Hungarian
Ferenc KIEFER (1)
1. The identity
1.1. The name
The Hungarian call themselves magyar, which is an Ugric compound the first member being magy-, which means something like ‘ belonging to the Ugric people’. The second member goes back to er, eri meaning ‘ man’, magyar thus means ‘ Ugric man’. The name Hungarian has been derived from the Byzantine form ungr of the Bulgar-Turkic tribal name on-ogur ‘ ten Ogurs, ten tribes’. Cf. also Fr. hongrois, Germ. Ungar, Pol. Vengr.
1.2. The family affiliation
The Hungarian language belongs to the Uralic language family which has two main branches: Finno-Ugric and Samoyed. Finno-Ugric is further subdivided into Finno-Permian and Ugric. Hungarian is one of the Ugric languages, mainly spoken in the Carpathian Basin. It is the mother tongue of about 10 million in present-day Hungary and some 5 million outside of Hungary. Hungarian’s 15 million speakers account for more than half of all Uralic speakers.
1.2.1. Origin
The Urheimat of the Uralic people is assumed to have been north of the Central Ural moutains. In the third millenium B. C. the Finno-Ugric branch separated from the Samoyed branch and occupied the European side of the Ural mountains. The independent life of the Hungarian language must have started around the fifth century B. C. when the ‘ proto-Hungarians’ separated from the Ugric community and settled in the present-day area of Bashkiria. It was at that time that Hungarians came into close contact with various Turkic tribes. The migration continued and around the end of the 7th century Hungarians lived in the
(1) Ferenc Kiefer (Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Budapest University (ELTE)) obtained his PhD at the University of Szeged in 1964. In the 60s he held a research position at the Computing Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 1973 he moved to the Research Institute for Linguistics at the Academy. He was visiting professor at several universities (Stockholm, Paris, Stuttgart, Vienna). He is the author of several books and more than 200 articles written in Hungarian, English, French and German. He is also the editor and co-author of a fourvolume Hungarian grammar (1. Syntax, 2. Phonology, 3. Morphology and 4. Structure of the Lexicon). His latest work includes a book on modality and another one on aspect and aktionsarten. He is a member of several academies and learned societies and was director of the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 1992 and 2001 and chairman of the Section of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the Academy between 1999 and 2005.
