Hungarian Palaeography

 

All the ancient writing systems of the middle-East, Mediterranean and central-Europe are in some kind of relationship. This is becoming obvious if we compare the letter A, called Aleph by the people of Levant or Alpha by the old Greeks. The Phoenician, the Etruscan and even our modern letter A, derived from the Roman script are all the same, and this is true for the Hungarian Rovás as well. But the question is, how tight the connections between all of those alphabets are? Which ties are more closely related? What was the line of development and influence between those alphabets? This can be revealed from the Correlation Analysis.

The Criterion: because there are difficulties in judgement of the similarities between characters which are often arbitrary, there are introduced only three classes of similarities [with allotted values]: (a) identical or very similar [1], (b) similar, but significantly changed [0.5] and (c) not similar at all [0].

The above criterion is applied in comparison of three characteristic features: (1) comparison of the sounds only, (2) comparison of the signs only and (3) comparison of both, sounds and signs matching. The results are compiled into table and shown graphically.
 

The Graph shows the matches and the differences of the sounds, signs and signs+sounds in two writings/languages. The low match of the s&s (1.7%) is the proof, that the borrowed signs did not carry the allocated sounds with themselves (with other words, this must be an independent development in Hungarian). For the Etruscan writing system see Bibl.[1].

The graph shows that the similarity of sounds and signs together is less than 2%, similarity of signs 28% and the similarity of sounds 51%.

(1) Matching of the sounds (2) Matching of the signs (3) Matching of the sounds and signs Note: (*) the big difference here, is the consequence of many peculiar Hungarian sounds not to be found in Phoenician. For Phoenician writing system see Bibl.[2].

The graph shows that the similarity of sounds and signs together is around 6%, similarity of signs 16% and the similarity of voices 60%.

(1) Matching of the sounds (2) Matching of the signs (3) Matching of the sounds and signs Note: in Rovás there are no signs for long vowels, this accounts for the difference of some 8% in the Graph.

This is a litmus test of this method. We know that the old and modern Hungarian are basically very similar, this should come up in the result. The diagram shows that the similarity of sounds and signs together is 2%, the similarity of the signs 10% and the similarity of the sounds 77%.
 

The result in the last case (iii) clearly shows, that the Roman script of the modern Hungarian is quite unrelated to the older Hungarian Rovás (2%). This is not a surprise: we know that the Roman script was introduced into the Hungarian language during the middle ages, not without pain and lots of accommodations, which even today can not be called perfect (remember just the multitude of double special letters, umlauts, acutes etc.).

The first two cases (i, ii) show, that the Hungarian Rovás is actually more closely related to the Phoenician script (5.7%) than to the Etruscan (less than 2%). This implies, that in the ancient times there may have been another path of dispersing the cultures, apart from the Mediterranean, which may have involved the Asiatic geographical regions.

Note: Dr. Paolo Agostini kindly suggested, that the peculiar Hungarian rovás sign for NY may be developed from double signs for N, the sign for GY from D+J, etc. and that the similarity of the contemporary Hungarian sounds with the HuRov (marked with an arrow on the diagram) may perhaps exceed 80%. I thank him for these remarks.
 

[1] John Reich: The Making of the Past- Italy Before Rome, Elsevier Phaidon Publishing Projects, Oxford 1979.
[2] The Great Family Encyclopedic Dictionary, Bay Books in association with Oxford University Press, Kensington NSW 1988.

Copyright Note ©1992: this document was published only on the WWW, I reserve all rights to publish or change it without notice. You may however, freely link this document to, refer to it, copy it for academic purposes with the usual academic references, but you may not republish or sell it. Page optimised Jan 2000.

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