Towards Eurasian Linguistic Isoglosses: the case of Turkic and Hungarian

388 Pages·2015·133.534 MB·English

by  László Marácz

International Turkic Academy
Prof. Dr. Läszlö Maräcz
TOWARDS EURASIAN LINGUISTIC
ISOGLOSSES:
THE CASE OF TURKIC AND HUNGARIAN
House Gylynr
Astana-2015
UDC 80/81
LBC 81.2
L 35
International Turkic Academy
Prof. Dr. LASZLO MARACZ
L 35 TOWARDS EURASIAN LINGUISTIC ISOGLOSSES: THE CASE
OF TURKIC AND HUNGARIAN - Astana: House Gylym, 2015. —
384 p.
ISBN 978-601-7793-08-1
In this book, Laszlo Maracz introduces a new approach to the Ural-Altaic language
classification. The book entitled Towards Eurasian Linguistic Isoglosses: the Case of
Turkic and Hungarian' (henceforth 'Towards Eurasian Linguistic Isoglosses . ' abbreviated
asTELI) develops a theory of linguistic relations across language families based on the idea
of linguistic isoglosses. Maracz argues against the traditional classification ofHungarian as
an Uralic/Finno-Ugric language.
According to him, there are no convincing arguments to justify a classification in
terms of a tree diagram and to embed the presupposed Uralic/Finno-Ugric languages in
this structure. The tree diagram theory misinterprets important core linguistic features
of the Hungarian language and also makes strong claims about the relations between
languages in this language family that are not supported by empirical data. Further, this
theory degenerates “deep” linguistic contacts between Hungarian and Turkic to secondary
unidirectional borrowings from Turkic into Hungarian. Again, this is not confirmed by
the empirical data. There are a number of lexical, morphological and syntactic parallels
between Hungarian and Turkic which are of a more fundamental nature. As a consequence,
Maracz also rejects the classification of Turkic into “West” and “East” Turkic considering
the Chuvash-Hungarian correspondences and Hungarian borrowings into Chuvash.
In earlier work, Hungarian scholars, i.e. the Central Asianists have been studying the
history, archeology and languages of Central Asia and have opposed the one-sided Nordic
explanation, i.e. the Uralic/Finno-Ugric cradle of the ancient Hungarian language. TELI
revises and reinterprets earlier discoveries made by famous Turkologists, like Armin
Vambery and coins the Central Asian proto-variant of Hungarian ‘Ugor-Magyar Proto­
language'. TELI demonstrates convincingly that the paleolinguistic methodology is
insufficient and that it is safer to set up an integrative interdisciplinary research framework
in which linguistic, historical and archeological data simultaneously provide evidence for
the same conclusions.
UDC 80/81
LBC 81.2
ISBN 978-601-7793-08-1 © Laszlo Maracz, 2015
© International Turkic Academy, 2015
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION....................................................................................4
PART ONE...............................................................................................35
Chapter One: Ideological background of the Ural-Altaic language
classification.............................................................................................,35
Chapter Two: Methodological aspects of the Ural-Altaic language
classfication..............................................................................................69
Chapter Three: The root system of Hungarian and the Czuczor-Fogarasi
dictionary.................................................................................................85
PART TWO.............................................................................................. 106
Chapter Four: On the status of the so-called Old Turkic loan words
in Hungarian.............................................................................................,106
Chapter Five: Comparing Ural-Altaic basic vocabulary.........................,120
Chapter Six: Ural-Altaic basic lexical affinities...................................... 133
PART THREE..........................................................................................,173
Chapter Seven: Hungarian-Chuvash linguistic affinities..........................173
Charter Eight: Explaining the Hungarian-Chuvash linguistic affinities ...190
PART FOUR............................................................................................,224
Chapter Nine: Towards a theory of Ural-Altaic linguistic areas..............,224
Chapter Ten: Morphological affinities in the domain of Ural-Altaic
languages...................................................................................................248
Chapter Eleven: The Ugor-Magyar proto-language revisited...................275
CONCLUSIONS.......................................................................................293
APPENDIX I: Some General Features of Uralic Languages...................316
APPENDIX Ila: Complete List of Lexical Items in the Lako-Redei
Dictionary.................................................................................................321
APPENDIX lib: List of Roots in the Lako-Redei Dictionary..................334
