History of the Hungarian language

It has been spoken in the region of modern-day Hungary since the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century.

The oldest surviving coherent text in Old Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, dated to 1192.

yſa pur eſ chomuv uogmuc (/laːtjaːtuk fɛlɛim symtyxːɛl mik vɔɟmuk iʃaː por eʃ xɔmou vɔɟmuk/ — "Do you see, my friends, what we are: truly, we are only dust and ash.")

Events of the 1530s and 1540s brought a new situation to the country: the time of Humanism – which had flourished only a few decades earlier under Matthias Corvinus – was over; the population, both in villages and towns, was terrorized by Ottoman raids; the majority of the country was lost; and the remainder began to feel the problems of the new Habsburg rule.

However, Hungary, with the great territorial and human losses, soon entered into a new cultural era, the Reformation.

The first directly reformed Hungarian book was Imre Ozorai's Argument, published in Cracow, in 1535.

Among other works, Aesop's Fables – a collection of moral short stories – was first translated into Hungarian by Gábor Pesti (1536).

The speakers of Ugric languages were still living close together approximately until 1000 BC, when the ancestors of Hungarians separated for good from the Ob-Ugrians.

(This split may have occurred only later, and their speakers were influenced by an Asian, possibly Western-Siberian tribe, as the Mansis and Khantys moved northeast.)

The Hungarians gradually changed their way of living from settled hunting to nomadic cattle-raising.

After a long journey, the Hungarians had settled the coastal region of the northeastern Black Sea (Levédia).

With the fall of Attila's empire, the Huns had receded to this area, and established their new state, which also ruled over the Hungarians.

Later, the Hungarians also came into contact with the Khazars and moved westward to Etelköz, where the Magyars lived as an independent nation.

A saying or prayer mentioning the exonym "Hungarians" (Hungari) was common in the 10th century, at the time of intense raiding of various parts of Europe by these tribes.

Here are some examples: In the era of the Turkic influences, Hungarians developed especially culturally: the borrowed vocabulary consists of terms referring to sophisticated dressing, and the words of a learned upper class society.

The most important change was the disappearance of the original Uralic word-ending vowels, which eroded in many descendant languages (among others Finnish, however, largely preserves these sounds; see the table on the right).

Even so, declined forms of the nouns and inflected verbs of Uralic origin still show traces of the lost sounds: ló (horse)—lovas (rider); kő (stone)—köves (stony).

The earliest written records of Hungarian from the 9th century still show some retained word-final vowels, e.g. in hodu 'army' > modern had.

Nevertheless, the Ottoman Empire put pressure on neighbouring nations, just like on Hungary — the latter was unstable at the time, due to internal lordship disputes.

However, Hungarian was used in certain cases; sometimes it was fitted into Latin documents, to avoid later disputes about proprietary rights.

The text contains some Hungarian (and also some Slavic) place names: e.g. saɣarbrien (compound formed from saɣar 'shaft' + an obsolete Turkic loanword, brien 'coalition'—today Szárberény); saːmtaɣ 'plough'; meleɡdi (from meleg 'warm' + -di diminutive suffix).

Through His divine grace the Lord God first made our ancestor, Adam, and gave him the Paradise of Eden for his home.

The codex had arrived at Wrocław, Poland, by the end of the century; there, because it was not understandable to the Polish bookbinder, it was chopped and used to bind a Latin book.

Over and above the "Laments of Mary", the other important item of Old Hungarian poetry is Szabács viadala ("Triumph of Šabac").

Reputedly, it was denoted in the year of the battle (1476); in this, Hungarian troops led by King Matthias of Hungary had a glorious victory over the Ottoman army — its issue is secular.

A quotation: De aʒ fellywl mōdot pal keneʒÿ Aroknak melyſeget ygen neʒÿ kÿ Sabach erws voltat elmelle Honneg mÿnemw algÿw kel melle dɛ ɑz feʎːøːl mondot paːl keneʒi aːroknɑk meːʎʃeːɡeːt iɡen nezi ki ʃɑbatʃ erøːʃ voltaːt ɛlmeːlːeː honːeːɡ minemøː aːlɟuː kel mɛlːeː But, Pál Kinizsi said about the thing,who was regarding the dike's depth;who knew the powerfulness of Šabac:what sort of cannons should be brought from where.

There were numerous diminutive suffixes, non-productive in today's Hungarian, e.g. -d ("holmod", from "holom"—"tiny hill"); -t (it left its trace in some geographic names); -n, -ny, -m (as in kicsiny, from kicsi—very little).

Loans were mainly acquired from Slavic languages (for example, kiraːʎ 'king'), German (e. g. hɛrtsɛɡ 'prince'), and Latin (e. g., tɛmplom 'church').

In the late 18th century, the language was incapable of clearly expressing new scientific concepts, and several writers found the vocabulary a bit scant for literary purposes.

In 1920, due to the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary lost 71% of its territories, along with these, 33% of the ethnic Hungarian population.