62 HUNGARY (LANGUAGE AND LITEEATUEE) personal union with Cisleithan Austria under the house of Hapsburg. The revolutionary extreme left numbered few adherents. The same was the position of affairs in the diet of 1809-72. Andrassy, who in the war of 1870 restrained Beust from interfering against Prussia, succeeded that statesman in Novem- ber, 1871, as foreign minister of the monarchy, L6nyay taking his place in Hungary. A new agreement was entered into with Croatia, and the Military Frontier districts were gradually placed under civil jurisdiction. The finances of the country, however, became rapidly em- barrassed by state subsidies, and L6nyay fell under personal attacks, Szlavy becoming his successor (December, 1872). The new cabinet was even less successful, and in March, 1874, made room for a coalition ministry under Bitt6. HUNGARY, Language and Literature of. The Hungarian language (Hung. Magyar nyeh) is an isolated branch of the Uralo- Altaic family, constituting a peculiar group with the now ex- tinct idioms of the Uzes, Khazars, Petchenegs, and ancient Bulgarians. Leo Diaconus (10th century) called the Magyars Huns, and the peo- ple liked to consider themselves as such, being proud of Etele (Attila) and his brother Buda. The chronicle of the monastery of St. Wan- drill and Dankovszki connect them both with the Huns and Avars. Some connect them with both the Uigurs and the westerly Ogors or Yugri. There are also various fanciful derivations of the name Magyar from roots belonging to the Hungarian language. The Byzantine emperor Constantino Porphyrogeni- tus names the people Turkoi. The Magyars and the Osmanlis agree in the belief that they are kindred, and the former are called "bad brothers" by the latter for having resisted them. Klaproth deduces the Hungarian lan- guage from a mixture of Tartaric or Turk- ish with Finnic. Malte-Brun considers the Magyars as Finns who were subjected to the Turks and to an unknown Uralian people. Bese found that Balkar tribes in the Caucasus boasted of being Magyars, and that the ruins of a Magyar town were yet visible S. W. of Astrakhan. Csoma de Koros, who went in search of the cradle of his nation, found many words in the Thibetan and other tongues of middle Asia akin in sound and sense to the Magyar, but was unable to solve the mystery of the original home of the race. Many Hun- garian writers report that their ancestors brought from Asia works written in their na- tional 34 characters, which were suppressed at the command of Pope Sylvester II. and with the aid of Stephen I., but which were taught as late as the beginning of our century in remote places among the Szeklers, and may be seen in S. Gyarmathy's grammar as well as in George Hickes's Linguarum Veterum Sep- tentrionalium Thesaurus (3 vols. fol., Oxford, 1703-'5), under the name of Hunnorum litterce. The language is now accommodated to the Lat- in alphabet, and consists of 26 simple and 6 compound sounds, agreeing, unless otherwise noticed, with the Italian, viz. : 8 vowels : a (like English a in what, swallow), e, e (French), i (also y), o, u, 6 (Fr. en), u (Fr. ); 18 conso- nants : b, d, f, g hard, h (German), j (German), k, I, m, n, p, r, s (Eng. sh), t, v (also w), z (French), sz (Eng. s), zs (or 's, Fr. j) ; 4 com- pounds with y: gy (dy, as in gydr, factory, pron. dyar, in one syllable), ly (as in Fr.Jille), ny (Fr. gn), ty ; and 2 compound sibilants : cs (written also ch, U ; Eng. tch) and cz, c, or tz (Eng. ts). With the addition of the vowels marked as long with the acute accent, as for instance d (long Italian a), i, 6, S, u, u, there are 38 sounds in all, besides x, which is used only in foreign names, as in Xerxes. As in Turkish and other kindred tongues, the whole mass of words and grammatical forms is divi- ded into two groups, viz., into those of high and low sound. The former is determined by the presence of , d, ii, the latter by that of a, o, u, in the roots or stems ; those with e or i constitute a neutral ground. All formative and relative suffixes have therefore a double form, in harmony with the roots to which they are attached ; thus : vdll, shoulder, vdllal (shoul- ders), undertakes, vdllalat, enterprise ; but bees, worth, becsiil, (he) respects, becsulet, respect. Whatever changes the Magyar language may have undergone under adverse circumstances, amid hostile nations, it has yet retained its essen- tial peculiarities of phonetism, grammar, and construction. Although it contains many Slavic, Latin, German, Greek, and other foreign words, it has digested them in its own way, assimila- ting them otherwise than the western nations have done with the same element ; thus, schola, Slav, klas, Ger. Schnur, became iskola, kaldsz, sinor. The concurrence of harsh sounds and of consonants is as much avoided as in all the languages of central and eastern Asia. The roots remain unaltered, and most frequently bear the accent in all their derivatives. The most peculiar feature of Hungarian grammar is its system of suffixes. In the possessive forms of nouns they are varied according to the number and person of the possessor and the number of the object, giving 12 distinct terminations, as follows: hdzam, my house, hdzaim, my houses ; hdzad, thy house, hdzaid, thy houses ; hdza, his or her house, hdzai, his or her houses ; hdzunk, our house, hdzaink, our houses ; hdzatok, your house, hdzaitok, your houses ; hdzok, their house, hdzaik, their houses. In verbs they are made to indicate not only the voice, mood, and tense, and the person and number of the nominative, but the definiteness or indefiniteness of the object, and in one form (indicative present, first person singular) the person of the object, as vdrlak, I expect thee; Icerlele, I ask thee. The follow- ing table exhibits the suffixes of the indicative present, the root being always the third per- son singular of the indefinite form, and the vowels varying, as above stated, in consonance with that of the root :
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