The Ugric-Turkic Infinity War
Background:
It had been taken for granted that there was an
Eastern homeland of Hungarians somewhere in the Ural mountains called Yugria.
This belief was based on a simple similarity between the toponym Yugria and the
ethnonym hungarus. In addition, a population was found in the area which called
themselves Mansi. A connection between Mansi and magyar was immediately
established and considered as strong evidence for the Finno-Ugric or Uralic theory.
Weapons:
In this battle commander Budenz tried out a new
weapon called Comparative Method, however as it was new, it wasn’t worked out well
yet. In this way, Budenz didn’t apply it correctly or he didn’t apply it at all.
On the Turkic front line commander Vambery and
his soldiers tried to defend the thesis that Hungarians were of Turkic origin,
however their weapons were outdated. Vambery’s method of Turkish-Tatar word
comparison to Hungarian was severely criticised by Budenz.
Arguments:
So, the Turkic front fought for the Turkic
origin of Hungarians while the Ugric front using ‘scientific-looking weapons’
insisted that the Turkish elements were only loan-words in Hungarian.
Results:
At the time of the battle, many Hungarian
rejected the possibility of a relationship with poor people with a ‘fish fat
smell’ and fought for the ‘glorious Turkish origin’. The battle got a
sentimental taste from the Turkic front and for that reason it was easy to win
them from the Ugric front. It’s fine that ratio wins over sentiment in a
scientific battle, however in this case there was no ratio as we shall see.
It was widely believed that the existence of
the Finno-Ugric family was proven beyond doubt first. Otto Donner’s works gave
rise to the Uralic family noticing relationship between the Samoyed languages
and the Finno-Ugric family. In this way, the Uralic theory has arisen.
It is still believed that the languages of the
Yugria area (Vogul or Mansi, Ostyak) and Hungarian form the conventional Ugric
node even if it is generally recognized that Hungarian is radically different
from the Ugric languages. It is radically different in phonology, morphology,
lexicon and syntax. Hungarian is different in every aspect of the language! Cannot
the winner Ugric front see it? Of course, they can! But where is it written that
the truth must be the winner? The winner is the more politically correct one,
the convenient one, not the true one.
The battle is over but the war goes on…
The truth is that Budenz has not claimed there
is no genetic relationship between Hungarian and Turkic. He imagined a big
picture: a Ural-Altaic language family. He simply argued that Hungarian was
more closely related to the Ugric node, instead of to the Altaic languages.
However, this view lost its validity in the modern theory and now usually the
Uralic languages are usually considered unrelated to the Altaic languages. As
one consequence, words of Turkic origin in Hungarian now are classified as
loan-words instead of cognates.
Budenz argued that most of the correspondences
proposed by Vambery are wrong, but not all of them. But how did he make his judgement?
Unfortunately, no criteria has found how Budenz decided if a correspondence was
a cognate or loan-word. Moreover, many
words in the Budenz corpus for which he tried to find Finnic or Ugric
parallels, are wrong according to UEW, the Uralic Etymological Dictionary. In
addition, Budenz didn’t specify the sound-rules which he worked with to
establish the Hungarian/Ugric correspondences. He often cheated a little bit to
win the battle: he stretched the meanings of some words and gave a set of
parallels without any reasonable explanation in order to get the desired
correspondence. On the contrary, the
Hungarian-Turkic parallels have basically the same meaning and similar
sound-shape. Actually, the Budenz corpus turned out to be of very poor quality.
81% of his correspondences are not considered valid any more in the modern
literature.
This is how the Finno-Ugric and Uralic theory
was established. It was founded on a very weak basis, but it is still alive and
it is still believed that it was well-founded.
Isn’t it time to demolish it and build a new one on a strong basis?