The Land of Wonderbugs
(To those who stumbled
upon this page
by coincidence: I am a linguist specialising in Finno-Ugric languages, a
long-time
friend of Hungary and the Hungarian language, professor at the
University of Vienna. My contact data can be found by way of this URL
or at the end of this text. I wrote this text first in my native
Finnish, to vent
the frustration of many linguists like myself, and translated it into
my non-native English, to save time – time and again, people
baffled by what they have heard from their Hungarian friends want to
know whether there really is “something” behind the
“alternative” ideas which are gaining popularity in
Hungary. I dedicate this to my Hungarian friends, many of whom are
colleagues of mine and get confronted with the
“alternative” ideas much more often than I do.
For those who read Hungarian, I warmly
recommend the linguistics portal www.nyest.hu,
the articles about language relatedness at http://fgrtort.nytud.hu/index.php/table/nyelvrokons%C3%A1g/,
Ádám Nádasdy’s article
“A
gonosz Budenz”, and the Turkologist
Klára Sándor’s article
series on the website galamus.hu.
For anybody who wants to know more about how historical linguistics
works, there are numerous good handbooks available in English; my two
favourites are both entitled “Historical
linguistics”and
written by R. L. Trask and Lyle Campbell, respectively.)
Sometimes I hear from fellow Finns that they have been unpleasantly
surprised by their new Hungarian acquaintances. Instead of happily
embracing the idea of “being related” with the
Finns, the
Hungarian guy has told them that “we don’t believe
in this
Finno-Ugric thing any more, you know, it was just Commie
propaganda”. In fact, the whole Finno-Ugric relatedness was
made
up by agents of the Habsburgs, in order to humiliate the proud Magyars,
and later instrumentalised by the imperialists in Moscow as well. The
truth is that the Hungarians descend from the Huns, the Scyths and
other proud warrior peoples of the steppe zone, but also from the
Sumerians; other ancient civilisations, from Etrusks and ancient Greeks
to India, Japan, Atlantis and the outer space can be mentioned as well.
This truth was well known to everybody in the Middle Ages, when
traditional lore about the Huns was written down in Hungarian
chronicles. During the Dark Ages of Socialism, this true knowledge
mainly survived in the Western world, in books published by Hungarian
emigrants, but now that the proud people of Hungary has shed the yoke
of Communism, the truth can finally come out. And so it does: even many
educated Hungarians “don’t believe” in
Finno-Ugric
relatedness any more, and numerous alternative works on the prehistory
of the Hungarian language are available on the Internet and in any
Hungarian bookshop.
Of course, with almost any nation you can find
“alternative” pseudo-research – research
which has
partly or completely abandoned the principles and good practices of
science such as objectivity or source criticism – into the
national prehistory. (As for my native country Finland, one could
mention the fantastic ideas of the artist Sigurd
Wettenhovi-Aspa
who claimed to have found traces of an ancient Finnish civilisation
everywhere in Europe, the psychiatrist Panu Hakola who believes in the
relatedness of all agglutinating languages around the world, or the
almost as fantastic ideas of the phonetician Kalevi Wiik about Germanic
being originally “Indo-European spoken with a Finno-Ugric
accent” and Finno-Ugrians originally inhabiting the whole
Northern Europe.) In Hungary, however, it seems that the position of
alternative prehistory-writing is exceptionally strong. Despite
whatever the scholarly establishment does to spread information, the
“Anti-Finno-Ugrists” are supported not only by the
general
ignorance of the masses of what linguistics is about but also by
political developments. The present government of Hungary cultivates a
highly emotional patriotism, including an emphasis on the glorious
history of the Hungarian nation and the uniqueness of the Hungarian
language. The right-wing populist party Jobbik has even
included the “reappraisal of the Finno-Ugric
narrative” in its official programme (see
the English-language web pages of the party).
