Preface

"Etymological Dictionary of Hungarian" (EDH) and my two little volumes "Hungaro-Rhaetica" were and still are a huge success, unexpected even for me, since I never thought that until now already over 5'000 people would download them. My readers may thus ask why I present them now a new etymological dictionary of Hungarian. This has at least three good reasons:

First, EDH shows on approximately 1'500 pages Gostony's 1'042 Hungarian words ("Dictionnaire d'étymologie sumérienne", Paris 1975) in 18 language families with several dozens of languages around the world, ordered primarily according to the language families and only secondarily according to the 1'042 Hungarian-Sumerian cognates. The present dictionary, which I call "HMD", shows 1'317 Hungarian-Mesopotamian (Sumerian, Akkadian, Rhaetic) words according to alphabetical order.

Second, Gostony' dictionary as well as all hitherto published works on Sumerian-Hungarian, are based on outdated Sumerian dictionaries, the newest one being normally P. Anton Deimel's "Šumerisches Lexikon" (Rome 1928ss.), but since this work is hardly available outside of libraries specialized in Assyriology, most of the Sumerian-Hungarian studies are based on Friedrich Delitzsch's "Sumerisches Glossar" (1914) which represents the scientific level of Sumerology of the end of the 19th century. HDM is based of the Sumerian dictionary of the University of Pennsylvania which is accessible in the internet and constantly being updated.

Third, the only reliable and thus usable Sumerian-Hungarian language studies are the ones written by Ida Bobula, Sándor Csőke and Zsigmond Varga. Most of the other ones deserve the bad critics that they got, because almost each etymology is either debatable or wrong. This is one of the main reasons, why the Sumerian-Hungarian affinity, already early proposed, was never accepted by international scientists. All people who wrote Sumerian-Hungarian studies did it with best intentions - but at the end they rather damaged than helped this theory. Moreover, practically none of these works are based on sound-laws. The necessity of sound-laws and thus the right of existence of historical linguistics was even denied. HDM is based on sound-laws and presents a completely new etymological base for 1317 Hungarian words, keeping only those early Sumerian etymologies that can stand before the present state of Sumerian linguistics. HDM does not deny historical linguistics, but takes full consideration of the (Ugric, Finno-Ugric, Altaic, etc.) proto-forms that had been reconstructed by traditional historical linguists, confronts them with the possible Sumerian words and discusses divergences between Sumerian and Proto-X. Therefore, HDM does not intend to substitute traditional Hungarian etymological dictionaries, but enlarges their basis by confronting the abstract proto- forms with the concrete words of an extinct, but once living language.

I could have tried to explain more Hungarian words by Sumerian than I did. But with its 1317 entries, HMD can stand its concurrence at least in quantitative respect: "A Magyar Szókészlet finnugor elemei etimológiai szótár" contains ca. 677 and Budenz' comparative dictionary 996 entries, concentrating only on such Hungarian words that show up at least in one other Uralic language. Since it was important to me to compare the actual Sumerian words with the reconstructed proto-forms, I restricted myself also basically only on such words, but enlarged my vocabulary from the Uralic to the Altaic language family, does presupposing that the once asserted Ural- Altaic macrofamily does exist. The other group of words I have chosen to try to explain in HMD are words that are still "of unknown origin". In this case, HDM wants to open new ways by confronting such Hungarian words with possible Sumerian, Akkadian and Rhaetic cognates. On the other side, Bárczi's "short" dictionary has apprioximately 8,500 entries, the big TESz has 10,714 entries and the newest, the "Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Ungarischen (EWU)", has ca. 10,000 entries, but these latter works include all possible derivations from the simple Hungarian stems. Since these derivations are accessible in each big Hungarian dictionary (and known to the Hungarian readers anyway), I also concentrated myself only on stems, which does not exclude that I also brought derivations, if their semantics has considerably changed from the original meaning(s) of the stems.

Unlike in EDH, I do not quote scientific literature in HDM (unless it is really necessary), because unlike EDH, HDM should become a reference work not only for linguists but for specialists of other disciplines and even interested people of each genre as well. For everybody who wants to check the used as well as further literature, I recommend the several bibliographies at the ends of the 18 chapters of EDH. Since it is very well known that Finno-Ugric etymologies change from dictionary to dictionary (even in such standard works that were written under participation of the same persons almost at the same times), I cite deviant proto-forms next to one another, separated by commata. I like to thank my great teacher and best friend, Professor Dr. Linus Brunner (1909-1987), with whom I studied Assyriology and Semitistics and without his continued mental presence I would not have been able to write HDM. Special thanks go to Flórián Farkas who has already taken care of many studies of mine and has also done an excellent job in editing HDM.

Tucson, AZ (USA), July 28, 2007

Prof. Dr. Alfréd Tóth