Etymological Dictionary of Hungarian (EDH)

1. Introduction
ALFRÉD TÓTH : ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF HUNGARIAN (EDH)
14. Japanese and Hungarian
14. Japanese and Hungarian
Since the appearance of Roy Andrew Millers book “Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages” (1971),
it is mostly, but not generally, assumed, that Japanese belongs together with Turkic, Manchu-Tungus
and Mongolian (and perhaps Korean) to the Altaic linguistic family. Most influenceful for this
assumption was Karl H. Menges review of Millers 1971 book (Menges 1974). Yet there is also not a
general, but at least a widespread agreement, that the forementioned languages form a family in the
linguistic sense. A big step towards acceptance was the publication of the “Etymological Dictionary of
the Altaic Languages” by Sergei Starostin, Anna Dybo and Oleg Mudrak (2003) with its 2800
etymologies: “After a critical evaluation of the problem we came to the conclusion that Altaic should
still be characterized as a genetic unity (...). The very fact that it is possible to compile a dictionary of
common Altaic heritage appears to be a proof of the validity of the Altaic theory (2003/I, p. 9).
This little map shows the geographical position of the Japanese language:
In the following, I compare Japanese with Hungarian, but not directly, as Kazár (1980) did it in the
whole range of all Uralic and Altaic languages, from whom we take our Japanese reflexes, but again via
their common Sumerian basis according to Gostony (1975), i.e. I compare his 1042 Sumerian-
Hungarian etymologies with the 594 Japanese-Hungarian etymologies in the Finno-Ugric dictionary
part of Kazár (1980, pp. 12-213). In doing so, we get 235 common Sumerian-Japanese-Hungarian
etyma, that I will present in the next chapter.
2. Hungarian-Sumerian-Japanese etymologies
1 a, az “that”
ŠL 480; Gost. 835; Kaz. 1
Sum. aš
Jap. a-no “that”
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