The Hungarian mystery

According to lots of research, the Hungarian language (Magyar) has no root in Latin, Slavic, Persian, Arabic and no other known language. It is simply unique.

Anyone with ideas/infos on this? Some stories (sorry, no links at the moment, I'll post if I find some) claim that the origin of the hungarian people and language is to be sought in a lost UFO that landed on earth ages ago...

Curiously a lot of big scientific minds came out of Hungary: Nikola Tesla, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Theodore von K�rm�n... Lots of others.

Especially hungarians (if any reading this?)are welcome to comment as they are probably more keen to know any legend/stories/facts that come with this...

Originally posted by SpookyVince
According to lots of research, the Hungarian language (Magyar) has no root in Latin, Slavic, Persian, Arabic and no other known language. It is simply unique.

Anyone with ideas/infos on this? Some stories (sorry, no links at the moment, I'll post if I find some) claim that the origin of the hungarian people and language is to be sought in a lost UFO that landed on earth ages ago...

Curiously a lot of big scientific minds came out of Hungary: Nikola Tesla, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Theodore von K�rm�n... Lots of others.

Especially hungarians (if any reading this?)are welcome to comment as they are probably more keen to know any legend/stories/facts that come with this...

Hungarian is the strangest language I've ever heard spoken besides some pygmy clicking languages. Most of the Hungarians I know are well developed in many areas. My father is talented in languages (speaks 4), sculpts stone, carves wood, does oil painting, sketches, sings, skis and swims. My uncle and his cousins are also professors. Most of them are bastards, womanizers and charmers. I'm not sure if they are aliens but it's possible. The older my father gets, the more he loses control of his english. He's left me a few messages that sound almost as if they are messages left in tongues. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else uncovers information along these lines. I'm going to Hungary later in the year and I can do research.

Hugarian belongs to the Finno-Ugrian language family...that branch of the tree speciffically goes.

Uralic --> Finno-Ugric --> Ugric --> Hungarian --> HUNGARIAN

Search here for a great site on languages

It's an interesting site to explore, you can learn alot. There is asection on nearly extict languages, many of them you can count the speakers on your hands. I wonder what it would be like to know that when you die, your language dies with you.

I believe that the Korean (maybe Japanese as well) language doesn't have a root language, or atleast not a branch system that I've seen that has placed it anywhere.

HUngarian is being researched as tied closely to what was once Sumeria. It is a very ancient language as well.

Originally posted by IKnowNothing
I believe that the Korean (maybe Japanese as well) language doesn't have a root language, or atleast not a branch system that I've seen that has placed it anywhere.

*nods* Japanese is it's own group, and it is debateable wether or not Korean is part of this group, since it is not able to be put anywhere else.

google "linguistics" and you'll quickly find a grouping of families and included languages, often with a list of unique languages. Basque is unique, and there are a couple of others.
I good explanation for these languages is independent development, but what interests me is that there aren't any off-shoots, only a sinlge language from that family. To me, it suggests that they are the last survivors of a lost linguistic family- which by whatever means (natural disaster for example) has been thoroughly destroyed.

Hungarian is fascinating, among other reasons because it's a language isolate. Hungarian and its distant language cousins in Finland and Estonia are the only Uralic languages in all of Europe.

Just listening to Hungarian you can tell that it's very different from most other languages. Linguists place Hungarian closest to Khanti and Mansi, two obscure languages spoken in western Siberia between the Urals and the Ob river. It is possible that this is evidence for an Asian origin of the Hungarians. However, the related Finnic languages seem to have been in Europe before the Huns settled in present-day Hungary. Going back many thousands of years to the time before Indo-European language had reached Europe, there may have been proto-Finnic speakers in the north and proto-Basque speakers in the south. Perhaps others can contribute more. I can tell you one thing though- Finnish and Hungarian don't sound anything alike.

All these various groups of language-speakers came in waves over time, and it wasn't necessarily one group displacing another or one big military invasion. More commonly, small bands of newcomers would mingle and over time one or more cultures/languages would emerge from the new demographics. So rather than killing off every last one of the previous inhabitants, the subsequent generations just began to speak the language of the new people. Example: the Gallic/Celtic speaking people of France never died out and they weren't displaced by a new people. They just took up the habit of speaking their own dialect of Latin, which eventually became known as modern French. What about Brittany, you might ask? Well, that area was truly isolated and did preserve a bit of Celtic language, but modern Breton also has "modern" influence from Welsh and Cornish who emigrated there during the middle ages.

The ancestors of the Hungarian can be tracked back to the ancient Hun and other peoples who once lived in the north of China. There are some evidences in China. In the Gansu province of China the people of Yugu nationality have their own folk songs very consistent with the Hungarian in the respects of rhythm, scale, content etc. Perhaps, this is the origin of the Hungarian language.

