The Hungarian language belongs to the “Ugric” group of the Finno-Ugric language family. The oldest document written entirely in Hungarian is a funeral sermon (Sermo super sepulchrum), which dates back to 1295 and contains about 300 words; but already from the century. X we find Hungarian words from Byzantine authors and in various documents written in Latin and Greek on Hungarian territory.
The difference between the Hungarian in early documents and today’s is relatively small. This character of stability is also evident in the scarce dialectal division; this is partly explained by the fact that the dispersion of the Hungarians over such a vast European territory began just a millennium ago.
The generally accepted division of Hungarian dialects is that of J. Balassa, which is based on two main criteria: 1. the treatment of ë which is triple, because ë can be conserved, or become e or ö, eg. vizën “on the water”, in Debrecen vízen, in Seghedino vízön ; 2. the treatment of é. The literary language and a part of the linguistic domain have merged in é (and narrow long) both the ẹ and a ę some dialects instead maintain until today the difference between the two and, for ex.kêz (ké ??? z) “hand” (l. lit. kéz), but szép “beautiful” (l. lit. =); others have brought ê (ę) to é (ẹ), but at the same time they have closed é (ẹ) in í ; for example. in the northern region of Tisza we have kéz “mano” ma szíp”nice”. Based especially on these two characteristics, the Balassa divided the Hungarian dialects into eight groups: 1. Western; 2. beyond the Danube; 3. of the Alföld; 4. of the Danube and Tisza; 5. north-west; 6. north-east; 7. from Transylvania; 8. of the Sicilians (Szekler) of Transylvania. For Hungary religion and languages, please check ezinereligion.com.
Among the characteristics of Hungarian within the Finno-Ugric languages we will mention the following:
In phonetics a good preservation of vowel harmony (with the presence, however, of “neutral” vowels that can agree with both palatal and velar vowels and with the complication of triple series, one of which for the chord with labial vowels; cf. harmony: Vowel Harmony IV, p. 527 and examples therein). In consonantism the following correspondences are especially notable: ugrof. * k (velar)> ungh. h (ant. ungh. ch = χ): e.g., ungh. három “three” (ant. Hungarian charmul); vot. kur ə m ; sir. kujim ; finn. kolmo, etc .; ugrof. * s-> ø (zero), p. ex. ungh. ín “nerve, sinew” sir. sen, vote sen ; ugrof. * š -> ø (zero), p. ex. ungh. egér “mouse”, cf. mordv. š ej ə ř, finn. hiire -; ugrof. * – t -> ungh. z, e.g. ungh. haz “home”, cf. ost. χ òt ; finn. kota. Like the Permian languages (see Permians, XXVI, p. 777), Hungarian also has the loss of the nasal in Ugric connections. * η g ~ * η g > g; * nt ~ * nd > d; * mt ~ * md > d; * mp ~ * mb > b; * n ′ d ′ z ′ ~ gy: p. eg., ungh. ág “branch”, sir. vug, vot. vug, but finn. onke – gen. ongen.
In morphology, the Hungarian retains very well several of the most important peculiarities of the Ugricinnico, p. ex. possessive suf6sis: first pers. sing. ugrof. * – m > ungh. – m, p. ex. kez – ëm “my hand” vár – om “my fortress” (pl. kez – e – i – m “my hands” in which – i – is the index of the plur.). First ps. plur. ugrof. * m. k (i.e. – m index of the first person and – k index of plural)> ungh. – nk, p. ex. kez – ünk “our hand” (pl. kezeink “our hands”). The second-person singular possessive – d comes from an expanded form * nt ~ * nd and not from simple * t (> og. Te “you”), p. ex. keze – d “your hand”. The second person plural is formed in ugrof. from * t. k (i.e. – t of the second person singular – k index of the plural). Hence ungh. – tok, – tëk, – tökfor the triple chord of vowel harmony, eg. atyátok “your father”, kezetëk “your hand” börtönötök “your prison”. In the third person pronouns, Hungarian differs from the other Finno-Ugric languages.
In the formation of the comparative the nail. ha – bb ⟨ugrof. * – mp / mb: see ungh. gyors “fast” comp. gyorsabb.
The Hungarian declension (if such it can be called in a Finno-Ugric language) is formed by simple postpositions; 21 cases are distinguished. Some of the postpositions were originally adverbs or even true nouns; p. eg, to indicate the locative, the Ugrinic had an ending * – n which is continued in Hungarian to indicate the superessive (meaning “on the surface of a place and not inside”, eg vízën “on the water”); but to indicate state in place we use now – ben / – ban, p. ex. vízben “in the water”; su – well he then stopped – ban for the chord with velar vowels. L’and therefore does not correspond to the accusative ugrof. which was characterized, like the Indo-European one, by * – m. Budenz demonstrated very well that the Hungarian accusative – t derives from a demonstrative – * tä (from which also the postponed definite article of the mordvino comes).
