Old Hungarian script

Hungarian language
Alphabet, including ő ű and cs dz dzs gy ly ny sz ty zs
Phonetics and phonology
Vowel harmony
Grammar (Noun phrases · Verbs)
T-V distinction
Regulatory body
Hungarian names
Language history (Sound correspondences)
Tongue-twisters
Hungarian pronunciation of English Old Hungarian script English words from Hungarian

The Old Hungarian script^[1] (in Hungarian known as rovásírás, or székely rovásírás,^[2] székely-magyar rovás because their use persisted longest among the Székely in Transylvania; for short also simply rovás "notch, score"^[3]) is a writing system used by the Magyars in the Early Middle Ages (7th to 10th centuries, by Székely Magyars down to the 17th century). Because it is reminiscent of the runic alphabet, the Old Hungarian script has also popularly been called "Hungarian runes" or "Hungarian runic script".^[4]

The script is thought to be derived from the Old Turkic script, and probably first appeared during the 7th century. The Hungarians settled the Pannonian plain in 895. With the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary in AD 1000 and the adoption of the Latin alphabet with Christianization, the script fell into disuse, although in remote regions of Transylvania, it remained in marginal use into the 17th century at least.

The script is adapted to the phonology of the Hungarian language, featuring letters for phonemes such as cs, gy, ly, ny, ö, sz, ty, ü, zs.. The modern Hungarian alphabet represents these sounds with digraphs (letter sequences used to write a single sound) and diacritics.

Note that the rovásírás alphabet does not contain the letters for the phonemes dz, dzs of modern Hungarian since these are relative recent developments in the language's history. The Latin letters q, w, x and y also do not have an equivalent as these do not stand for separate phonemes in Hungarian but are only used to spell foreign words.

History

Origins

Around 600 AD, the Hungarian tribes moved southwest from their earlier territories to the coastal region of the Eastern Black Sea. The Hungarian Runes are related to the Old Turkic script, itself probably (though debatedly) deriving from Aramaic script^[5]. This is supported by the Hungarian tribes' early geographical proximity to the Göktürks. Moreover, all the letters but one for sounds which were shared by Turkic and Ancient Hungarian can be related to their Old Turkic counterparts.

The inscription found in Homokmégy-Halom. From the 900s

Most of the missing characters were dervied by script internal extensions, rather than borrowings, but a small number of characters seem to derive from Greek, such as 'eF'.^[6] The Hungarian Runic script is not directly related to Germanic Runes: the only tie between them is that both derive from the Phoenician alphabet (if Old Turkic indeed does). While the modern Hungarian term for this special script (coined in the 19th century) rovás derives from the verb ró ('to score') which is derived from old Finno-Ugric, general Hungarian terminology describing the technique of writing (ír 'to write', betű 'letter', bicsak 'knife (also: for carving letters)') derive from Turkic^[7], which supports the theory of transmission via Turks further.

Medieval Hungary

The alphabet of Nikolsburg

The century after 896 saw the emergence of the Hungarian State. The seven Hungarian tribes settled the Pannonian Basin, where the Principality of Hungary was formed.^[8] There are archaeological findings from the 10th century, for example, from Homokmégy^[9] The latter inscription was found on a fragment of a quiver made of bone. Although there have been several attempts to interpret it, the meaning of it is still unclear. In 1000, with the coronation of Stephen I of Hungary, Hungary became a Kingdom. The Latin alphabet was adopted as official script, however Old Hungarian continued to be used vernacularly.

The runic script was first mentioned in the 13th century Chronicle of Simon of Kéza,^[10] where he stated that the Székelys borrowed the script of the Romanians^[11][12], possibly making a confusion between the runes and cyrillic script: "... non tamen in plano Panonie, sed cum Blackis in montibus confinii sortem habuernut, unde Blakis commixti litteris ipsorum uti perhibentur".^[13] The earliest surviving copy of the actual alphabet was found is an incunabulum from 1483, found at the library of the castle of Nikolsburg, now Mikulov in Moravia, hand-written onto the endpaper of the printed book. This alphabet lists 35 letters and 15 ligatures with Latin transcriptions.

Early Modern period

In 1526, Hungary lost the Battle of Mohács against the Ottomans. This led to the partition of the Kingdom: the western and northern parts remained Royal Hungary, the southern parts were occupied by the Ottoman Empire, and the eastern portion became independent. The latter, notably the Principality of Transylvania, favoured Hungarian culture.

The Énlaka Inscription (1668) reads "egy az isten georgyius musnai diakon", or "There is but one God. Georgius Musnai deacon."

The indigenous script was not widely used, as previously, but became part of folk art in several areas. Thus, the corpus of Hungarian runes became more voluminous at the time. In Royal Hungary, rovás was used less, although there are relics from this territory, too. There is another copy – similar to the Nikolsburg Alphabet – of the rovás alphabet, dated 1609. The inscription from Énlaka, dated 1668, is an example of the "folk art use". In 1686, the Kingdom of Hungary regained the territories lost in 1526. After that time several other runic inscriptions were created, for example the inscriptions of Kibéd, Csejd, Makfalva, Szokolma, Marosvásárhely, Csíkrákos, Mezőkeresztes, Nagybánya, Torda, Felsőszemeréd [1], Kecskemét and Kiskunhalas, all ranging from the 17th to the early 19th century. After 1850, with the spread of modern education and education in Latin orthography, Hungarian runic writing was all but extinguished.

