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Interesting Chinese/Hungarian similarity | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| kewms Senior Member United States Joined 6187 days ago 160 posts - 159 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 65 of 97 01 March 2008 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | ||
It seems to me that the modern use of the name Attila doesn't have much to do with whether the two languages are related or not. There are plenty of ethnic Chinese Americans named "John" or "Maggie," too. To prove any kind of relationship based on names, you'd need to prove that both the Hungarian and Chinese tribes named their kids "Attila" *before* The Hun made the name symbolic of warrior might. Katherine 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 66 of 97 01 March 2008 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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On the same page 6 of this thread I explained exactly what I meant by the usage of the name Attila by Huns and Hungarians :-)
I was implying that if the Hungarian tribes indeed did borrow the name Attila from the Huns, they must've met in order to make this loan happen.. which could lead to all sorts of speculations as to how much the two tribes and their two languages were related. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kewms Senior Member United States Joined 6187 days ago 160 posts - 159 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 67 of 97 01 March 2008 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, no. Attila the Hun's empire included a large fraction of modern Europe. By the time of his death, it's likely that every educated person in Europe and many of the peasants knew who he was. His name was therefore available for borrowing by the entire continent. To show a relationship between the tribes, you would need to show that Hungarian use of the name predated 450 AD or so. If you've done that, I missed it. To put the same argument in another context, many Christians name their children after New Testament figures -- Mark, Mary, Joseph, etc. Does this mean that, say, Chinese and African Christians are ethnically related? Katherine 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 68 of 97 01 March 2008 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just watched a whole historical document about Attila, which says that Hungarians are partial descendants of the Huns. Hungarian tribes came into the present day Hungary (9th/10th century A.D.) much later than the Huns were allready swirling through Europe (5th century A.D.)
I see what you are trying to say, but today Attila is an exclusively Hungarian name. Attila and the confederation of Huns has conquered a territory reaching from Orleans in the west to north Russia in the north and Constantinopolis in the south. To my knowlege non of the nations living on this territory are using the name Atilla except the Hungarians, which could imply that it was a Hungarian name before Hungarians came into present day Hungary asking the question again: 'Where did they get the name from?' If the historical document says Hungarians are partial descendants of the Huns..then I think it could be said that the name Attila was either taken from the Huns or shared with them a long time before any of them entered Europe.. maybe in a time when both tribes were one. Attila might also mean: The Volga River in the Hun language or Iron. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 69 of 97 01 March 2008 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Hungarian way of expressing possession not only reminds me of Mandarin's way but also that of what is used in Finnish, Mongolian, Russian and Ukrainian. I doubt that the similarity in expressing the possession in Hungarian and Mandarin is worth getting excited over (unless you'd use using the similarity as a sort of mnemonic or teaching aid for Hungarian students learning Mandarin or vice-versa) and believe that it arises as a way to express possession in a language that lacks a verb "to have".
"Vlad has a book" can be expressed in Ukrainian as either a) Влад має кнігу (literally "Vlad has (a) book") OR: b) У Влада є кніга (literally "At Vlad [there] is (a) book") *** On Attila, the only thing that I find striking about the use of Attila is that Hungarians seem to be the only group of people who name their boys Attila. While it's true that Attila was known to both vassals and enemies of the Huns, it is rather odd that for such a supposedly (in)famous name, only one ethnic group today still uses it actively. As I posted earlier I do agree with kewms since just because Hungarians still use other supposedly Hunnish names such as Ildikó and Réka, it doesn't mean an automatic Hun-Hungarian kinship. Historians would need to explore the cultures of the ancient steppe nomads further, but alas they may never know the real story since there's very little in historical records so far. What is there is of varying quality since chroniclers of the Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and Chinese empires/kingdoms had their own take of events and geography and their records may contain differing interpretations because of their imperfect understanding or biases. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7144 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 70 of 97 01 March 2008 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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The name (more often, I think, spelled "Atilla") is, or rather was, also fairly common in Turkey. It wasn't a traditional Turkish name, but pan-Turkic romantic nationalism in the 20th century led to names like "Atilla" and "Cengiz" becoming fairly popular. My impression is that they're no longer being given to newborns to the extent that they were in, say, the 1940s and 1950s.
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| Sima Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6054 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English | Message 71 of 97 28 April 2008 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is an interesting topic I have beening following for some time. Thanks for all the postings. While forums elsewhere also mentioned the link between Hungarian and Chinese, the cases people present are extremely limited to a extent that they could be pure coincident. However, if the Xiongnu-Hun-Magyar theory stands, the Chinese Hungarian link can be true. We need many more examples to confirm it.
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| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6149 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 72 of 97 29 April 2008 at 6:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Vlad, while you may well be right that there was only one protolanguage, it is completely unprovable with current techniques. It all depends whether language was developed before the great exodus from Africa around 70000 years ago, if the geneticists have got it right. Since there is no important anatomical difference between humans then and now, the chances are it was. Indeed, it has just been claimed that Southern and East African humans were isolated for half the time of existence of the human race, so it could have been developed much earlier, before 100,000 years, since both groups can speak perfectly well. So your hypothesis is entirely plausible but almost irrelevant for meaningful comparisons of modern languages.
It is thought that the limit of reconstruction of protolanguages is about 10000 years. Beyond that time, it is almost impossible to detect any similarities between languages above background noise. Have a look at www.zompist.com/chance.htm. He calculates the probability of words being similar between languages by pure statistical chance, and the results are striking. There is a very high probability of hundreds of words from a dictionary being similar, especially if the criteria are relaxed for either pronunciation or meaning. It doesn't look good for your relation of Hungarian and Chinese based on one word, and also shows the huge difficulty in proving the claims of the Nostratic theory just on lexical comparison. I once gave a lift to a hitchiker who had proved entirely to his own satisfaction that Scots Gaelic and Hebrew were the same language from comparisons of several dozen words and I have also seen books claiming that either Hebrew or Arabic, as being the perfect holy language, is the ancestor of all other languages on Earth. Never mind the umpteen studies which have shown relationships between Basque and every other language isolate in the world, from Caucasian to Native American to Sumerian. There is one study which has used the full statistical apparatus of evolutionary theory to create a very plausible family tree for Indo-European languages going back to about 9000 years without assuming the usual groups such as Romance, Germanic etc. It shows just how complex the problem is. It was published in Nature in 2003 (volume 426, pp435-9). The results are fascinating for anyone with an interest in the history of these languages, as they give probabilities of the standard language groupings being actually true. Comfortingly, most suggested associations do hold up, so the field is not entirely based on egos and guesswork (though there is a lot of that). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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