It is actually not very difficult to explain why the Finno-Ugric
relatedness holds true and the “alternative”
theories
don’t. There are two basic tenets which the
“Anti-Finno-Ugrists” refuse to understand. First,
relatedness between languages, the fact that they stem from a common
proto-language, does not necessarily mean that these languages are now
mutually intelligible or “look similar”. With
greater time
depths, relatedness cannot be found out by laymen comparing word lists
and spotting accidental similarities; it takes special expertise and
methods to find out whether and how languages are related. Second,
because the transmission of languages from generation to generation
doesn’t function in the same way as the transmission of genes (or
culture, or ethnic
self-identification), especially with greater time depths there is very
little correspondence between the history of a language and the history
of the genetic composition of its speakers. When I say that
“Anti-Finno-Ugrists” refuse to understand these two
facts,
I mean that for them, their alternative ideas about the prehistory of
Hungarians and their language are an act of faith, a matter of
patriotism understood as something sacred. For this reason, a linguist
debating with Anti-Finno-Ugrists is in a similarly hopeless position as
an evolutionary biologist among fundamentalist creationists.
Both the alternative “research” and its
“antidotes” look back to a long tradition in
Hungary, as
also shown by the established expressions for these concepts.
Anti-Finno-Ugric theories are often called
“wannabe-linguistics” (nyelvészkedés)
or “mirage linguistics” (délibábos
nyelvészet).
Already in 1943, the linguist Miklós Zsirai published an
often-cited book on “prehistoric freaks” (or,
literally,
“wonderbugs”: Őstörténeti
csodabogarak).
Most of this literature only exists in Hungarian – except
material published especially by expatriate Hungarians on the Internet
– and the debate mainly takes place in Hungary and among
ethnic
Hungarians in other countries. Otherwise, anything that is stated in
this debate is probably self-evident for the informed and uninteresting
for the most. This is why I wrote this text. Let me here offer my
apologies to all those good Hungarians and friends of Hungary who would
rather remain silent about this embarrassing debate; it was not my
intention to ridicule or offend any well-meaning person.
How it all began: The poor relatives who smell of fish fat,
and the bad, bad Habsburgs
For centuries already, learned Europeans have known that the strange
language of the Hungarians doesn’t seem to resemble any major
language of Europe, and already in the 17th and 18th centuries some
learned gentlemen thought that it might have something to do with some
other equally strange languages of the North and the East. Finno-Ugric
relatedness in its proper sense was finally proven by a Hungarian
scholar: the astronomer János (Johannes) Sajnovics on his
expedition to Northern Norway in 1769 observed the Sámi
language
and published a book (1770), in which he demonstrated that
Sámi
and Hungarian are related (or, in the undeveloped terminology of those
times, “the same”: demonstratio idioma Ungarorum et
Lapponum idem esse).
In fact, the idea that languages which are not similar at all may still be related – that languages
change with time and sister dialects may, given enough time, lose
almost all traces of their original similarity – was new in
those
times, and Sajnovics was one of the founding fathers of
historical-comparative linguistics. Sir William Jones came up with his
revolutionary idea of relatedness between Sanskrit and the major
European languages only 16 years later.
However, many Hungarians of those times were not so proud of
Sajnovics’s accomplishments. Hungary in those times had just
been
liberated from the Turks, only to become part of the Habsburg empire.
The glorious times of the old Kingdom of Hungary, when the Renaissance
court of the righteous king Mathias Corvinus was famous throughout
Europe and Hungary understood itself as the defender of Western
civilisation against the Eastern barbary, were gone for good. Actually,
from the 16th century on Hungarian patriotism looked back to the
glorious past – to the Middle Ages and even further, up to
the
half-legendary conqueror ancestors who had come from the steppes of the East
and who already in the mediaeval chronicles had been connected with the
legends surrounding Attila the Hun. This noble and war-like past did
not suit very well together with the Northern “relatives
smelling
of fish fat” (halzsíros
atyafiság). In those times, the
“Lapps” were generally believed to be ugly,
primitive and ape-like half-human Untermenschen
– something like what was thought about the African Pygmees,
for
instance – and they obviously didn’t have a
glorious,
war-like past nor heroic deeds to show off. Already in those times, the
main argument against the Finno-Ugric relatedness was that it was
humiliating. Why is national prehistory researched, if not to raise the
national self-esteem?
