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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Dec 4, 2009 13:13:51 GMT 3
Interesting theories.
I will make a small correction though:
Hungarian "Isten" is actually at least partially Turkic, because the "-ten" particle probably comes from Turkic "Täŋri" (Tengri). I don't know about the "Is-" particle though. Also, Hungarian "úr" comes from Turkic "Buyruq".
I also got a question. Is it possible that Hungarian "ég" was related with Turkic "Kök"?
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Post by chichak on Dec 4, 2009 20:15:33 GMT 3
I have found a page stating that "Is" in Isten means ős (ancient) and -ten is equivalent to the Turkic form. Unfortunately it also talks about Sumerian, Egyiptians, Chinese, Celts, Indo-Eropeans and what not into hocus-pocus comparisons and esotherics. It was quite disappointing. (Article only in Hungarian) istenszavunk.extra.hu/I was then searching for the Iranian loanword theory's support material and I was able to find a scholarly work of Rédei Károly. Only dealing with the origin of the word Isten. It is quite confusing with a huge amount of data fillings as comparisons. and how German is used when talking about context (we should not forget that in Hungary a great number of the scholarly works are still written in German). The first pages present Finno-Ugric names for gods. Interesting to see how the Khantis and Mansi say different froms similar to "Torum" which sounds familiar with the Hungarian word "terem", which means to create & "teremtő" meaning creator. No such comparisons were noted, probably this sort of comparisons are not plausible, for scholarly reasons we are not expertised in. I presum the study is a phylologist's work, where every source possible and context is tried to be considered. They analytically dissect words according to their grammatical form etc. Anyway the study goes on through pages about different forms of the Iranic words. It suggests the transiting word was from the middle-Iranian form ištÁn < *ištan and its possible meaning in both the transmitting language and Hungarian had the meaning: "highness, majesty". The article is in Hungarian www.c3.hu/~magyarnyelv/99-1/redeik.pdfI didn't find anything about "úr" and "ég". But also interesting that I have read somewhere the word knife "kés" might also come from a Turkic word meaning to cut.
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Post by hjernespiser on Dec 5, 2009 2:36:42 GMT 3
Ihsan,
Kék is kök.
Hungarian is the outlier when it comes to the word for God amongst all the other Uralic languages. Isten is one of the greatest mysteries and I've no doubt that there's a vast number of theories and reams of paper on the subject. I've seen it suggested that it came from Hittite.
Some of the words mentioned so far have all been proposed as being Turkic, FU, Ugric, Iranian, etc. Excellent examples of the dissension amongst the ranks, so to speak.
More words on this subject later...
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Post by hjernespiser on Dec 5, 2009 2:45:07 GMT 3
Oh, one more thing I wanted to say...
There's history presented for the masses. Books are published with whatever is the day's best guess consensus. It used to be the consensus that Magyars were Huns too. I like to get deeper. I like to see the actual arguments for a loanword origin proposal. I want to know where the points of contention are. One of those points is the Western Siberian homeland theory.
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Post by Subu'atai on Dec 5, 2009 17:02:27 GMT 3
And how history tends to be tied to politics, or is this a steppe thing? Meh, drinking up tonite, forgive me.
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Dec 5, 2009 21:32:33 GMT 3
I see, thanks, will read the article in a free time. György Györffy proposed ("Die Rolle des ' Buyruq' in der alttürkischen Gesellschaft", Acta Orientalia, Tom. 11, Budapest 1960) that Hungarian Úr was a borrowing from Old Turkic Buyruq via the Bulghars. The "-yr-" to "-ry-" change can be attested from Uyghur documents as well, where we see the corrupted form of that titles as Buryuq. About Kés, that is highly possible, because the Turkic word for "cut" is Käs/Kes. Ah yes, sorry, forgot that
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Post by hjernespiser on Dec 6, 2009 2:50:51 GMT 3
Isten (ishten) as Hittite loan. This is mentioned in Rona-Tas. "The Hittites took over the worship of the sun god from the Hattians, and with it the Hattic word for the sun god. The Hattic name Eshtan transformed into Ishtanu 'sun, sun god', from which most likely through Caucasian and Khazar intermediaries, it passed into Hungarian as the word for God, Isten. However, such cultural loan words cannot prove relationships between ancient peoples..." And the note for this mention is: "For the Hittite form Istanu, see Gamkrelidze-Ivanov (1984, pp. 684 and 897). Maybe the name of this god got into an Iranian language, Alans or something. I'm not sure as to the suggestion that Hungarians picked it up through the Caucasus. That is probably not in Gamkrelidze-Ivanov.
