Hungarian, Sumerian and Egyptian. Hungarian, Sumerian and Hebrew

Цитата:
In the most recent Sumerian Grammar (Edzard 2003), Dietz Otto Edzard deals on less than one page with the possible relationship between Sumerian and other languages under the title “The (hopeless) question of the linguistic affiliation of Sumerian”, thus proving to be biased from the beginning. Superfluous to say that he does not even mention the very well known Sumerian-Hungarian language comparisons that started already in the 19th century (cf. Érdy 1974).

According to Edzard, there are two reasons, why “the problem is practically insoluble”: 1. “Sumerian must have separated from a hypothetical language family of which it was part in the middle or late fourth millennium B.C. at the latest. We know next to nothing about the sound and structure of Sumerian before the middle of the third millennium. Thus there is a gap of at least two thousand years between that time and the oldest reconstructible form of any languages which have been compared to Sumerian” (2003, p. 2). – Here is to say that the time difference between Vedic (testified since about 1500 B.C.) and Albanian (testified since about 1500 A.D.) is around 3000 years, thus one millennium more than between Sumerian and the oldest reconstructible form of an other language. Therefore, according to Edzard, it would not have been possible to prove that both Vedic and Albanian belong to the Indo-European language family. However, this is internationally accepted by all linguists. Edzard’s other objection against the comparison of Sumerian and any other language is: 2. “Efforts to find cognates have been exclusively based on the sounds of individual words” (2003, p. 2.). – Here is to say that this is simply not true, because even the kling-klang etymologists always considered the semantic similarities between words, too. Moreover, the comparison of words – consisting of sounds and semantics – is exactly the method how the Indo-European language family has been established. But not enough with that: Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction that never existed as a language, while Sumerian was once a living and not an artificial language. Moreover, there is to underline that the comparison of two non-artificial languages like Sumerian and Hungarian is methodically acceptable, while the comparison of a couple of languages with an artificial language like Proto-Indo-European is unscientific, because Proto-Indo-European was first reconstructed from the alleged Indo-European languages and then the affiliation of this languages to a hypothetical Indo-European language family was “proved” by comparing them to the reconstructed Proto-language – this is thus logically circular and methodically unacceptable.

In this contribution I show the linguistic relationship between Hungarian, Sumerian, and Egyptian. The method that I use is historical linguistics, but I will follow the same strategy that I have already established in EDH (Tóth 2007): There I took the Sumerian-Hungarian dictionary of Gostony (1975), revised it by correcting mistakes and updating this standard work to the newest results of Sumerology.
The result were 1042 safe Sumerian-Hungarian cognates that I compared after with words of other languages that had been compared to Hungarian by other authors already before. Therefore, I always compared at least the cognates of 3 and not only 2 languages with one another, hence excluding the danger of mistaken etymologies as much as it is possible in diachronic linguistics. Mathematically speaking, the fact that only two languages have 1042 common safe cognates excludes the chance, but the other fact that I was able to show remarkable numbers of cognates in 17 language families comprising several dozens of languages excludes any doubts of the genetic affiliations of the languages compared.

Hungarian and Egyptian were compared to one another relatively late – first by the Hungarian historian Tibor Baráth (Baráth 1968-74; Baráth 1973; Baráth 1988; Baráth s.a.), but according to Lajos Bíró, “Th. Glock 1916-ban azt írta, hogy a magyar nép az egyiptomi-fGníciai kultúrkörbGl ered” (Bíró s.a.). In 1935/36, the Finn hobby-researcher Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa published his “capital work” about the alleged Fenno-Egyptian cultural origin of the whole Old World, claiming amongst other things that there is no Indo-European language family and trying to “prove” his theory by giving such “word equations” like English (!) pyramid = Finn pyhät raamit “holy frame”. By another “equation”:
Bonaparte = Finn Punaparta = “Redbeard” he proved that he is unable to differentiate between nouns and names, that he does not know that certain words are borrowings and that he does not know Latin. That he did not even know the parts of speech, he proved with his “equations” German “der (masc. article)” (English “the”) = Finn terä = phallus, penis, and German “die (fem. article)” = Finn tissi = “tits, bosom”. Attempts like this damaged the comparison of any member of the so-called Finno-Ugric language family – and thus traditionally also Hungarian – with Egyptian enormously.

It was only by chance that I learned in the fall of 2006 about a to me hitherto unknown publication by the Finn linguist Helmi Poukka: “Unkarin ja Egyptin sanojen vertailua” (Poukka 1979). My extensive researches showed that this booklet is only in one library of the world – according to “WorldCat”: in Kent State University Library in the U.S. But since American copyright law did not allow me to get a copy of this book and since the rules of this University Library did not allow me either to borrow this book, because it is a typewriter manuscript (that was given to Kent by István Erdély), I had no chance to use it for EDH (Tóth 2007). That I finally got a photocopy of this booklet, that contains 9461
common Egyptian-Hungarian etymologies, I owe to the generosity of PD Dr. Johannes Reckel of Göttingen University. Since the American copyright law does not apply for borrowings outside of the US, Dr. Reckel was able to get a copy of Poukka’s remarkable work and could send it to me – back to the US.

Poukka follows the transcription of Erman and Grapow (1961). For technical reasons, I had to replace h with a dot underneath by Z and h with a semicircle underneath by h, the one example where dotted w appears, I had to use
underlining.