During the 19th century, while scholars in Hungary and in other
countries collected and organised the evidence for the history of the
Finno-Ugric language family, many Hungarians turned their gaze towards
mediaeval Hun legends or the glorious East. In the 1820s,
Sándor
Kőrösi Csoma set out to find the roots of the Hungarians in
India;
he didn’t find them (at least in the opinion of
today’s
scholarly establishment), but on his way he became the founding father
of Western Tibetology. The Turcologist Ármin
Vámbery
waged the so-called Turkish-Ugric war against the Finno-Ugrist
József Budenz; this conflict was solved when the developing
methods of historical-comparative linguistics could show that the
abundant Turkic elements in the Hungarian language are not inherited
from the earliest strata of the proto-language but borrowed from
different Turkic language
varieties. However, this solution was not accepted by all laymen, and
many still doubt it. The reasons for this have nothing to do with
science and research.
Especially since the late 20th century, there have been more and more
attempts at a “reappraisal” of 19th-century
Finno-Ugrian
studies by way of national-political prejudices. Forgetting Sajnovics
and his successor Sámuel Gyarmathi, who wrote an even larger
comparative work including numerous other Finno-Ugric languages, the
“alternative” critics concentrate on the two
gentlemen
who after them established Finno-Ugric language studies in Hungarian
academia: Pál Hunfalvy and his protegé
József
Budenz. Both are suspect because of their descent. Hunfalvy came from a
family of German settlers, originally called Hunsdorfer, in the area of
Zips (Szepesség)
in
today’s Slovakia. Budenz was a German linguist who only moved
to
Hungary after his studies at the university of Göttingen had
inspired him to find out more about the mysterious past of the
Hungarian language. As we know, Hungary in the 19th century struggled
for emancipation – and even fought for its independence in
1848-49 – against the Habsburg monarchs who lived in the
German-speaking city of Vienna and spoke German. For many Hungarians of
today, the conclusion is self-evident: Finno-Ugrian studies were
invented by German bad guys, and the whole discipline was initiated by
an order from the Viennese court. Nobody seems to remember that both
Hunfalvy and Budenz regarded themselves as Hungarian patriots. In fact,
Hunfalvy was one of the secretaries at the revolutionary Diet of 1848,
and after the Hungarian insurgents had been defeated, he was compelled
to go underground for some time. The Viennese court actually never
showed a major interest in supporting Finno-Ugrian studies. In Hungary,
there were a couple of attempts (by Hungarian activists!) to create a
university chair for Finno-Ugrian studies, but these requests were not
granted by the administration in Vienna; the chair was only founded
after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, under the Hungarian
minister of educational affairs. At the University of Vienna, the
Finno-Ugrian Department was only founded in the 1970s.
Many people still believe that the idea of Finno-Ugric relatedness
was established in the academic world not on scholarly grounds
but
on political ones. Hunfalvy and Budenz, so they claim, were academic
dictators who silenced their opponents or even destroyed evidence. (A
wild legend circulates about how Hunfalvy got hold of hundreds of
ancient Hungarian-Hunnish texts in runic script and had them burnt. I
will return to the runic scripts later.) In particular, two statements
keep resurfacing in “alternative” literature. The
first one
stems from the (amateur) anthropologist and alternative historian
István
Kiszely. He claims to have found in an archive in Vienna an order of
the court chancery to Austrian historians from 1821: a new prehistory
must be written for the renitent Hungarians, something that they cannot
be proud of. To the best of my knowledge, Kiszely has not published a
copy or a photo of the original text anywhere, not even a literal
quotation or proper source information (precisely in which archive and
where the text is to be found) – not to speak of whether
there was any reaction to this among the historians of the Habsburg
empire. Another die-hard legend tells about the
so-called Trefort quotation. It is claimed that in the 1870s
Ágoston Trefort, the minister of cultural affairs,
explicitly
prohibited research into any other theories on Hungarian prehistory
except
the Finno-Ugric one. The historians writing on the website Töriblog have
tried to find out the origins of this quotation, but the trail ends in
the 1970s: prior to an article written by a Mrs. Háry in the
journal Valóság,
there are no traces of Trefort's order in any contemporary publications
or protocols. (Link
to the Töriblog article, in Hungarian.)
