Early Hungarian–Turkic language contact

This chapter surveys early Hungarian–Turkic language contact and its study. It places the beginnings of contact after the ancestors of the Hungarians separated from the Ugric community and left their homeland in the forest-steppe of north-western Siberia, and locates intense contact after their settlement between the Don and Kuban rivers near the Khazar Empire, continuing through Etelköz, the Conquest and the Árpád period until the Mongol invasion. It reviews the debate on the classification of the Khazar language within the Turkic family. It then traces the research: the 19th-century ‘Ugric–Turkic War’ between Vámbéry and Budenz; Gombocz’s 1912 monograph, which established three chronological layers of Turkic loanwords and identified Bulgar Turkic as the source of the early layer; Ligeti’s etymological studies and his 1986 monograph; the etymological dictionaries TESz and EWUng; and Róna-Tas and Berta’s West Old Turkic (2011), which draws on Johanson’s theory of code copying. According to this work, early contact involved the Ogur and Kipchak branches of Western Old Turkic, and Ogur was the language of both the Khazars and the Bulgars, since 246 of the 384 certain Western Old Turkic words in Hungarian have reflexes in Chuvash. With examples such as gyöngy, szél, bíró, törvény, ökör, disznó, árpa and szőlő, the chapter illustrates geographical and chronological phonological subsystems and vocabulary of elite titles, public life, animal husbandry and crop cultivation. It argues that these data reflect several centuries of contact at successive stopping places, one of which, the Don–Kuban region, is indicated by Hungarian–Turkic–Alanian plant names.