JÓZSEF'S SERMON ON LANGUAGE HISTORY (AND MORE)

JÓZSEF'S SERMON ON LANGUAGE HISTORY (AND MORE) ON

(This is a stylized and expanded English version of a facebook post I published in Magyar yesterday.) It is about a discovery of some significance for students of the history of the Hungarian language that I came across recently. If this kind of stuff doesn't excite you, feel free to skip it.

So.

Although Hungarian public culture insists Magyar is a "small" language ("small" people, "small" nation, etc.), it is more accurate to describe it as a mid-size language: With its number of speakers between 12 and 13 million, it ranks 92th among the 6000-6500 tongues of the world. Not too small at all.

Magyar is an Uralic > Finno-Ugric language. Based on evidence pertaining to its fundamental grammatical features, Magyar has some reasonably well documented linguistic relatives; closest among them are Hanti and Mansi, two small indigenous languages in western Siberia. Finnish, Estonian and Saami are also related to Magyar but they are more distant. There are no easy cognates for native speakers of Hungarian, nothing like the Neo-Latin or the Slavic groups. Magyar has vastly more loan words from neighboring Slavic languages, Latin or German than Finno-Ugric word stems. But the vocabulary that is of Finno-Ugric origins, pertains to the most central aspects of life (the basic nouns and verbs, numerals, etc.)

The area that is considered "Hungary" today became really monolingual only recently, due primarily to the last century's politically and socially enforced, insane linguistic nationalism after world war 1, when the borders of today's Hungary were drawn such that most of the ethnically mixed areas went to its neighbors. So, most of historical Hungary's plurilingual population ended up being citizens of the neighboring countries, and even Budapest--until the early 20th century a predominantly German-speaking, with Croat, Romanian, Serb, and Slovak, Yiddish, etc. having a significant presence--became monolingual Magyar.

For centuries, written evidence that could be used as a basis for reconstructing the history of the Magyar language come basically from Latin documents--codices as well as royal and other edicts, contracts, diplomas, and various other accounts--as they are sometimes interspersed with notes, explanations, etc. by the people who served as scribes. (Latin was of course the language of the Roman Catholic Church until very recently--and of the state in this part of the world well into the 19th century.) One key source of Magyar is place names, either as they exist up till today's spoken practice or, in historic forms, as they had been inserted into Latin documents (e.g., property deeds, etc.).

There is an inherent instability to this kind of evidence. Sometimes source evidence is overlooked because people who handle the diplomas neglect to take notice of scribblings (say, because they are overleaf), or because the librarian / archivist doesn't speak Magyar, so they would just shrug it off as "unknown language" or "illegible markings", etc.

One of the most fascinating things I learned in my modest studies in historical linguistics was how dependent scholarship concerning not only the history of any language--including Magyar--but also the current "norm" language, the various dialects and argots is on a relatively small number of AVAILABLE early written documents. The earlier written records, the more significant they may be in determining the state-of-the-art of linguistic knowledge.

In the case of Magyar, the list of available documents start with the famous Founding Deed of the Abbey of Tihany (on lake Balaton), issued in 1055CE. That contains a host of place names and a few geographcial pointers. This is remarkably early find, given that the medieval Hungarian state was established, and Christianity adopted, only 55 years earlier, in 1000CE.

Facsimile of the Founding Deed of the Abbey of Tihany (1055CE)

(source: Wikimedia Commons)

The second earliest known document containing Magyar elements, a funeral sermon, is estimated to date from 1192-1195. This is the oldest available text that is in Magyar in its entirety. Its 26 lines contain 190 words in Magyar.

The earliest known poem is the Old-Hungarian Lament of Mary--it is from the 13th century.

Why am I suddenly reminded of all this?

Clearly, the "appearance" of a "new"--i.e., hitherto unknown--document, or one that has been registered but has not been properly evaluated / interpreted for its Magyar linguistic content--could re-write large parts of what we seem to know about the language. Of course this is true of any language--it's just that I have had exposure in this odd Uralic-Finno-Ugric case, called "Magyar." It is likely that relatively large numbers of documents, especially little used codices held in various repositories away from central Europe, have fragments of Magyar texts, so it is possible that there might be interesting discoveries.

So, as it turns out, there's been recent a discovery of a stash of documents that contain Magyar evidence. They are part of the over 3000 (!) item archive of what used to be the Margaret Island (earlier: Rabbit Island, today, essentially, a large-ish and very pleasant park between Buda and Pest, in the middle of the Danube, north of Margaret Bridge) Dominican Cloister. (Only the ruins of the cloister are there today.) Make a long story short, these documents seem to contain as many as 138 (!!) instances of Magyar texts. They are dated in the early 16th century--i.e., they are not that old, but . . . well, pretty old. They contain place names as well as references to various issues in taxation and property. They reflect multiple handwriting styles and dialects (!).

I find it amazing that this can actually happen to the supposedly "modern" (i.e., stable and highly normalized) language of a supposedly "modern" culture and society. It is fascinating that pure luck (what document goes through whose hands when) can re-write received knowledge about various significant aspects of history and the present--in their CONNECTEDNESS. This realization came to me first when I was a student at Debrecen University in the seventies. . . and my excitement at age 21 probably has something to do with my having become a historical sociologist later on, after all.

Anyway, the little, relatively pedantic and likely rather insignificant "cultural" news of the discovery of the stash of Dominican documents with Magyar vocabulary references reminded me how dynamic knowledge, even scholarly knowledge is, how desperately reliant we are on a few--really, a small handful--of sources of evidence, and how exciting all that is.

All this is absolutely relevant to historical sociology, mind you. About that, . . . later.

JÓZSEF'S SERMON ON LANGUAGE HISTORY (AND MORE) OFF