Sumerians, Scyths, and the Hungarian Jesus
World War I destroyed the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the old Kingdom
of Hungary. In the peace treaty of Trianon, two thirds of Hungary and
one third of its ethnic Hungarian population came to belong to the new
neighbour states. Since then, Trianon has been a major trauma for the
Hungarians, and any questions of Hungarian patriotism are connected to
it.
Between the two world wars Hungary was formally a kingdom, technically
ruled by the Regent, Admiral Horthy, in an increasingly autocratic
style. Revanchist ideas were popular, but relationships with other
countries of “Intermediate Europe” were also built
up. The
new independent states of Finland and Estonia were interesting contact
partners. The state of Hungary supported the teaching of Hungarian in
these countries, among others, cultural contacts between
“kindred
peoples” were encouraged and the idea of Finno-Ugrian
relatedness
being humiliating was more or less forgotten. However, alternative
hypotheses also flourished; the so-called Turanists emphasised and
romanticised the ancient contacts of the Hungarians to the warrior
peoples of the Eastern steppes. (Turanism is an ideology which embraces
the unity of especially the Turkic-speaking peoples, but in a wider
sense, the Finno-Ugrians have also been counted to the
“Turanic
peoples”.)
Beside the officially supported cultural contacts to the Finno-Ugrian
“kindred peoples”, the public consciousness about
the roots
of the Hungarians probably included a jumble of competing alternative
ideas: the traditional connections to the Turkic peoples, to the Huns
or the Scyths, but also other alternative hypotheses, and also the
traditional idea of Hungarian being a completely unique language, idioma incomparabile.
When after the tumults of World War II and the defeated revolution of
1956, thousands of politically traumatised Hungarian emigrants settled
down in the West, many of them started to channel their patriotic
feelings into amateur “research” of the roots of
Hungarianness. In Western Europe and in the Americas there were not so
many institutions offering Finno-Ugristic expertise or even source
literature. Instead, the Hungarian emigrants, many of whom were
educated but no linguists, could find statements of Western scholars
about the uniqueness of the Hungarian language or comparisons between
Hungarian and Greek or Basque. Some exile Hungarians in the Americas
found Hungarian-sounding elements in a local indigenous language (there
is a die-hard legend about “an Indian tribe in South America
who
can communicate with Hungarians”). Others searched
for the
roots of Hungarianness in the available literature which, of course,
often dealt with the well-known ancient civilisations. Among these,
Sumerian became particularly popular.
Sumerian, the language of one of the oldest civilisations and perhaps
the oldest written language of the world, is generally considered to be
an isolate language, that is, no languages related to it are known.
However, ever since the cuneiform texts in Sumerian were deciphered for
the first time, there have been attempts to connect Sumerian to other
languages of the world – in particular to other agglutinating
(“affixing”) languages, such as the Finno-Ugric
ones.
Expatriate Hungarian “Sumerologists”, the perhaps
best
known of whom was the historian Ida Bobula who lived in the USA,
published numerous Sumerian-Hungarian comparisons spiced with patriotic
emotion in the post-war years. Typically, Bobula and other amateur
“Sumerologists” didn’t know very
much about linguistics, not even about the Sumerian language, they just
interpreted Sumerian text editions with the help of Modern Hungarian,
that is, tried to find similar-sounding Hungarian
“equivalents” for Sumerian words. So, for instance,
the
Hungarian word pók
‘spider’,
according to Ida Bobula, reflects the Sumerian PA
‘tree’
and UG ‘stinging worm, spider’. (Bobula, like the
other
“Sumerologists”, obviously had no idea that the
capital
letters in text editions only stand for so-called Sumerograms, a
special type of cuneiform signs – she uses only capital letters,
probably believing that they are the standard way of transliterating
cuneiform
script.) Of course, Bobula knew that pók was
generally considered to be a Slavic loanword in Hungarian, but to her,
the Sumerian etymology was more credible, as the ancestors of the
Hungarians had certainly known spiders already before they arrived to
the neighbourhood of the Slavs. (In probably any language, there are
loanwords which have replaced an original word without any obvious
reason or motivation. But, as already mentioned, Bobula and other
amateur researchers
of her ilk were no linguists.)
