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VIII. évfolyam, 2. szám Mikes International Volume VIII., Issue 2. _____________________________________________________________________________________ must have left Mesopotamia for the Himalayan highlands. 4 Wilhelm von Hevesy has shown that they even wandered much further, since the Munda languages (most of all Santali) show a huge number of cognates with Hungarian (von Hevesy 1932; cf. also EDH-1, ch. 11). Other groups of Sumerians wandered, e.g., to Northern Africa in order to establish a still existing substrate in the Bantu languages (cf. EDH-1, ch. 8), so that it must be assumed that there was not a single and a one-directional emigration of the Sumerians, but many emigrations in several directions. All these emigrations must have taken place before the year 0, since already shortly after, in the 2nd century A.D., the Scythians, as already mentioned, showed up in the Carpathian basin. From that it follows, that the journey to Tibet was obviously one of the last emigration waves of the Sumerians. And since at that time, Huns and Hungarians (Magyars) were still geographically together and their languages not very different from one another, Körösi Csoma Sándor was surely right to claim the Tibetan highlands a cradle of the descendants of the legendary brothers Hunor and Magor. 4. Bibliography Bárczi, Géza, Geschichte der ungarischen Sprache. Innsbruck 2001 Blažek, Václav, Basic word lists of ancient languages of the Near East. In: Dhumbadji! 3/1, January 1997, pp. 7-14 Botos, László, The Homeland reclaimed. http://www.magtudin.org/Homeland%201.htm Chinese Swadesh lists: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Sino-Tibetan_Swadesh_lists Décsy, Gyula, Einführung in die finnisch-ugrische Sprachwissenschaft. Wiesbaden 1965 Gostony, Colman-Gabriel, Dictionnaire d’étymologie sumérienne. Paris 1975 Jäschke, Heinrich August, A Tibetan-English Dictionary. Reprint Delhi 1987 (1st ed. London 1881) Kiszely, István, A magyar nép őstörténete. Budapest 2001 Matisoff, James A., Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. Berkely 2003 Peiros, Ilia and Starostin, Sergej, A Comparative Vocabulary of Five sino-Tibetan Languages. 6 fascicles. Melbourne 1996 Swadesh, Morris, The origin and diversification of language. Chicago 1971 Tóth, Alfréd, Etymological Dictionary of Hungarian (EDH). 5 vols. The Hague 2007 (a) Tóth, Alfréd, Hungarian-Mesopotamian Dictionary (HMD). The Hague 2007 (b) Tóth, Alfréd, Is the Turanian language family a phantom? The Hague 2007 (c) Tóth, Alfréd, Hunnic-Hungarian Etymological Word List (based on the editions of the Isfahan codex by Dr. Csaba Detre and Imre Pető). The Hague 2007 (forthcoming 1) Tóth, Alfréd, Tibetan and Hungarian. A tribute to Alexander Csoma de Körös. In: Central Asian Journal 52, 2008 (forthcoming 2) van Driem, George, Languages of the Himalayas. Vol. I. Leiden, Boston and Köln 2001 von Hevesy, Wilhelm, Finnisch-Ugrisches aus Indien. Wien 1932 Vovin, Alexander, Some notes on linguistic comparison. In: Shevoroshkin, Vitaly and Sidwell, Paul J. (eds.), Historical Linguistics and Lexicostatistics, Melbourne 1999, p. 67-94 Zakar, András, A sumér nyelvről. Fahrwangen 1975 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 4 For an excellent (and unbiased) introduction into the early history of the Himalayan languages and their socio-cultural environment before Turanian, Sumerian and Elamite background cf. van Driem (2001, p. 333-462: “From Turanian to Tibeto-Burman”). _____________________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright Mikes International 2001-2008 88
VIII. évfolyam, 2. szám Mikes International Volume VIII., Issue 2. _____________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Introduction TÓTH, ALFRÉD : ON THE RECONSTRUCTION OF URHEIMAT Dem Tode von Taulignon gewidmet. Urheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language. Proto-languages were not actually spoken, but reconstructed by linguists. They are kind of a common linguistic skeleton of languages that are supposed to be genetically related. When a certain set of words or morphological features of two languages A and B are assumed to be related to one another, then one can reconstruct for each pair of words from A and B a proto-word or proto-feature whose phonetic shape and meaning are so general that proto-form and actual form can be related via sound-correspondences. Yet, there is first the assumption that A and B are related, and in keeping this assumption one proves this assumption. The sound correspondences that one uses to trace back actual forms to proto-forms are re-established after the proto-forms are found in order to “prove” that A and B are related. This is a classical vicious circle. Since Urheimat depends in reconstructing proto-forms and since the method of reconstruction is circular, the reliability of the location of Urheimat and the age of the reconstructed proto-languages are highly debatable. Another problem is that comparative historical linguistics has been always oriented methodically on Indo-European languages, since this method was first established in order to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European and to find the Indo-European homeland: “So ergibt sich denn ein Höhepunkt der Linguistik (...). die Indoeuropäistik ward so zum Vorbild für viele andere Wissenschaften wie Bantuistik, Austronesistik usw. Aus all diesen Untersuchungen ergeben sich allgemeine Schlussfolgerungen, gültig für jeden Nachweis einer Sprachverwandtschaft” (Doerfer 2000, p. 30). 2. Hypotheses about the Indo-European homeland 2.1. The Armenian Hypothesis (Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1990) assumes that Proto-IE was “spoken” in the 3rd millennium B.C. in the Armenian Highland. 2.2. The Kurgan Hypothesis (Mallory 1989) assumes that Proto-IE was “spoken” around 5000 B.C. in the Pontic-Caspian steppe. 2.3. The Anatolian Hypothesis (Renfrew 1987; Gray and Atkinson 2003) assumes that Proto-IE was “spoken” around 6500 B.C. in Asia Minor. 2.4. The Paleolithic Continuity Theory (Alinei 1996/2000) assumes that Proto-IE was “spoken” before the 10th millennium somewhere and thus coincides with the first regional settlement of Homo sapiens in the Middle/Upper Paleolithic age. 2.5. Earlier attempts (without giving any time-frame) localized Proto-IE “in Europe or along the border between Southwest Asia and Europe (Brugmann 1904, p. 22) or in the area North of the Black Sea (Hirt 1906-07). 2.6. And finally there is still the “No-Answer-Theory”: “Linguistic-comparative methods cannot inform about origin and age of a linguistic community” (Wunderlich 2004, p. 1). Here is to say that this statement is unfortunately also true for archaeology and genetics, since archaeological objects can be transported and people often migrate. And again unfortunately, also “interdisciplinary” attempts have lead to nothing, since what comes out usually in combining linguistics, archaeology, history and genetics are mutually contradictory hypotheses, but not a reliable theory. 3. Hypotheses about the Semitic homeland Semitic languages are not so different like IE languages. But this makes only the age of Proto-Semitic easier that is commonly assumed to have been “spoken” about the 4th millennium B.C., but not the localization of the Semitic Urheimat. There are, however, only two divergent assumptions: 3.1. Arabic peninsula (Brockelmann 1908/1961, p. 2; Kienast 2001. 3.2. In his study about Amoritic, Streck (2000, p. 29) refuses the concept of migration connected with the question about an Amoritic homeland because he thinks that the “wave theory” is outdated. Therefore, he must assume that the Amorites are autochthonous in Mesopotamia. This assumption, however, contradicts the generally accepted theory that the Akkadians who were close relatives of the Amorites, also originated in Arabia. _____________________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright Mikes International 2001-2008 89
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