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Post by chichak on Dec 6, 2009 10:58:06 GMT 3
Ishan, unfortunately the both of the articles are in Hungarian! Most references are still only referable in Hungarian on the prehistory of Hungarians. Google translator won't help either, it just makes a mess. Although for Indo-European languages, it seems to work quite well. Russian sources are translated in quite a satisfactory manner into English and as we know many Steppe resources are written in Russian. There was even a Hungarian tribe called Keszi(Kesi)/Kaszi. I suppose the Hungarian word for scythe=kasza might also be attributable to Turkic contacts. The second article I've posted on the etymology by Károly Rédei mentions the theory of a Hittite loanword! Róna-Tas brought forward in his „A honfoglaló magyar nép” (The conquering Hungarian nation) (Bp., 1996.) that the Hattian "Eštan", Hettite "Ištanu/Aštanu" word for sun god was adopted by the Hungarians. He mentions as 'ad hoc' that this transfer was done through Caucasus and Khazar contacts. This idea is not yet supportable. T. V. GAMKRELIDZE—V. V. IVANOV in their book "Indoevropeiskij jazyk i indoevropejcy", Tbiliszi, 1984. also present this theory. János Makkay in "A magyar nyelv isten szaváról" (About the word Isten in the Hungarian language), Bp., 1998 in reference to Volkert Haas (Geschichte der hethitischen Religion. Leiden—New York—Köln, 1994) points out that the Hittite word meant "Sun goddess", this semantically causes a bottleneck in this loanword theory. Makkay also has a serious argument against Róna-Tas's theory in terms of chronology, the Hittite empire broke up in roughly 1200 BC. The Khazar-Ancient Hungarian contacts in the Caucasus can be placed around 600 AD. The separating 1800 undermine the idea of ethno-linguistic contacts. Then the article demonstrates how the word cannot originate from an Uralic word either. It doesn't compare a Turkic possibility, but mentions that the earliest records in Turkic are Tänri and the Othoman Turkic for is Tanry. Also the article talks about how Munkácsi-Kálmán's semantic comparisons of ős (ancestor) in (< is) are supportable, they are not supportable by phonetics & morphology. The creator of the article Károly Rédei was the member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until his recent death (2008 August). He was a linguist specializing in Permian and Ob-Ugrian languages. Although that doesn't contradict his linguistic expertise in analyzing the Iranic origins of the word "Isten".
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Post by chichak on Dec 6, 2009 11:57:01 GMT 3
I understand your doubts when not seeing the actual arguments. You see most of the academical works are definitely not promoted to the masses, although whoever wants to read about it, its not difficult to gain hold of them. On the other hand there are uncountable books written for the masses that are sometimes only having one consensus (common agreement) amongst each other: That academics is lying and full of falsies. These popular writers have very definite political affiliations, while the academicians separate politics from their work. The system for arguments for a theory or suggestion are not usually presented in a separate work just dealing with the suggestion. They are incorporated into the academicians book on a larger topic, where he presents a number of theories. Other academicians in their newer works respond to this, by either affirming or rejecting these theories. At least that is how I saw it in several books.
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Post by hjernespiser on Dec 6, 2009 22:25:21 GMT 3
„A honfoglaló magyar nép” (The conquering Hungarian nation) (Bp., 1996.)
The Rona-Tas book I have (1999) is a "modified and extended" English translation of that book. It isn't really an academic work as it is meant for a more general audience. Sometimes I wish it had more detail, but at the same time it does have quite a bit of detail. It would be suitable as a textbook. He devotes a good portion of the book to source critique.
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Post by hjernespiser on Dec 6, 2009 22:43:59 GMT 3
I'll reiterate: Why the Sargat culture? Why east of the Urals?
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Post by hjernespiser on Dec 7, 2009 9:12:17 GMT 3
Chichak, Join us on Facebook.
I'm just having a little fun here tonight. There's a timeline extension for Mediawiki and I'm playing with it to create some nice graphic of these Magyar timelines.
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Dec 7, 2009 21:00:08 GMT 3
Yes, we got a Facebook group there, you can also search and find me as well
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Post by hjernespiser on Dec 9, 2009 10:51:34 GMT 3
Chichak, I hope you haven't disappeared!
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Post by chichak on Dec 10, 2009 18:55:53 GMT 3
Don't worry hjernespiser, I haven't disappeared! Guys, thank you so much for the invitation to the froum's facebook group. Please forgive me if I can't do that, at least for the time being. Although I am more than willing to keep contact with forum members on an individual level.
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