following percentages:

Hungarian = Vogul: 41%
Hungarian = Ostyak: 36%
Hungarian = Syryen: 34%
Hungarian = Votyak: 35%
Hungarian = Cheremis: 31%
Hungarian = Mordwin: 29%
Hungarian = Finnic: 33%
Hungarian = Estonian: 31%
Hungarian = Lapponic: 26%
Hungarian = Nganasan: 14%
Hungarian = Selkup: 12%
Average: 29.27%

Vogul = Ostyak: 59%
Vogul = Syryen: 28%
Vogul = Votyak: 32%
Vogul = Cheremis: 28%
Vogul = Mordwin: 22%
Vogul = Finnic: 30%
Vogul = Estonian: 29%
Vogul = Lapponic: 21%
Vogul = Nganasan: 15%
Vogul = Selkup: 13%
Average: 27.6%

Ostyak = Syryen: 31%
Ostyak = Votyak: 31%
Ostyak = Cheremis: 29%
Ostyak = Mordwin: 23%
Ostyak = Finnic: 25%
Ostyak = Estonian: 25%
Ostyak = Lapponic: 25%
Ostyak = Nganasan: 16%
Ostyak = Selkup: 11%
Average: 24.0%

- 33 -

Syryen = Votyak: 64%
Syryen = Cheremis: 33%
Syryen = Mordwin: 27%
Syryen = Finnic: 31%
Syryen = Estonian: 30%
Syryen = Lapponic: 23%
Syryen = Nganasan: 16%
Syryen = Selkup: 11%
Average: 29.38%

Votyak = Cheremis: 37%
Votyak = Mordwin: 30%
Votyak = Finnic: 34%
Votyak = Estonian: 35%
Votyak = Lapponic: 25%
Votyak = Nganasan: 14%
Votyak = Selkup: 12%
Average: 26.7 %

Cheremis (Mari) = Mordwin: 30%
Cheremis (Mari) = Finnic: 32%
Cheremis (Mari) = Estonian: 30%
Cheremis (Mari) = Lapponic: 26%
Cheremis (Mari) = Nganasan: 14%
Cheremis (Mari) = Selkup: 12%
Average: 24.0%

Mordwin = Finnic: 29%
Mordwin = Estonian: 25%
Mordwin = Lapponic: 23%
Mordwin = Nganasan: 12%
Mordwin = Selkuph: 11%
Average: 20.0%

Finnic = Estonian: 73%
Finnic = Lapponic: 34%
Finnic = Nganasan: 15%
Finnic = Selkup: 14%
Average: 34.0%
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Estonian = Lapponic: 31%
Estonian = Nganasan: 15%
Estonian = Selkup: 13%
Average: 19.67%

Laponic = Nganasan: 12%
Lapponic = Selkup: 8%
Average: 10.0%

Nganasan = Selkup: 22%
Average: 22.0%

Average Finno-Ugric: 31.91%
Average Uralic: 24.54%

Total average Finno-Ugric-Uralic: 23.33%

Generally, according to Swadesh (1955) a language keeps each 1000 years 86% from its vocabulary.

Therefore we get the following table:

 According to the calculated percentages, Proto-Uralic should have existed therefore about 9000 years ago. The separation of the Samoyed languages (Nganasan and Selkup) from Lapponic should have happened even about 11’000 years ago, i.e. still 2000 years before Proto-Uralic, whose members they are! As one can see very easily, both the hypothesis of a Finno-Ugric and of an Uralic language family lead themselves ad absurdum. Languages with such small common lexical stock can best be considered Sprachbunde (loose language complexes), but never language families. Principally, also the question arises, if it is possible to reconstruct languages at 11’000 and more years back. Concretely speaking, this would mean – since the Uralic languages are a member of the Nostratic “language family” -, that the latter must be still several thousands, if not ten-thousands of years older then Proto-Uralic: an assumption that very probably has to be considered in the light of glottogony as pure nonsense.
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4. Comparing Hungarian etymologies

from standard etymological dictionaries

We compare the etymologies of the 100 words in the basic Swadesh-List, as given in the following four standard Hungarian etymological dictionaries, whose abbreviations we use in the list that follows:

Barczi = Barczi, Geza: Magyar szofeitC szotar. Budapest 1941
BenkC 1 = BenkC, Lorand (ed.), A magyar nyelv torteneti-etimologiai szotara. Budapest 1967ff.
Lako = Lako Gyorgy (ed.), A magyar szokeszlet finnugor elemei. 3 vols. Budapest 1967ff.
BenkC 2 = BenkC, Lorand (ed.), Etymologisches Worterbuch des Ungarischen. 3 vols. Budapest 1992ff.

Further abbreviations:
UR = Uralic origin,
FU = Finno-Ugric origin,
U = Ugric origin,
Tu = borrowing from a Turk language (including Turkish),
Sl = borrowing from a Slavic language,
— = unknown or uncertain origin.
 = = (only in Lako) means, that the word in question is not present in all (or in none of) the UR or FU languages.

