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 als