How did the descendants of the Sumerians come to Hungary? The road from
the Mid-East to the Carpathian Basin goes through the Eastern steppes
populated by nomadic warrior tribes. In addition to the Huns, the
alternative prehistorians love the Scythians, a people (or, more
probably, an ethnolinguistically diverse group of tribes) described in
Ancient Greek sources and inhabiting the steppe zone from north of the
Black Sea to Central Asia; in their tombs, beautiful jewelry and works
of art have been found. South of the Scythians, in today’s
Iran,
there lived the Parthians, a people who (like at least part of the
Scythians) spoke an Iranic language. And from here, a route is opened
for brave new theories which connect Hungarian patriotism both with
Christianity and with the strong Eastern Central European tradition of
Antisemitism. The theory which Ferenc Zajti developed already in the
1930s in his book Zsidó
volt-e Jézus? [‘Was
Jesus a Jew?’] still enjoys popularity in certain circles:
Jesus
was in fact a Parthian prince, Christianity had originally nothing to
do with the Jews. And because the Parthians and their neighbours, the
Scythians (the ancestors of the Hungarians, that is), were descendants
of the Sumerians, Jesus was technically a
Hungarian, and the first Hungarians already practised
something like an original, pure and non-Judaic Christianity. The most
famous representative of these thoughts was Ferenc Badiny
Jós, a
former army officer and a private thinker who lived in South America
after WW II; in the 1990s, shortly before his death, he returned to
Hungary and founded a private “university” and a
religious community of his own.
Runic scripts and the Hun petition
If the ancestors of the Hungarians were carriers of the oldest
civilisation of the world (as the “Sumerologists”
interpret
the ethnonym magyar: MAH-GAR,
‘people of knowledge’), how did they maintain their
culture
when riding on the steppes, conquering and devastating? At least one
technique typical of higher civilisations was known to them: they knew
how to
write with the so-called Old Hungarian runic script (rovásírás).
In Hungarian-speaking areas – not in today’s
Hungary but in
Szeklerland in Transilvania, today’s Romania – the
so-called Szekler runic script was known. The runes resembled the
Germanic and Old Norse runic scripts, for obvious reasons (the shapes
are angular because the runes were not drawn with a pen but engraved in
stone or wood), but their origins are probably in the East, in the
runic scripts known by Turkic peoples and documented also in Central
Asia. The Szekler runic script was documented already by 16th-century
scholars, some of whom used it as a kind of an academic inside joke.
Otherwise, no longer texts in the runic script have been found and
nothing indicates that the runes were ever used for the writing of
literature in modern sense: most remaining runic texts are very short,
names or minimal comments in the style of “Kilroy was
here”.
In the same way as the ancient Germanic runes, the Szekler runes have
inspired the imagination of romantic Nationalists, and people obviously
feel tempted to ascribe mystical and magical meanings to them. Even
today, it is claimed that writing in the “Old Hungarian runic
script” is beneficial for one’s spiritual
development; on
an “alternative” website, some fanatics declare
their belief that the Hungarian
runic script was not created by human hand but comes ultimately from
the heavens. In the last few years, revitalising the “Old
Hungarian runic script” has become a popular activity
especially
in extreme right-wing circles; Hungarian runic fonts for your computer
are available on the Internet, and not only in Szeklerland but also in
Hungary some activists want to have the names of towns and villages
written on the signs also in the runic script. Of course, this
revitalised runic writing is something completely different from the
actual runic scripts written centuries ago, and the rune activists
easily forget that there probably never was a one and only, unified
runic writing system in the whole area of Hungary (not to speak of
“runic literature”).
