Á. Berta, A. Róna-Tas, L. Károly. West Old Turkic: Turkic loanwords in Hungarian. Part I-II (2011)

Á. Berta, A. Róna-Tas, L. Károly. West Old Turkic: Turkic loanwords in Hungarian. Part I: introduction, lexicon »A-K«. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011, pp. I-X, 1-618. ISBN 9783447062602

Á. Berta, A. Róna-Tas, L. Károly. West Old Turkic: Turkic loanwords in Hungarian. Part II: lexicon »L-Z«, conclusions, apparatus. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011, pp. I-X, 619-1494. ISBN 9783447062602

Cover illustration: The picture on the cover is from Cod Clmx 404 of the Chronicum Pictum, now held in the Szechenyi National Library, Budapest. On p. 21, we see the Conquest of Pannonia. On the right- hand side, Arpâd arrives on a white horse with six captains and lance-wielding armoured warriors to conquer the Carpathian Basin. In the centre, surrounded by Hungarians calling the name of God three times, Arpâd drinks the water of the Danube from a drinking horn. To the left stands Kushid with a wooden flagon in his hand for the same purpose. On the left-hand side, the Slav prince Svatopluk on his throne receives Kushid. Kushid’s groom leads the white horse with a golden saddle. In the lower right-hand corner, women approach with their children, while herdsmen and castles can be seen at the top. The pictures in the Codex were painted around 1360.

The Hungarian language is the most important source for reconstructing the West Old Turkic language spoken west of the Ural in the 5th-12th centuries. The study by Arpad Berta and Andras Rona-Tas deals with the etymology of about 500 Hungarian words which are or may be of Old Turkic, in some cases of Middle Turkic origin. The Hungarian-Turkic contacts began in the 5th century and lasted a long period. The earliest loanwords were copied from a Western Old Turkic idiom; the latest loanwords were borrowed from the language of the Cumans who settled down in Hungary in the first half of 13th century. The authors excluded the Ottoman words from the corpus. In all cases the authors give the etymology of the Turkic word, the reconstructed copied form, the form as adapted by the Hungarian language and the history of the word. The detailed introduction focuses on the former research, the historical setting and the technical framework. In the concluding chapters the authors reconstruct the Ancient Hungarian language at the time of the Turkic-Hungarian contacts and outline the structure of the West Old Turkic language. A bibliography and several indices help the reader to use the book.