In verbal conjugation we find two types; one “subjective” and one “objective”; the first is used when no reference is made to an object or when the third person object is indeterminate or finally when the object is first or second person and the subject is third. The second type is used when the object is a third person and is determined; then there is also a form of objective conjugation for the object of second person singular and plural, but it is, in Hungarian, limited to the first person singular only. As for the use of the two types of conjugation, it would be too complicated to explain it here; this example suffices: I will say várok “I wait” (with subjective) when I do not specify what I am waiting for; I will also say embert várok “I ‘mwaiting for a man” because the object is indeterminate, but I’ll say várom a barátomat ” I ‘m waiting for my friend” with the form of the con. objective because in this case the object is determined. In objective conjugation the outputs correspond to those of possessives, p. ex. várom “I (it) wait” cf. barátom “my friend”; várod “you (it) wait” cfr. barátod “your friend”; várja “he awaits him” cf. barátja “his friend”, etc. This coincidence has made some authors support the so-called possessive theory of the verb, for which a form like várom it would have originally meant “my waiting”. The objective conjugation of Finno-Ugric languages, despite being found in the three Ugric languages and in Mordvino, does not seem to go back to the Protougro-Ugric language. The studies of J. Melich (A magyar tárgyas igeragozás [The Hungarian objective conjugation], Budapest 1914) lead us to believe that the objective conjugation of Ugrian languages is completely independent from that of the Mordvino.
As for the lexicon, Hungarian retains a relatively small number of Finno-Ugric elements. Most of the lexicon is made up of elements borrowed over the centuries, which can be divided into two broad categories: 1. elements borrowed before the arrival of the Hungarians in the current European headquarters; 2. elements borrowed after the settlement of the Hungarians in historic Hungary.
Among the first, the most important are the Bulgarian-Turkish elements, due to the coexistence of the ancestors of the Hungarians with a people who spoke a Turkish language of type s, which presented the rotaxism of – z- intervocalic, and must have been very similar to the ‘today’s ciuvascio (v. Turks, languages). It is probable that a part of these Bulgarian-Turks merged with the progenitors of the Hungarians and that this merger led to a change of civilization, transforming the Hungarian people who were perhaps, like their closest relatives Voguli and Ostiachi, a people devoted to hunting and fishing, in an agricultural and warrior people. This is especially evident from an examination of the Bulgarian-Turkish elements of Hungarian, from which it appears that the main terms relating to agriculture and livestock farming, as well as many war terms, are of Bulgarian-Turkish origin (e.g., búza “wheat” árpa “barley”, eke “plow” sarló “sickle”, alma “apple”, szöllö“grape”, szüret “harvest” bor “wine”, etc.).
Also very ancient are some loans, much more obscure, taken from Osseto, p. ex. asszony “lady” ⟨Obs. tagaunico äxsin, äfsin “master of the house”; hid “bridge”> Obs. tag. xid, etc.
Among the influences suffered after arriving in European offices, the most important is certainly the Slavic one. Almost all of the terminology of Christianity is of Slavic origin, p. ex. kereszt “cross” ⟨sl. kr ĭ st ŭ ; etc. Also many items related to political organization such as király “re” ⟨sl. kralj, etc., are of Slavic origin. Another very strong influence, although certainly not like the Slavic one, is the German one, which began to penetrate since the time of the Árpád through the knights, priests and numerous settlers who came to Hungary (cf. polgár “citizen, bourgeois”, German model Bürger). A purely cultural influence is that due to Latin which was the language generally used for public acts, teaching, etc. Among the Romance voices there are some words derived from French already at the time of the French Queen Margaret, second wife of Béla III and daughter of Louis VII, and an even more important, but still not sufficiently studied nucleus of voices penetrated by Italian, either directly or through Croatian (eg, paizs “shield” ⟨pavese; pálya “road, street, course” ⟨palio, etc.). In the second half of the century. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Hungarian language was enriched with many new formations due to the trend of “linguistic renewal” (ungh. Nyelvújitás).
A highly cultured language, Hungarian in turn exerted a considerable influence on the languages of the finite peoples and especially on those of the minorities living in historic Hungary; so many Hungarian elements are found in Romanian, Slovak and Croatian.