Scholarly discussion

The script was first described in late Humanist/Baroque scholarship, in 1598 by János Telegdi in his primer, "Rudimenta Priscae Hunnorum Linguae", where he presents his understanding of the rovás. It also contains Hungarian texts written with runes, for example, the Lord's Prayer.

In the 19th century scholars began to research the rules and the other features of the Old Hungarian script. From this time the name rovásírás began to enter popular consciousness in Hungary.

Because the Old Hungarian script had been replaced by Latin, linguistic researchers in the twentieth century had to reconstruct the alphabet from historic sources. Gyula Sebestyén, ethnographer, folklorist and Gyula (Julius) Németh, philologist, linguist, turcologist did the lion's share of this work. Sebestyén's publications, Rovás és rovásírás (Tally Marks and Runic Writing, Budapest, 1909) and A magyar rovásírás hiteles emlékei (Trustable Relics of the Hungarian Runic Writing, Budapest, 1915) contain valuable information on the topic.

Popular revival

Beginning with Adorján Magyar in 1915, the script has been promulgated as a means for writing modern Hungarian. These groups approached the question of representation of the vowels of modern Hungarian in different ways. Adorján Magyar made use of characters to distinguish a/á and e/é but did not distinguish the other vowels by length. A school led by Sándor Forrai from 1974 onward did also distinguish i/í, o/ó, ö/ő, u/ú, and ü/ű. The revival has been quite successful, with at least tens of thousands of people learning about the script. It has been an important part of youth education: the worldwide Hungarian Scout organizations, for instance, are teaching it in summer camps and other venues. The script is today held in high esteem by many Hungarians as an important cultural symbol.

Old Hungarian has seen other usages in the modern period, sometimes in association with or referencing Hungarian neopaganism, similar to the way in which Norse neopagans have taken up the Germanic runes, and Celtic neopagans have taken up Ogham script for various purposes. The use of the script sometimes has a political undertone, as they can be found from time to time in graffiti with a variety of content.

Epigraphy

In the latter part of the twentieth century, several new rovás and rovás-like inscriptions were found. For rovás-like see the section "Confusion" below.

Some of the findings include:

• A labeled crest etched into stone from Pécs, late 13^th century (Label: aBA SZeNTjeI vaGYUNK aKI eSZTeR ANna erZSéBeT; We are the saints [nuns] of Aba; who are Esther, Anna and Elizabeth.) (photo) (debated)
• Runic stick calendar, around 1300, copied by Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli in 1690^[14]. It contains several feasts and names, thus it is one of the most extensive runic records.
• Nicholsburg alphabet
• Runic record in Istanbul, 1515.
• Székelyderzs: a brick with runic inscription, found in the Unitarian church
• Énlaka: runic inscription, discovered by Balázs Orbán in 1864. (photo)
• Székelydálya: runic inscription, found in the Calvinist church
• The inscription from Felsőszemeréd (Horné Semerovce), Slovakia (1400s) (debated)

Characters

The runic alphabet includes 42 letters.^[15] Some consonants have two forms, for example, aS and eS. The 'a' form should be written after vowels a, á, o, ó, u, ú, while the 'e' form after e, ë, é, i, í, ö, ő, ü, ű.
To gather information about the transliteration's pronunciation, see Hungarian alphabet.

The Hungarian runes also include some non-alphabetical runes which are not ligatures but separate signs. These are called capita dictionum. Further research is needed to define their origin and traditional usage. Some examples:

Confusion

In the region north of the Caucasus, west of the Ural mountains up to the Carpathian Basin several related, though different, yet undeciphered scripts exist. All of them feature characteristics in ductus which can be called "runiform".

Within the Carpathian Bassin some of these scripts, which do not constitute Old Hungarian, are e.g. the relic from Homokmégy (of which a Turkic reading has been proposed), needle-box from Szarvas (with Hungarian and Turkic readings proposed), and most prominentlythe inscriptions of the Nagyszentmiklós Treasure, a precious golden hoard of unknown origin (various Turkic readings proposed).

While the Szarvas and the Nagyszentmiklós inscriptions share the same script, the Homokmégy finding is written in an other, third one. Neither is Old Hungarian.

Due to the polysemy of rovás, rovásírás which can be understood, and is also used, as 'runiform script', but is also commonly used as 'Old Hungarian Script', these scripts are often confused, and relics of the latter ones are often found cited among the OHS findings.

Quite confusingly, the numberals are often referred to as integral part of the script, while their pairing is 20th century invention. The counting system existed independently of the Old Hungarian Script, it is probably of different oringin, and we have no historical source containing both alongside each other.

Features

Old Hungarian letters were usually written from right to left on sticks. Later, in Transylvania, they appeared on several media. Writings on walls also were right to left and not boustrophedon style (alternating direction right to left and then left to right).