APPENDIX III: Ural-Altaic Lexical Affinities in the Domain
of Kinship Terms, Body Parts Terms, and Numerals................................342
REFERENCES.........................................................................................347
INDEX OF NAMES.................................................................................378
INTRODUCTION
In this book, I will argue that the so-called Uralic/Finno-Ugric language
classification is untenable. There are serious arguments for rejecting this
taxonomy both on internal grounds and external ground. Among the
internal arguments is the fact that the historical-comparative method that
has been used to “prove” genetic relationships is not really working for the
Uralic/Finno-Ugric language family. The technical elaborations runs into a
number of problems that I will discuss in the course of this book. To mention
a few. The distribution of words over the so-called Uralic/Finno-Ugric
language family is defective. Quite often Hungarian has only one lexical
correspondence with another Uralic/Finno-Ugric language. This fact does
not exclude the option that such lexical correspondences are produced
by mere chance. The question also arises why lexical correspondences in
other hypothesized subgroups, like Finnic, Volgaic, Ob-Ugric and so on
are "missing”. Why is it that frequently only one of the members of these
subgroups have preserved the so-called lexical “correspondence”? The so-
called sound laws are not really "laws”; they over- and undergenerate.
There are always exception to the sound laws. This should not be the
case in a historical-comparative linguistic derivation. The Uralic/Finno-
Ugric paradigm is built on circulus vitiosis, i.e. circle reasoning and other
logical inconsequence’s. Important “generalizations" are missed, like the
root system of Hungarian that should be the basis of any relevant analysis
of the Hungarian vocabulary, morphological system and its system of
cognates with other languages.
From an "external” point of view it is clear that the linguistics relations
between Hungarian and the Altaic languages, especially with Turkic are
impressive. Due to the Uralic/Finno-Ugric classification these linguistic
relations are only qualified as “secondary” in mainstream linguistics.
The argumentation is that Hungarian is a Uralic/Finno-Ugric language
and hence any other linguistic relationships is by definition of an inferior
"borrowing” nature instead of a possible genetic relationship. In this book,
1 will attempt to demonstrate that Hungarian-Turkic linguistic relations,
i.e. both lexical and morphological are df a “deep" nature. I will argue that
serious generalizations have been missed and that it is fully unmotivated
to disconnect the ties between Hungarian and Turkic, i.e. more precise
between their proto-variants. A certain conservatism in scientific research
is well-motivated but if a paradigm makes completely wrong predictions
that cannot be accounted for in a rational manner it is high time - and I will
argue that this is the case after 240 years of research of which the last 140
years with full professional scientific equipments - to draw the conclusion
that exclusive research of Uralic/Finno-Ugric linguistic has not fulfilled
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the objectives, i.e. the isolation of a Uralic/Finno-Ugric people speaking
one and the same Uralic/Finno-Ugric Ursprache in a geographically
well-defined territory, the so-called Uralic/Finno-Ugric Urheimat. Hence,
this will open the possibility for the developments of other theoretical
frameworks that are able to cover Uralic and Altaic linguistic contacts,
and also other simultaneous linguistic contacts, with the Indo-European
languages for example, i.e. both its “Western”, Balto-Slavic variants and
its “Eastern” Indo-lranian variants. In any case, it is reasonable to suppose
that these early language contacts are rooting in Central Asian space and in
the Scythian-Sarmatian times. I will argue that it is motivated to revise the
theory of an Early Central Asian Sprachbund in the sense of the Hungarian
"Central-Asianists” that were researching along these lines in the second
half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century
and to postulate an early variant, a so-called proto-variant of Hungarian,
the 'Magyar-Ugor Ursprache’, that included apart from the ancestors of
the Hungarian language the languages that have been classified in the
‘Oghur’-group within the Turkic language family, such as Khazar, Avar,
Bulgar, Onogur, Sabir, and so on.1 Furthermore, I will provide arguments
for the Early Central Asian Sprachbund and the Magyar-Ugor Ursprache
not only from linguistics but also from other disciplines, in the first place
from history and archeology. Instead of the paleolinguistic approach that
has dominated Uralic/Finno-Ugric research tradition I will adopt the view
that linguistic results are better founded theoretically, if these results are
combined and integrated into a theory with the results of history and
archeology.
