Hungarians and Etruscans I.
Those Very Special Moments...;
At very special moments in my life - when I hear a good story or come across an interesting theory - I get a warm feeling inside my veins and my head starts to spin. At various occasions I have tried to talk with people about this particular experience, and I discovered that nobody seems to know exactly what I am talking about. Am I the only one with such feelings? They are really physically noticeable, akin to what one may experience during a neck massage at the physiotherapist. I get this feeling whenever I write and get totally absorbed in my story. Already at elementary school I periodically experienced it, specially during a history lesson or when my beloved sixth grade teacher would be comparing languages. I had it at high school when my German Lehrer discussed the different Germanic dialects. Later at college it would often come while I listened to my Latin lecturer. Have I become addicted to it? I wonder how much it may have influenced my drive to study the Hungarian language...Hungarian in the Ancient Times
The Etruscans
At the gymnasium we heard apart from the Greek and the Romans also about other people from Asia Minor and Italy. We learned that the Skyths were, like the Hungarians masters of wrought iron and wage war with bow and arrow and travelled around North of the Black sea on horseback. The area where according to Greek writers only barbarians lived. We also read about the fight of the Greeks against the Persians and of the Romans against the Phoenicians and the Etruscans. The Etruscans were already in 280 BC defe/?ated by the Romans. What was left was a lot of beautiful sculptures but only a few texts. On the basis of this little material it was quite impossible to decipher the language.Hungarian
This all is mighty interesting material but all the same I´ve put those dead languages at the university aside because I came, by accident in contact with another mighty interesting and quite complicated, obviously very ancient but still living language. It gives an enormous satisfaction to learn this language. And it turns out that the people who speak this language are kind and hospitable, they cook fantastic and make outstanding wines. That´s why over 25 years I´ve been grabbed by this language, Hungarian.Recently there was in my surrounding a quiz with questions like e.g. to which language family the Hungarian language traditionally belongs. A few gave a rather correct answer and said something like Ugric-Finn or Finnugric. Others came only with Finnish, they have vaguely heard about a well-known theory. Very few came with Asia as an answer which is in fact quite a good answer, at least according to the traditional Finno-Ugric linguistics and also according to a group of experts and hobbyists who have kept themselves busy in the last decades to find the link between Hungarian and languages like Sumerian, Skythian and the early Turkish (Altaic) language.
The roots of Hungarian
During the Middle Ages the Hungarians thought, according to chronicles, they were related to the Skythen with whom they had a lot in common from cultural point of view. Examples of this one can find in their art of wrought iron and the turul, a mythological bird which plays a very important /?role in old stories by the people of the steppe and also by the Hungarians. Later from mid- nineteenth century one started to search, and to believe in a pure Finno-Ugric origin. Although quite a lot of scientists and publishers harp on the many similarities between the Sumerian, the Turkish and the Hungarian language, the Finn-Ugric story is still the accepted theory at the Hungarian Academy of Science.Finn-Ugric theory
All the course books for the Hungarian lesson, also ours starts with a sketch of the origin of the language from the Finno-Ugric perspective and one writes about the peregrination of the Hungarian tribes. They should have been separated from other Ugric-speaking people (Mansi and Chanti) about 2500 year ago and went more south-west over the Ural to the region Bashkirs.From this point of view the Finns should have gone to the North much earlier, (about 4000 years ago) the reindeer following via the river Volga to the Baltic Sea in North Europe Resent genetic research has more or less proved the Finn seclusion.
The Finnish people come from a small group.
The people from Finland are for the biggest part offspring of a small group of farmers who settled about 4000 year ago. That explained why certain genetically illnesses are so common in Finland whilst they are almost unknown in other European countries. This is what researchers under the leading of geneticist Svante Pääbo from the university in München wrote in an article in PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES of 15 October 2004. Co-workers examined genetic variations in the Y-chromosome and in the mitochondrical-DNA of 54 Finnish persons and 28 Laplanders and compared them /?with variations by other European people. Analyses showed that the Finnish patterns of mutations are almost homogeneous and there are fewer variations by the Laplanders. That suggests that the actual population in total descended from one small group.Researchers estimate the period this genetical ´bottleneck´ happened about 4000 years ago.
A little message from a Dutch newspaper, which proves that the Finnish people come from a separate source.
All this is hard to prove but one can link the Hungarian vocabulary together with the wanderings of the Hungarian tribes.
The Finnish and the Hungarian language should have come from common ancestors and have a common basic vocabulary. These are mainly everyday words that have to do with the body and the natural surrounding of hunters and fishermen. One always comes up with examples like (Finnish or Hungarian): kala - hal (fish), kolme - három (three) and so on.
Continue Reading in part II