Who were the people who maintained the runic script and other cultural
accomplishments throughout centuries, and how did they bring the legacy
of the Sumerians to Hungary? The Hungarian alternative
“historians” struggle for a reappraisal of the
Eastern
nomadic peoples, who are usually depicted as primitive and brutal in
old European sources. In this, they can refer not only to the beautiful
art of the Scythians but also to the fact that of the Huns, the Eastern
warrior people who conquered and devastated large parts of Europe in
the 4th and 5th century AD, very little is really known. Of their
language, which may have belonged to the Turkic group, there is no
proper
documentation (only a handful of words and names, partly of Germanic or
Slavic, partly of Turkic origin, have been recorded).
Traditionally, the Huns have been identified with the xiong-nupeople
mentioned in old Chinese sources, but this, too, is uncertain.
And because all descriptions of the Huns were written by their enemies
and victims, it is easy to claim that these stories about fierce and
dreadfully ugly barbarians are mere propaganda – in reality,
the
Huns were not only brave but also wise, beautiful and enlightened. This
was also stated in the petition signed by more than 2000 Hungarians who
even in our days call themselves Huns; in 2005, they applied for
official recognition
as an ethnic minority. The parliamentary commission for human rights
and minority affairs, however, relying on statements of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, was not convinced.
(For some time already, Hungarian alternative websites have circulated
a word list in the Hun language, allegedly based on Armenian and Greek
original sources which were found in an – apparently
non-existent –
Armenian monastery in Isfahan. The list was originally published by a
retired Hungarian
archaeologist in a children’s colouring book (!). The story
is too
fantastic to be true, especially as there is no documentation
whatsoever about the original source texts, their background,
transcription etc.; the “Hunnish” words are simply
distorted Hungarian. For more information in Hungarian, see a
nice article on the nyest.hu portal.)
Since the Middle Ages, there has existed a tradition of identifying the
ancestors of the Hungarians with Huns. The Hungarians, just like the
Huns and the Scyths, were originally a war-like nomad people of the
steppe zone; like the Huns – although four or five centuries
later, in the late 9th century AD – they came to Central
Europe
from the East and were first known as fierce warriors and a severe
threat to their new Christian neighbours. In those times, centuries
before modern comparative linguistics and the idea of a nation-state
based on language were even thought of, it was natural to identify
peoples with each other on the basis of similarities in culture and way
of life. For this reason, the early Hungarians, whose culture was
formed by massive influences from Turkic and other steppe peoples,
figure in Byzantine and
Western European sources as “Turks”, later also as
“Huns”. Probably because of this identification,
the originally Turkic ethnonym on-ogur
‘10 arrows (= 10 tribes)’ also
acquired its folk-etymological initial h-; Ungaria became Hungaria, and even
in our days, many people consider this as a piece of evidence for the
Hunnish origin of the Hungarians.
Klára Sándor has analysed the
research on the history of Hungarians’ self-identification as
“Huns” and comes to the conclusion that probably it
was
Western Europeans who first believed that the Hungarians were a
subgroup or descendants of the Huns, and the Hungarians themselves only
took over this idea a little later (article
in Hungarian on the galamus.hu website).
The first medieval
chronicle in
which the Huns were mentioned as the ancestors of the Hungarian nation
was written by Simon Kézai in the 13th century. Now medieval
chronicles are no reliable historical documentation in the modern sense
of the word – they are tendentious compilations of facts,
fiction
and folklore in the service of certain political goals. Kézai
may well have noticed the similarities between the Hun legends and the
Hungarians’ own folklore (a considerable part of it goes back to
the shared cultural heritage of the peoples of the steppe zone!), and
by identifying his people with the Huns he gave them an internationally
acknowledged “label” and a “noble descent”
– in a similar way as the ancient Romans claimed to descend
from heroes of the Trojan war. By describing
the warlike past of the Huns, the chronicle-writer could provide the
Hungarian gentry with accomplished ancestors to
legitimise their families’ privileges. For
Kézai’s
employer, King László, emphasising the
“non-Western” origins of the Hungarians may also
have been
especially important, as the king himself was half Cuman –
his mother
was a princess of a Turkic-speaking wild nomad people settled in
Hungary, a people which in his time was still resisting the missionary
activities of the Catholic church. Even for later kings, the
identification with the Huns was a PR strategy to highlight their role
as mighty and feared warlords; in the 15th century, King Mathias
Corvinus let his chronists call him “the second
Attila”.