In this introduction, I will briefly discuss the two approaches that
are confronted in this book. The so-called ‘linguistic tree' approach of
the German linguistic August Schleicher (1821-1868) and the so-called
linguistic area and contact’ approach of the Russian émigré linguist
Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938). The discussion will be
illustrated on the basis of the so-called ‘Indo-European’ language family.
Further, I will carry the discussion over to the Uralic and Altaic language
families and 1 will conclude that it is more fruitful to operate with seven
categories, including Finnic, Ob-Ugric, Hungarian, Samoyedic, Turkic,
Mongolian and Tungusic. This is the methodological guiding principle
that I will elaborate on in this book. In the second part of the introduction
1 will discuss the content of this book chapter-by-chapter.
' The self-denomination of the Hungarians in their own language is 'Magyar'. The
Hungarians are known by the outside world, that is in other European languages in
reference to themselves or to their language as a variant of 'Hungarian’, compare French
'hongrois’. German 'Ungam’, Russian 'vengr'. and so on. Throughout this book I will
use both the external and self-denominations, that is 'Hungarian' and ‘Magyar’ without
difference. Hence. 1 will not replace in historically established phrases, like 'Magyar-Ugor'
I’roto-language "Magyar’ with "Hungarian’.
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Linguistic trees versus linguistic areas
In this book, I will confront two approaches to linguistic correspondences
in the Eurasian space. The first one is the postulation of genetic relations
and the framing of relations on the basis of the classical binary branching
family tree theory developed in the work of August Schleicher (1821-1868)
in reference to the so-called Indo-European languages. The alternative
interpretation of linguistic correspondences in terms of the Sprachbund or
linguistic area theory has been developed by the so-called Prague School
of which the two most important representatives were the Russian émigré
linguists Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson (1896-
1982). Before we explore the linguistics affinities between the Uralic and
Altaic languages let us first have a closer look into the hypothesis of the
Indo-European genetic language family.
The idea to postulate a tree diagram of descent for language family
groups was originally put forward in the work of August Schleicher.2
Already in his early work on the lexical and morphological connections
between Indo-European languages the idea of ‘language hierarchy’
played an important role. Note that this idea was widely shared in his
age. In Schleicher's Die Sprachen Europas in Systematischer Uebersicht
( Schleicher 1850,1,8-9) he clearly adhered to the idea of ranking languages
according to the linguistic type. Schleicher (1850, 1, 8-9) assumed that
languages with inflection were superior to agglutinative languages and
that these languages were in their turn superior to monosyllabic languages
(Toman 1995, 197). The idea that there was a naturalistic evolution among
languages was also elaborated for the several stages of lineages within a
group of related languages. Schleicher and his followers argued that related
languages that were determined on the basis of lexical and morphological
correspondences in which the so-called ‘sound laws’ in the sense of Jacob
Grimm (1785-1863) could be attested were linked by these sound laws
via intermediate stages; and finally all the languages and intermediate
forms were derived from the so-called Ursprache, the original language,
i.e. the proto-language. According to Morpurgo-Davies (1998, 285), the
assumption of Schleicher’s family tree has the following consequences:
(1)
1. Languages or dialects were self-contained units easily identifiable.
2. After a language had split into two, no further contact between the
two separate linguistic communities is normally assumed.
3. Related languages would progressively diverge but never
converge.
4. In order to establish whether two languages belonged to the same
2 See for further discussion of Schleicher’s ideas on historical linguistics Koemer (1987),
Morpurgo-Davies (1998, 170-171) and Gante (2003).
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branch, shared innovations mattered more than the preservation of
inherited features.
Note that there is an inherent paradox in this program. The explanation
of linguistic relatedness took place in terms of divergence, i.e. the
divergences between two individual languages could yield the assumption
of two genetically related languages. To this divergence it must be added
that languages had to differ in a systematic way to suppose that they had
originated from the same source. These systematic differences between
the Ursprache and the intermediate layers of language stages were linked
by the so-called sound laws referred to above. However, especially in the
field of the lexicon these systematic divergences were not always attested.
