Iranian loanwords in a North-Eastern Hungarian Dialect
(64th Meeting Budapest, 2022)
Crossroads on the Eurasian steppe and the contacts between the Hungarian tribes and the more numerous nomadic peoples, had a decisive influence on the Hungarian language and society, as many excellent scholars, especially the linguists described it before. The main components were the Turkic and the Iranian peoples. The Turkic are much better known than the Iranians, inspite of such excellent scholars as J. Harmatta and others. In this paper I intend to present some words, used in Hungarian dialects, not the well-known borrowings in the literary language. I will disregard also the words which belong to the dialects of the Yas and Cuman areas but concentrate on the obviously or presumably older borrowings, as far as it is possible. There are all together 20 words, like names of fruits (e. g. bacsókörte «a kind of pear»), adjectives describing animals (e. g. baris «a kind of colour»), fields (e.g. baszó «misshaped groove»), food (e. g. kudari «a kind of soup»), three personal and geographical names (e. g. Aladár and Dárfolyó), etc. Some of these words, e. g. Islamic terms, must have been borrowed from an Islamic Turkic group, which rarely but still sometimes occured before the Cumans, or from Turkish in the Ottoman period. In other cases the vocal change testifies the Osset origin of the word. Based on the spread of these words it is possible to assume the social function of these Iranian groups in the medieval Hungarian society.