Over centuries, medieval chronicles became an important part of the
national cultural legacy. In the time of Romantic Nationalism in the
19th century, when everywhere in Europe glorious national histories
were constructed on the basis of heroic epics, folk tales and legends,
the Hungarians, understandably, made use of the Huns who had already
become a part of their national history-writing. Poetry and prose was
written about Attila and his tribe, the Hunnish history of the
Hungarians was presented in children’s storybooks, paintings
and
sculptures. One of the most important literary accomplishments in this
genre was Géza Gárdonyi’s popular
historical novel A
láthatatlan ember (‘The
invisible man’, 1902), the story of a young Byzantine scribe
who
on a diplomatic mission falls in love with the daughter of a Hun
chieftain. The Huns in this book are described as
unmistakable
Hungarians, with abundant references to Hungarian language, folklore
and the runic script. Thus, the imagined legacy of the Huns has become
part of Hungarian cultural history. Even in our days, Attila is a
popular boys’ name, and the national anthem mentions
“the
blood [= descendants] of Bendegúz”, father of
Attila.
Giving up this Hun tradition would mean the same as giving up the
national epic Kalevala would mean for the Finns. (Which, actually, has
a certain historical truth as well – the major part of the
folklore material for Kalevala was collected not in Finland but in
Karelian area on the Russian side of the border. But that’s
another story.)
How we became Bolsheviks: From Huns and Sumerians to active
Anti-Finno-Ugrism
In the post-war years, the Finno-Ugric origins of the Hungarians were
not a question of primary importance for the Hungarians who were
struggling under the yoke of Stalinist dictatorship. In fact, in the
first few years of Communist power in Hungary, Finno-Ugric relatedness
was a taboo: until 1950 Soviet linguistics followed the doctrine of
Marrism, according to which language relatedness in the traditional
sense does not exist at all. Even after that – contrary to
what
is imagined now – Finno-Ugric relatedness was not a major
concern
for the Socialist rulers. But of course it came in handy as a nice
addition to the usual Socialist liturgy about “friendship
between
peoples”, when the contacts between Hungary and Finland, the
perhaps nicest and most harmless capitalist country, started to develop
again from the 1960s on.
In the Socialist system, no multiple truths were allowed. This, of
course, could mean censorship and suppression of facts, but on the
other hand it also kept a large part of pseudo-scientific flim-flam
under cover: there were no publication channels dedicated to astrology
or homeopathy, and nobody could seriously state in public that the
piles of corpses in the photos from Auschwitz were actually made from
papier-maché. In historical linguistics, this meant that
“Sumerologists” and other alternative groups
couldn’t
make their voice heard very easily. And because a major part of them
lived in exile in the West and combined their prehistorical fantasies
with ardent right-wing patriotism and Anti-Socialist rhetoric, a
political Berlin wall was gradually built between mainstream
linguistics and flim-flam as well.
Perhaps we could put it this way: The political barrier between a
“Sumerologist” in Argentina fantasizing about the
Hungarians’ glorious past and a “normal
researcher”
earning his/her small but guaranteed salary in Hungarian academia was
gradually understood as a barrier separating
“patriotic”
from “non-patriotic” research. This may have
happened
especially as the Socialist system in Hungary collapsed and the
pressure created by political censorship exploded. Some
“alternative” researchers vented their frustration
by
accusing Hungarian Finno-Ugrists of “goulash
Communism”.
The de-censored media and increasingly the Internet offered a new
channel for conspiracy theories and fabrication of sensations: All
these years, they have lied to the people of Hungary about their
history, but now, finally, we will tell you the truth! According to the
basic principles of propaganda, people will believe almost anything if
it is repeated often enough, and now the means for endless repetition
are available. In addition to the above-mentioned “order to
Austrian historians” and the “Trefort
quotation”,
an excellent example is the completely unfounded statement
which
most Hungarians will have heard: “In Finland, Finno-Ugric
relatedness is not taught any more. The Finns have rewritten their
school textbooks and removed the Finno-Ugric myths in 2003.”