Furthermore, convergences could also be attested between members that
were already split off from an earlier stage.
The language family tree of Schleicher and his ideas on the proto­
language, hierarchies and naturalistic evolution (Schleicher 1850) were
most visibly challenged in the twenties of the twentieth century by Nikolai
Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy, a Russian émigré linguist who was academically
active in Central Europe.3 Trubetzkoy had a different approach than the
followers of the so-called German School researching on the lexical and
morphological correspondences between languages. According to him.
these correspondences were the result of linguistic contact instead of
linguistic genealogical relations. In order to accommodate this concept
Trubetzkoy developed his theory of the Sprachbund, i.e. "linguistic area'.
The theory of linguistic area studies the diffusion of structural features
across language boundaries within a geographical area. Neighboring
languages in a geographical space display lexical and grammatical
parallels, because of a permanent, intensive contact between them and
these parallels may cross genetic boundaries. The key words for areal
linguistics were not ‘genetic’, and ‘tree' but ‘net’ or ‘chain’. Trubetzkoy
developed his thesis of the Sprachbund in his influential paper Gedanken
iiber das Indogermanenproblem (Thoughts about the Indo-European
problem) that was finally published in 1939. It is instructive to summarize
his main line of reasoning.4
Contrary to the Schleicher, Trubetzkoy argued that in order to account
for the origin of the parallels between the Indo-European languages it
is not necessary to assume an Indo-European Proto-language.5 These
1 See (Toman 1992, 185-215) for a discussion of the work of Trubetzkoy.
1 The Austrian linguist Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927) derived at the same conclusions as
Trubetzkoy on the basis of dialect studies.
'Trubetzkoy actually turned the table. He argued that pure agglutinative languages, like
Turkic, Finnic and Hungarian were more advanced than languages with inflection, like
Germanic, Slavic and so on (Toman 1995, 210).
7
correspondences can also be due to permanent, intensive contact, mutual
influence, borrowings or language mixing. Trubetzkoy further assumed
that lexical parallels are secondary because they do not appear in all the
Indo-European languages and the most frequent correspondences can also
be found in languages outside the Indo-European language family. This
is also the case with frequently appearing morphemes. The borrowings,
i.e. the results of linguistic contact take place according to integrative
rules as well. These borrowings actually mimic the effect of the “sound
laws" that were postulated to prove a genetic relationship of the lexical
and morphological elements. Hence, Trubetzkoy concluded that common
structural features instead of lexical and morphological ones are the most
important for establishing “genetic” relationships. According to him, the
Indo-European language family is characterized by the following six
features:
(2)
1. Lack of vowel harmony.
2. A specific relation between consonantal clustering in the word onset
and coda (the onset is not more restricted than the inlaut and coda).
3. No condition requiring that words begin only with the root.
4. The presence of apophony (Ablaut).
5. The presence of consonantal alternations in morphology.
6. A nominative-accusative, rather than ergative, case system.
According to Trubetzkoy, only if in languages all these six features
are attested simultaneously is it possible to speak about an Indo-European
language. Further, by adopting this set of features defining the type, the
geographical origin of the languages concerned can be determined as well.
It is the territory where the neighboring language families display these
six structural features, all six of them together. Trubetzkoy determined
this space at the intersection of the Ural-Altaic, Caucasian and Semitic
languages, more precisely in the large spatial parts between the Baltic and
the Caspian Sea. In these three language groups all the above six features
appear together.
A language family located between two other families can be interpreted
as a link between the two, if it shares some structural features with its
neighbors. The Indo-European language group shares the nominative-
accusative characteristics with Ural-Altaic languages, and on the other end
there is the Caucasian-Mediterranean complex, with which it shares the
first four of the six structural characteristics outlined in (2). Throughout
this book I will adopt Sprachbitnd, linguistic or diffusion area in the sense
of Campbell (2006, 330-331) that includes not only defining structural
features but also lexical and morphological characteristics: “The term
8