Re: Finno-Ugric languages

At 11:01 -0400 on 19.9.1998, Sally Caves wrote:


> On Fri, 18 Sep 1998, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>
> > Firstly, the Huns have nothing to do with Magyars (ie, Hungarians).  The
> > Huns were Turkic.  Second, the Danube basin was inhabited by Avars at the
> > time of the Magyar honfoglala's (Occupation of the Homeland) in 896.  At
> > that time there weren't any Slavs there at all; the Slavs were to the
> > south.
> >
> > -------ferke
> > Ferenc Gy. Valoczy
>
> At one time, however, the Magyars must have been associated with the Huns.
> Who applied, and when, the name *Hun*gary?
There is, in a way, a double answer to this:

1) The Magyars at some time belonged to, or even constituted, a federation
of tribes that other tribes, who were Turkic, called *Onogur*.  Apparently
Byzantine Greeks first heard about the Magyars second-hand from Turkic
informants already before they entered Pannonia, and so that name in
various distortions stuck to them in Southern Europe.  (The Byzantine
writers do however refer to the ruling group among the "Ongori" as
"Magoires"!)
2) When the Magyars conquered Pannonia they also inherited the Avars'
intermittent warring with the Germans (who were at this same time emerging
as the German nation in the modern sense of the term).  German clerics
writing in Latin retrofitted the name of the Huns -- another, Turkic, tribe
of nomadic horse-borne warriors that had arrived by the same route five
centuries earlier and fought against the ancestors of the Germans -- to the
Magyars.  Later someone somewhere blended the two words, adding the H of
the word "Hunni" to the word "Ongarii".  Italians and Frenchmen didn't
pronounce the H of Latin anyway, and werent very particular about where
they put or omitted that letter.  The Germans, however, once they learned
the "true" Greek and Latin name for the new people adopted it in the form
"Ungarn", without any intrusive H.

Why, then, were the Magyars never called "Magarii" or something similar in
Latin?  I don't know for sure, but chances are that once the early Magyars
had been converted to Christianity and adopted Medieval European culture
they acknowledged and took pride in the Onogur name and didn't mind its
being used about them.  I don't think Magyars generally mind being called
(H)Ungarians in other languages even now.

/BP


B.Philip. Jonsson <bpj@...>

Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant (Tacitus)
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