Hungarian numerals

The numbers are almost the same as the Roman, Etruscan, and Chuvash numerals. Numbers of livestock were carved on tally sticks and the sticks were then cut in two lengthwise to avoid later disputes.

• Ligatures are common. (Note: the Hungarian runic script employed a number of ligatures. In some cases, an entire word was written with a single sign.)
• There are no lower or upper case letters, but the first letter of a proper name was often written a bit larger.
• The rovás did not always mark vowels. The rules for vowel inclusion were as follows:
  • If there are two vowels side by side, both have to be written, unless the second could be readily determined.
  • The vowels have to be written if their omission created ambiguity. (Example: krk – can be interpreted as kerék – [wheel] and kerek – [rounded], thus the writer had to include the vowels to differentiate the intended words.)
  • The vowel at the end of the word must be written.
• Sometimes, especially when writing consonant clusters, a consonant was omitted. This is however rather a phonologic process, the script reflecting the exact surface realisation.

Text example

Text from Csikszentmárton, 1501. Runes originally written as ligatures are underlined.

Interpretation in old Hungarian: "ÚRNaK SZÜLeTéSéTÜL FOGVÁN ÍRNaK eZeRÖTSZÁZeGY eSZTeNDŐBE MÁTYáS JÁNOS eSTYTáN KOVÁCS CSINÁLTáK MÁTYáSMeSTeR GeRGeLYMeSTeRCSINÁLTÁK G IJ A aS I LY LY LT A" (The letters actually written in the runic text are written with uppercase in the transcription.)

Interpretation in modern Hungarian: "(Ezt) az Úr születése utáni 1501. évben írták. Mátyás, János, István kovácsok csinálták. Mátyás mester (és) Gergely mester csinálták [uninterpretable]"

English translation: "(This) was written in the 1501st year of our Lord. The smiths Matthias, John (and) Stephen did (this). Master Matthias (and) Master Gergely did [uninterpretable]"

Unicode

Old Hungarian has not yet been assigned a Unicode range. There are several proposals for encoding the script which differ in some regards from one another:

• Michael Everson: Mapping between Old Hungarian proposals in N3531, N3527, and N3526, 2008-11-02
• Michael Everson and Szabolcs Szelp: Revised proposal for encoding the Old Hungarian script in the UCS = Javított előterjesztés a rovásírás Egyetemes Betűkészlet-beli kódolására), 2008-10-12
• Gábor Hosszú: Proposal for encoding the Szekler-Hungarian Rovas in the BMP and the SMP of the UCS, 2008-10-04
• Gábor Bakonyi: Hungarian native writing draft proposal, 2008-09-30
• Michael Everson and Szabolcs Szelp: Preliminary proposal for encoding the Old Hungarian script in the UCS, 2008-08-04
• Michael Everson: On encoding the Old Hungarian rovásírás in the UCS, 1998-05-02
• Michael Everson: Draft Proposal to encode Old Hungarian in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2, 1998-01-18

A set of closely-related 8-bit code pages exist. These are mapped to the Latin script with extensions. After installing one of them and applying their formatting to the document – because of the lack of capital letters – rovás characters could be entered in the following way: those letters which are unique letters in today's Hungarian orthography are virtually lowercase ones, and can be written by simply pressing the specific key; and since the modern digraphs equal to separate rovás letters, they were encoded as 'uppercase' letters, i.e. in the space originally restricted for capitals. Thus, typing a lowercase g will produce the rovas character for the sound marked with Latin script g, but entering an uppercase G will amount to a rovás sign equivalent to a digraph gy in Latin-based Hungarian orthography.

Gallery

Notes

References

• (Hungarian) István Fodor - György Diószegi - László Legeza: Őseink nyomában. (On the scent of our ancestors) - Magyar Könyvklub-Helikon Kiadó, Budapest, 1996. ISBN 963-208-400-4 (Page 82)
• (Hungarian) (English) Gábor Hosszú: Rovásírás
• (Hungarian) Új Magyar Lexikon (New Hungarian Encyclopaedia) - Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1962. (Volume 5) ISBN 963-05-2808-8
• (Hungarian) Gyula Sebestyén: A magyar rovásírás hiteles emlékei, Budapest, 1915.
• (English) Dr. Edward D. Rockstein: "The Mystery of the Székely Runes", Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, Vol. 19, 1990, pp. 176-183.
• (Latin) J. Thelegdi: Rudimenta priscae Hunnorum linguae brevibus quaestionibus et responsionibus comprehensa, Batavia, 1598.
• (Hungarian) Dóra Tóth-Károly Bera: Honfoglalás és őstörténet. Aquila, Budapest, 1996. ISBN 963-8276-96-7
• (Hungarian) Kiszely István: A magyar nép õstörténete

External links

• Hungarian Rovas Portal - www.rovas.hu
• Omniglot entry
• Hungarian runic writing in Hungarian
• The ancient Magyar Rovás
• More circumstantial English article about both variants
• Example in Felsöszemered (Upper Hungary - today Slovakia [2]

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