(An article with lots of nice counter-examples, in Hungarian, on
the nyest.hu website.)
So, here we stand and watch how the wonderbugs come creeping from under
every stone. More and more often normal, sensible, educated Hungarians
conclude that this Finno-Ugric thingy must have been a
Habsburg-Communist plot, how else would so many people write
about it everywhere. Rabid Anti-Finno-Ugrists demand that all
institutions for Finno-Ugric studies in Hungary be abolished and a
brave new research of prehistory constructed along the
Hun-Scyth-Sumerian lines. Time and again, I get hate mails from
Hungarian fanatics (“you are a racist and an idiot, and
besides,
you are just envious, as Hungarians had their apostolic kings when
Finns were still living in trees”). And this is nothing
compared
with what my Hungarian colleagues now must live through: threats,
accusations of treason and Bolshevik propaganda, and plain insults. I
know Hungarian Finno-Ugrists who will not reveal their field of study
to strangers any more, to avoid unpleasant comments.
Behind all this, one can sense a more general
“brutalisation” of discourse which anybody
following the Hungarian media cannot fail to notice. “Hate
speech”, openly racist or Anti-Semitist tones are tolerated
more and more often. Besides, the present government cultivates an
emotional style which, in the eyes of an outsider, seems to bring the country
back to the 1930s or the 19th century. Could you imagine a Western
European state passing a new constitution with a preamble full of
romantic nationalist liturgy (“the National
Creed”), pleading to God, mentioning the Holy Crown as a
symbol of Hungarian statehood and “pride” (in our
unique language, etc.)?
Perhaps the most essential and symptomatic problem of this debate
around “Finno-Ugrism” and
“Anti-Finno-Ugrism” is that it is exclusively
Hungarian. All this alleged criticism of Finno-Ugric historical
linguistics concentrates on the Hungarian language, its position and
its history and presents two Hungarian (or
“Hungary-based”) Finno-Ugrists as the main
scapegoats. As if there were no research on Finno-Ugric language
relatedness in any other country of the world. (Were the Finns M. A.
Castrén and Erkki Itkonen – and numerous others
–, the Swedes K. B. Wiklund and Björn Collinder, the
Norwegian Knut Bergsland, or the numerous Finno-Ugrists of Germany in
the 20th-21st century paid by the Habsburgs or by the Communists in
Moscow? Which institution finances my chair in Vienna? A major
international investment, only in order to humiliate the proud
Magyars...) And as if Finno-Ugric linguistics were not an organic part
of the study of historical linguistics worldwide, employing the same
methods which are used in the research of numerous other language
families as well.
Many alternative critics of “Finno-Ugrism” are not
only ignorant of the methods of historical linguistics but also
illiterate in any other language than Hungarian, and probably this
applies even more to their readers. Now in this case, we can really
blame the Communists – or the compulsory Russian teaching in
Hungarian schools in the Socialist system: nobody wanted to learn Russian, and very few learnt
it properly, but the resources spent for Russian were lost for other foreign
languages. In any case, according to a recent Eurobarometer studyHungarians
belong to the six most “monolingual” nations of Europe
– only in the UK and in Ireland, an even smaller proportion of
the population can speak a foreign language. Beside the ideological
reasons, there are also practical reasons for the Hungarians not being
able to see beyond their borders.
The language barrier also works in the other direction, and this is the
final reason why I wrote this text. Recently, the famous Hungarian-born
pianist András Schiff has openly criticised Viktor
Orbán’s regime, its media policy and the increasing
racism, xenophobia and political chauvinism in Hungarian public
discourse. In his interview to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
he claims that this nationalist hate speech fails to provoke worldwide
outrage only because Hungarian is like a secret language, understood by
very few outsiders only. This applies to
“Anti-Finno-Ugrism” as well: very few outsiders are able to
follow the Internet fora which praise Hungarian as the original
language of all humanity and portray university linguists as
accomplices of an international Jewish-Freemason-Jesuit-Communist
mafia. Perhaps it could be a good idea to translate a few samples into
a more accessible language.
November 1, 2011
johanna.laakso [at]
univie.ac.at