Re: IE & Uralic

From: tolgs001
Message: 51245
Date: 2008-01-14

>Them: who?

Them Magyars.

>You mean Hungarians were in Persia in 10th century?

Why should I mean that? It suffices to have a few travelers,
diplomats,spies, merchants, guests (who, for instance, ordered in
Persia some gold & silver jewelry items or tools) etc. in order
to get some info about some linguistic group or another
"out there", in the so-called barbarian world. That's how
we got primordial reports on Varangians, Bulghars et al.
steppe peoples of those times.

E.g. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a traveler who played the role of a diplomat
of the Baghdad caliph, visited the Volga Bulghars in the 9th c. and
(cf. his report Kitab ila malik ash-Shakalibah). Or al-Masudi (accounts
on Khazars, Byzantines, Rus & al.)

>What phonetics <majghar> stand for?

Obviously for some ethnonym that later on became the modern
<magyar> ['mO-g^Or].

>Can't you see that -g- in moger is the best match for -dzh- in latin
>script?

I don't know for what -g- stoodin those Latin chronicles. I'm no expert
in old Hungarian. But I can add that in some (sub-)dialects of modern
Hungarian, the pan-Hungarian <gy>, which stands for a palatalized /g/,
is rendered as a <dz^> /dZ/ (that warrants an English rendering
"Madjar").

Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the notary (who wrote his
"chronicon" prior to 1200) put the ethnonym <moger> as being related
to the Hungarian word for "seed", <mag> [mOg], that to the ears
of a foreigner sounds almost as [mog] (that's how the chronicler
wrote it in Latin). Perhaps, this interpretation is a mere
"Volksetymologie".
(And interesting that the entire area of the "Scythians", i.e. the
"Turkistan" (i.e. them Khazars, Onogurs, Bolgars, Petcheneks and
all "Altaic" nations), is also called <Moger>, namely <Dentumoger>,
their ancestor being a certain... <Magog>. (I don't know whether
Magog is another name for Togarmah mentioned in the Bible.))