Mikes International - Hollandiai Magyar Szövetség

VIII. évfolyam, 2. szám Mikes International Volume VIII., Issue 2.
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1. Introduction
TÓTH, ALFRÉD : TOWARD A RELATIVE CHRONOLOGY OF
HUNGARIAN, TIBETAN AND CHINESE
One of the astonishing results that my “EDH” (Etymological Dictionary of Hungarian, Tóth 2007a) brought, was the fact
that between 61 and 50 % of the common Sumerian-Hungarian word-list taken from Gostony (1975) is present both in Tibetan
and in Chinese. In an additional study, I could even prove that Körösi Csoma Sándor’s basic assumption that (at least a part of)
the Hungarians came from the Yarkand plateau, the seat of an ancient Buddhist kingdom on the southern branch of the Silk
Road basin, is correct (Tóth 2008, forthcoming 2). Archeological findings in the Tibetan-Chinese-Uigur borderland also seem
to confirm Csoma’s theory (Kiszely 2001).
Now it is a well-known fact that common words in different languages (cognates) are mostly not the words that belong to
the basic vocabularies. Thus, the comparison of Sumerian, Hungarian, Tibetan and Chinese in EDH does only prove that about
60% of a certain cognate set in these languages are genetically related. This was one of the reasons why the Russian-American
linguist Morris Swadesh (1909-1967) developed a 100 (and later a 200) word list that is supposed to contain the semantic
concepts of the “basic vocabulary” of all languages. Swadesh introduced his list in order to calculate how old languages are,
since according to his observations, each language should lose ca. 14% of its lexicon in 1’000 years. So, if two languages share
72% of their vocabulary, then they must have split from a common proto-language about 2’000 years ago. 1 Since the Swadesh
list proved to work pretty well in most of the languages around the world, we will establish in this article Swadesh lists for
Sumerian, Hungarian, Tibetan and Chinese in order to calculate approximately the time of their splitting.
Furthermore, we have to try to decide, Chinese really shares cognates with Hungarian and Tibetan or if the common words
words turn out to be borrowings. In addition, we will also establish a Swadesh list for Proto-Ugric/Proto-Finno-Ugric/Proto-
Uralic, whereby we will always chose the oldest reconstructible proto-forms (following Vovin 1999), since these protolanguages
were spoken between 1’500 B.C. and 4000/6000 B.C. according to the common assumptions in Finno-Ugristics and
Uralistics, thus, the older the proto-forms, the closer they are to Sumerian (testified since ca. 3’500 B.C.), hence approximately
coinciding with the hypothetical Proto-Finno-Ugric or even Proto-Uralic (cf. Décsy 1965).
2. Sumerian, Hungarian, Tibetan and Chinese Swadesh lists
The Sumerian Swadesh list including the Emesal forms (the Sumerian women-language) is taken from Blažek (1997). The
Uralic/Finno-Ugric and Ugric proto-forms are taken from Tóth’s HMD (2007b) that is based on the common Finno-Ugric and
Uralic dictionaries by Bárczi, Benkő, Collinder, Lakó, Rédei and others. The Tibetan Swadesh list was established on the basis
of Jäschke (1987) and the author’s competence in reading Tibetan. For the Chinese Swadesh list a professional and reliable 200
word Swadesh-list accessible in the World Wide Web was used. It turned out to be unnecessary to indicate for Tibetan and
Chinese the Proto-Tibeto-Burman and Old Chinese forms listed in Peiros and Starostin (1996) and in Matisoff (2003), since
Proto-Tibeto-Burman was reconstructed for about 4’000 B.C. and thus coincides in time with Proto-Finno-Ugric and/or Proto-
Uralic. Nevertheless, the dictionaries of Peiros, Starostin and Matisoff were used in order to decide, if the Tibetan and Chinese
words are related to one another and to the Sumerian and Hungarian words or not. Generally, it is to say that Chinese has
changed massively in its consonant system, while Tibetan has preserved almost all consonants since Proto-Tibeto-Burman
time.
In order to show if two or more words are genetically related, we will mark them using the same natural number (in
superscript) starting with 1 from the left to the right in each. Different numbers thus imply that the words carrying these
numbers are not cognates. And so are words that carry no number at all. We chose this “economical” way of marking for the
sake of avoiding too much complexity. But one important exception has to be mentioned: Sometimes, polysyllabic words
(Hungarian, Tibetan) and word-complexes (Chinese) turn out to be connections of two or more Sumerian monosyllabic words.
In these cases, all the Sum. words that are part of the connections are marked with the same number, but this does not imply
that these Sum. words are related to one another. In order to avoid mistakes, the semicolon (following Blažek 1996) separates
genetically unrelated words of each language from one another.
* Many thanks to Professor Václav Blažek (University of Brno, Czech Republic) for kindly sending me pdf files of several articles of him.
1 The same method can also be used to show that two or more languages are NOT related, cf. Tóth (2007c): Since Hungarian shares less than
30% of its vocabulary with the alleged Finno-Ugric family, Hungarian should have split from Ob-Ugric 5’000 years ago, while Finno-Ugrists
claim that the splitting took place only “between 1000 and 500 B.C.” (Bárczi 2001, p. 49).
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