Removed off-topic post

when i was in korea we learned that the korean language was created by a bunch of scholars for simplicity reasons and has some similarities to finnish. Not sure why or how they managed that but that was what they tought us in our class to help alleviate culture shock

removed off topic post from old thread

Thanks for all your answers, special thanks to zero_snaz for the good links.

I know that research on languages is difficult, especially when it comes to trace its roots... By the way I found quite interesting that these people are apparently then not too much influenced from outside (especially their language) as it appears that over centuries (millenia?) they've come to be quite unique. And yes the basque also as an example is quite unique, but it is now a dialect... Hungarian is still shared as a mother language by several millions of people.

I also found curious (but that's good for them, he?) that a lot of big minds come from that small country. In comparison, it should have been Belgian persons then that should have invented the microwave, the cell phone, the telegraph, the ABS, and maybe other things! Hats down!

As long as English is alive and well, I'm cool.

hi there, hungarian language is finougric, it's just separated from findland and estonia, so it has changed during a long period and sounds a little bit different. But it has the same roots from these days when ancient tribes moved into west and then separated.

there is one very intersting language and for sure very old - it's Lithuanian. It's my own mother tongue, so i'm proud to tell about it.

the thing is about our language, that there are only two countries that has the same root language in the world - it's Latvian and Lithuanian - both from Baltic language group.

Indo European Language group (INDO): Baltic -> Eastern -> Lithuanian

the thing is that this language is - even though the tribes travelled thousands of miles away from their source (you see that "INDO" so that is the source) - are quite simmilar to archaic Indian written language and it's really helpful to read these ancient texts.

"Both Latvian and Lithuanian languages are strictly local and obscure--supposedly derived fro ancient sanscrit. They have no relation to any other language or, in fact, to each other. The Latvians cannot understand Lithuanians and vice versa. "

Tracing the origin of encient languages is no easy task. The most widely kept view regarding the origin of the Hungarian (Magyar) language is of Sumerian connection, indicated by the almost identical grammar of the two languages. The sudden appearance of the non-Semythic Sumerians in Mesopotamia is as mysterious, as the non indo-europian Hungarians forceful appearance in the centre of Europe.
Other evidence of strong connection between Sumerians and Hungarians is their identical cuneiform writing.

Originally posted by Anonymous ATS
Tracing the origin of encient languages is no easy task. The most widely kept view regarding the origin of the Hungarian (Magyar) language is of Sumerian connection, indicated by the almost identical grammar of the two languages.

Wikipedia and a number of linguistic sites contradict this. They say it's Siberian/Finnish in origin and its closest relatives are Siberian languages.
en.wikipedia.org...

The sudden appearance of the non-Semythic Sumerians in Mesopotamia is as mysterious, as the non indo-europian Hungarians forceful appearance in the centre of Europe.

Niether actually "appeared mysteriously." Sumerians are a "Semetic people" and have been in the area for well over 7,000 years:
en.wikipedia.org...

Other evidence of strong connection between Sumerians and Hungarians is their identical cuneiform writing.

Hungarians actually didn't write until they were Christianized. They use an offshoot of the Roman alphabet, as you can see here on Omniglot: www.omniglot.com...

Originally posted by The Vagabond
google "linguistics" and you'll quickly find a grouping of families and included languages, often with a list of unique languages. Basque is unique, and there are a couple of others.
I good explanation for these languages is independent development, but what interests me is that there aren't any off-shoots, only a sinlge language from that family. To me, it suggests that they are the last survivors of a lost linguistic family- which by whatever means (natural disaster for example) has been thoroughly destroyed.

Basque is a good example of what you're saying, which is often thought to be derived from a language that was spoken before the Roman conquest. Indeed, DNA studies of the Basque people show a slight but distinct difference between them and other Europeans.

Originally posted by devmim
The ancestors of the Hungarian can be tracked back to the ancient Hun and other peoples who once lived in the north of China. There are some evidences in China. In the Gansu province of China the people of Yugu nationality have their own folk songs very consistent with the Hungarian in the respects of rhythm, scale, content etc. Perhaps, this is the origin of the Hungarian language.

More exactly the people were conquered by the Huns, and adopted their language.

Originally posted by kinslayer
when i was in korea we learned that the korean language was created by a bunch of scholars for simplicity reasons and has some similarities to finnish. Not sure why or how they managed that but that was what they tought us in our class to help alleviate culture shock

There was a school of 19th Century linguistics that wanted to link Korean to Hungarian and Finnish. Careful examination of the morphology of the languages show them to be distinct. There is a possible relation to Altaic, but it's not conclusive. Othewise, Korean is an isolate.