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VIII. évfolyam, 2. szám Mikes International Volume VIII., Issue 2. _____________________________________________________________________________________ 97 what a, a-na, a-ne, *mз1 mi1 tsi2 sam62,1 mo1; mat1 en, en-na(m) 1; (ES) ta(-a), te(-àm)2 98 white babbar, bír *päjз fehér, fejér dkar baak6 99 who a-ba; lú *ken ki gaŋ soey4; bin1 go3 100 woman munus1// *ńiŋä2 nő, nej, -né2; mo1 noey52 jan4 nunus2 — asszony 3. Evaluation and glotto-chronology We can now divide the words of the 5 Swadesh lists into the following groups: 1. Total genetic relationship (Sum. = Hung. = Tib. = Chin.): Nos. 10, 12, 17, 18, 23, 26, 41, 46, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 78, 80, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97, 100. (31%) 2. Partial genetic relationship: 2.1. Sum. = Hung. (alone): Nos. 19, 20, 29, 37, 45, 49, 61. (7%) 2.2. Sum. = Tib. (alone): Nos. 2, 11, 14, 15, 22, 31, 33, 36, 39, 43, 47, 63, 73, 79. (14%) 2.3. Sum. = Chin. (alone): Nos. 71 (?), 82 (?) (2% [?]) 2.4. Sum. = Hung. = Tib.: Nos. 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 28, 32, 35, 40, 41, 44, 48, 58, 64, 69, 77, 86, 88. (18%) 2.5. Sum. = Hung. = Chin.: Nos. 1, 24, 52. (3%) 2.6. Sum. = Tib. = Chin.: Nos. 8, 25, 75, 92. (4%) 2.7. Hung. = Tib. = Chin.: Nos. — (0%) 2.8. Hung. = Tib.: Nos. 13, 16, 83 2 . (3%) 2.9. Hung. = Chin.: No. 84 (?) (1% [?]) 2.10. Tib. = Chin.: No. 85 (1%) 3. No genetic relationship: Nos. 3, 21, 27, 30, 34, 38, 50, 59, 65, 67, 76, 81, 94, 95, 98, 99. (16%) Since only 16% of the words in all 5 Swadesh lists are clearly unrelated, it turns out that Sum., Hung. and Chin. must be related in some way or the other in up to maximally 84% of the cases. But it is remarkable that Hung., Tib. and Chin. share zero cognates. Moreover, Sum., Hung. and Tib. have 18% cognates, while Sum., Hung. and Chin. have only 3%. And then there are only two doubtful cognates shared by Hung. and Chin. alone. This raises the suspect that all or most of the words that Chin. has in common with Tibetan and/or Hung. may be borrowings from Tib. Historically, such an assumption is possible given the huge extension and the linguistic exchange of the different people of the Hunnic empire (cf. Botos 2006, esp. chapters 4 and 5). Therefore, if we deduct the 11% of all the cases where Chin. is involved, me get 73% of minimal genetical relationship between Sum., Hung. and Tib. Yet, also remarkable is that the total percentage of Hung., Tib. and Chin. words that have a Sum. root is 48%, while the percentage of those words without Sum. root is only 5% (or less). This indicates strongly the Hung. and Tib. cognates are due to their common Sum. origin. But here two important points are to be mentioned: 1. E.g., in no. 43, Hung. ölni is not related to any of the attested Sum. words for “to kill”, but according to HMD (Tóth 2007b, p. 101), Hung. ölni < Sum. ul4 “to grind”, so Hung. ölni does go back to a Sum. word although according to its 2 Also, both in Hung. and Tib. the words for “sun” and “day” are identical, while they are not in Chin. _____________________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright Mikes International 2001-2008 86
VIII. évfolyam, 2. szám Mikes International Volume VIII., Issue 2. _____________________________________________________________________________________ entry in the Swadesh list it does not seems to. As a matter of fact, practically all Hung. (and, most probably, Tibetan) words for which the above Swadesh list does not offer a Sum. etymology nevertheless go back to Sum. As an example from another language family cf. the words for “tomorrow” in some Romance languages: French demain, Italian domani, Spanish mañana “tomorrow” do not go back to Latin cras “id.” (which survived only in some Sardic dialects) but to a hypothetical Latin *de-mane. Thus, in a comparative Latin-French-Italian-Spanish Swadesh list, the Romance words would be considered not to be related to Latin cras, although they do have a Latin (yet reconstructed) etymology. In all these cases the phonetic shape of the words changed while the meaning stayed constant. 