As usual, derivations do not count, i.e. only the etymology of the stem of a word is considered (ex. g. farok, ferfi, szemely, etc.) (This principle should be applied across the board, not only for selected topics).
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We now evaluate this list and show the development of Finno-Ugric linguistics in the past 65 years. Statistics of word origin brings the following results:

The same Barczi, according to whom only 61% of the basic vocabulary of Hungarian is shown here to be FU and U, asserted in his book “A magyar nyelv eletraja” (Budapest, 3 rd ed. 1975) that the share of FU or U words, respectively, is “not under 75%”.

Considering that UR was before the 4th millennium BC, FU about the 3rd mill. BC and U around the 1st mill. BC (cf. Istvan Fodor, Verecke hires utjan, Budapest 1975), between 13% and 15% of the Hungarian basic vocabulary ranges in a time space of not less than 3000 years (these are the “doubtful” words, that have been marked in the list by the question mark).

Despite (or because?) of increasing research in Samoyedic linguistics, the percentage of uncertain/unknown etymologies grew from 21% to 28%.

If one follows the very strict rules imposed to historical language comparison by Gerhard Doerfer in his article “Bemerkungen zur linguistischen Klassifikation” (“Remarks to linguistic classification”, in: Indogermanische Forschungen 76, 1971), only 8% of the Hungarian basic vocabulary have a “proven” UR, FU, or U origin, i.e. for 92% of the basic vocabulary there is nothing such as a “proof”, that UR or FU build a “language family” and U builds one of the nodes of this “family”. This goes together with the results of Angela Marcantonio in her article “A case study within Uralic” (2004): “The key Ugric node, on which the family was historically based, has never been reconstructed, and it is widely recognized that Hungarian is radically different in morphology, lexicon, and phonology from its supposed siblings in the Ugric node”.

In an earlier publication “Is there a Finno-Ugric or even an Uralic language family?” (2006), I have already demonstrated on the basis of the Hungarian basic words themselves, that there is neither an Uralic nor a Finno-Ugric family. In this present article I have shown, that according to the etymological reconstruction of the Hungarian basic vocabulary by the four standard etymological dictionaries, there isn’t either an Uralic nor a Finno-Ugric language family. Uralistics and Finno-Ugristics change their opinion about UR, FU, U, loanwords or uncertain and unknown origin of Uralic and Finno-Ugric works with each dictionary – without being able to show the reasons. Of these possible reasons is for sure not better insight on the basis of further results, since – as Marcantonio correctly remarked: “Most studies of the Uralic languages (...) do not state the sound-rules on which the correlations are supposed to be based”.

Therefore, the main result of the present study is, that Uralistics and Finno-Ugristics are pseudo-sciences that work on the basis of kling-klang-etymologies.
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15. Turkish and Hungarian

1. Introduction

To compare Turkish and Hungarian is kind of a risky business, since both languages claimed and still claim to be the inheritors of the Sumerians, the representatives of the first high culture on earth. For Turkish, one should consult the exhaustive study of Laut (2000), especially the chapters about the “Sun Theory” (Gunes Dil Teorisi) (Funny, the “Sun Theory” is well-known among special circles outside of the Türkic milieu, but remains totally unknown on the inside. Maybe it is a specialized bacteria that prays only on vulnerable linguists, who knows?). Therefore, it is not astonishing at all that amongst the abundance of comparative linguistic literature both on the Turkish and on the Hungarian side we find many treatises that have been written more or less openly with nationalistic purposes. Moreover, the oldest Turkish texts date from the 8th century BC (i.e. AD, and not 8th c., but 6th c.) and the oldest Hungarian texts from the 12th century BC (i.e. AD), while Sumerian was extinct already around 1800 BC, so that the time difference between the youngest Sumerian and the oldest Turkish and Hungarian testimonies, respectively, are rather enormous – not to speak about the philological problems involved in Sumerian. In order to avoid biased data, we thus compare again Turkish and Hungarian not directly, but via their common Sumerian roots, using Gostony (1975) for Sumerian and Hungarian and Sara (1994, 1999) for Hungarian and Turkish.

The following map shows how widespread the Turkic languages are:
(Omitted a faulty biased map from Wikipedia that misses Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tuva, East Turkistan, and many other areas)

In the following, I present 577 Hungarian-Sumerian-Turkish etymologies. Yet, in very few cases I have given a word from another member of the Turkic language family, when no Turkish etymology was at hand (e.g. (Chuv.), Chagatai, Yakut, Uighur), in one case (no. 722) (out of 577?) I have even added an obvious etymology by myself, since Sara must have forgotten it by chance. It must be pointed out, however, that the present work cannot and does not want to be a comparative dictionary of the Turkic languages. Whoever is interested in finding out, in which other Turkic languages than Turkish a certain reflex exists, should consult the excellent “Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages” by Starostin, Dybo and Mudrak (2003) with its 2800 etymologies (The Dictionary is based on a creationist family tree model, and must be taken with corrections to compensate for obvious bias).
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2. Hungarian-Sumerian-Turkish Etymologies
(additional/alternate Türkic correspondences are shown in Italic blue)