2. But also the opposite happens very often: The meanings of words can change while their phonetic shape stays intact. Cf. again no. 43: Although Hung. ölni does not go back to any of the attested Sum. words meaning “to kill”, the Sum. word gaz “to kill” survived in Hung. gáz-ol-ni, yet not in the general meaning “to kill”, but “to crush sb.; to wade”. Obviously, the original Sum. meaning developed as follows: “to kill” > “to crush” (cf. French écraser) > “to wade in sb.’s blood” > “to wade”). Again an example from another language family: Engl. smoke is unrelated to Germ. rauchen, but in German there is a verb schmauchen that is phonetically identical with Engl. smoke, but has developed the special meaning of “to smoke slowly and in an enjoying manner a tobacco pipe”. Here, too, in an English-German Swadesh list, Engl. smoke and Germ. rauchen would not be considered as related, although there is a Germ. word corresponding to the Engl. word. As a matter of fact, most (if not all) of the 16% unrelated words in the above Swadesh lists have a Sum. etymology, but due either to point 1 (phonetic reason) or point 2 (semantic reason) their Sum. origin does not show up in the Swadesh lists and the respective words are treated as non-cognates. 3 We therefore have no reason to deduct the totally 48% of the cases where Sum. is involved from our minimal rate of genetic relationship, the fore-mentioned 73%. But now, we come to the most astonishing result that Sum., Hung. and Tib. are related to even 73% according to the Swadesh list, while the three languages were related “only” to between 61 % and ca. 50% according to EDH. Looking at EDH alone, one could say: EDH is based on Gostony (1975), and since Gostony (a Hungarian!) may have picked beforehand only such Hung. words that have a clear Sum. cognate (thus ignoring our above points 1. and 2.), the high percentage of correspondences does not astonish. But this cannot be true, since in this case the percentage of cognates in the Swadesh lists should be remarkably lower, since the Swadesh list was neither conceived for Sum. nor for Hung. nor for Tib. and not for a specific single language or language-family at all, but is, as mentioned in the beginning, is supposed to be represent the common semantic concepts of all languages of the world. Given the before-mentioned retention rate of approximately 86% of the vocabulary of any language in 1’000 years and since Hungarian and Tibetan share 73% of cognates, they must have split around 2’000 years ago. And because we also know that Proto-Tibeto-Burman was “spoken” around 6’000 years ago, we get from here a proof that the common Tibetan-Chinese words in our Swadesh list cannot be inherited from a common ancestor language and are thus merely Tibetan borrowings in Chinese. Since Hungarian and Tibetan split around the year 0 according to the Christian time concept, this means that the time of their splitting coincides with the time when the Huns had still one of their main centers in the Tibetan-Chinese-Uighur landscape. From that, it follows that around the year 0 Huns and Hungarians must have still been together. And since the Hunnic and the Hungarian languages, as I have shown in a special study (Tóth, forthcoming 1), were very close to one another, many of the Hungarian-Tibetan cognates in the above Swadesh list my also include etymologically corresponding Hunnic- Tibetan cognates. But on the other side, we know that the Sumerians (or a big part of them) must have left their Mesopotamian homeland much earlier, probably during the times of the Hyksos movement (17th century B.C.) and the Sea-Peoples’ Wars (13-12th centuries B.C.). We also know that the common ancestors of the Huns and Hungarians originate in Transylvania, then, in the 4th millennium B.C., became founders of the Sumerian empire in Mesopotamia, and that the Huns returned to the Carpathian basin starting in the 4th century A.D., followed by the Hungarians (5th-6th centuries A.D.) and preceded by the Scythians (2nd century A.D.) (Botos 2006, chapters 1-8 and passim; EDH, in the conclusions at the end of the individual chapters, with extensive bibliographies). How does, therefore, Körösi Csoma Sándors claim for a Tibetan homeland of the Hungarians fit together with the fact that the ancestors of the Hungarians and Huns originated in the Carpathian basin, emigrated to Mesopotamia and then returned to the Carpathian basin? – The only possible explication is that a large group of Sumerians did not return to Transylvania, but 3 Zakar (1975) is an example of a Swadesh list where Hung. words are compared to both phonetically and semantically fitting Sum. cognates. But since one of the goals of the Swadesh list is first to establish if the languages compared are or are not related to one another, Zakar’s Sum.-Hung. Swadesh list is circular. _____________________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright Mikes International 2001-2008 87
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