Hunnic language

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The Hunnic language, or Hunnish, was the language spoken by Huns in the Hunnic Empire, a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic tribal confederation which invaded Eastern and Central Europe, and ruled most of Pannonian Central Europe, during the 4th and 5th centuries CE. A variety of languages were spoken within the Hun Empire.Template:Sfn A contemporary report by Priscus has that Hunnish was spoken alongside Gothic and the languages of other tribes subjugated by the Huns.Template:Sfn

As no inscriptions or whole sentences in the Hunnic language have been preserved, the attested corpus is very limited, consisting almost entirely of proper names in Greek and Latin sources.Template:Sfn

There is no consensus on the classification of the Hunnish language,Template:Sfn but due to the origin of these proper names it has been compared with Turkic,Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Mongolic, Iranian,Template:Sfn and Yeniseian languages,<ref>Vajda, Edward J. (2013). Yeniseian Peoples and Languages: A History of Yeniseian Studies with an Annotated Bibliography and a Source Guide. Oxford/New York: Routledge.</ref> and with various Indo-European languages.Template:Sfn Other scholars consider the available evidence inconclusive and the Hunnish language therefore unclassifiable.Template:Sfnm

CorpusEdit

Contemporary observers of the European Huns, such as Priscus and the 6th century historian Jordanes, preserved three words of the language of the Huns: Template:Quote Template:Quote

The words {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, a beverage akin to mead, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, a barley drink, and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, a funeral feast, are of Indo-European origin,Template:Sfn possibly Slavic, Germanic or Iranian.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Maenchen-Helfen argued that strava may have come from an informant who spoke Slavic.Template:Sfn

All other information on the Hunnic language is contained in the form of personal and tribal names.Template:Sfn

Possible affiliationsEdit

Many of the waves of nomadic peoples who swept into Eastern Europe, are known to have spoken languages from a variety of families. Several proposals for the affinities of Hunnic have been made, however there is no consensus.Template:Sfn

UnclassifiableEdit

Given the small corpus, a number of scholars hold the Hunnic language to be unclassifiable until further evidence, if any, is discovered.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn András Róna-Tas notes that "the very scant sources of information are often mutually contradictory."Template:Sfn

Turkic or Altaic sprachbundEdit

A number of historians and linguists including Karl Heinrich Menges, and Omeljan Pritsak feel that the proper names only allow the Hunnic language to be positioned in relationship to the Altaic language group, which is itself a widely discredited language family.Template:Sfn Although Menges was reserved towards the language evidence, his view of the Huns was that "there are ethnological reasons for considering them Turkic or close to the Turks".Template:Sfn As further possibilities, Menges suggests that the Huns could have spoken a Mongolian or Tungusic language, or possibly a language between Mongolian and Turkic.Template:Sfn Pritsak analyzed 33 surviving Hunnic personal names and concluded: "It was not a Turkic language, but one between Turkic and Mongolian, probably closer to the former than the latter. The language had strong ties to Bulgar language and to modern Chuvash, but also had some important connections, especially lexical and morphological, to Ottoman Turkish and Yakut".Template:Sfn

According to Savelyev-Jeong (2020), the "traditional and prevailing view is [...] that the Xiongnu and/or the Huns were Turkic or at least Altaic" speakers.Template:Sfn Otto Maenchen-Helfen argues that many tribal and proper names among the Huns appear to have originated in Turkic languages, indicating that the language was Turkic.Template:Sfn Hyun Jin Kim similarly concluded that it "seems highly likely then from the names that we do know, most of which seem to be Turkic, that the Hunnic elite was predominantly Turkic-speaking".Template:Sfn Denis Sinor, while skeptical of our ability to classify Hunnic as a whole, states that part of the Hunnish elite likely spoke Turkic, though he notes that some Hunnic names cannot be Turkic in origin.Template:Sfn The historian Peter Heather, while he supported the Turkic hypothesis as the "best guess" in 1995,Template:Sfn has since voiced skepticism,Template:Sfn in 2010 saying that "the truth is that we don't know what language the Huns spoke, and probably never will".Template:Sfn Savelyev and Jeong similarly note that "the majority of the previously proposed Turkic etymologies for the Hunnic names are far from unambiguous, so no firm conclusion can be drawn from this type of data."Template:Sfn

YeniseianEdit

Some scholars – most notably Lajos Ligeti (1950/51) and Edwin G. Pulleyblank (1962) – have claimed that languages of Siberia, especially Ket – a member of the Yeniseian language family – may have been a major source (or perhaps even the linguistic core) of the Xiongnu or Hunnic languages.<ref>E. G. Pulleyblank, "The consonontal system of old Chinese" [Pt 1], Asia Major, vol. IX (1962), pp. 1–2.</ref>Template:Sfn First proposed by Edwin G. Pulleyblank, the theory that the Xiongnu language belonged to the Yeniseian languages was reinforced by the discovery of the Kot and Pumpokol word lists, which Alexander Vovin used to create a more accurate reconstruction.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Hyun Jin Kim in 2013 proposed that the Huns experienced a language flip like the Chagatai Khanate, switching from Yeniseian to Oghuric Turkic after absorbing the Dingling or Tiele peoples.Template:Sfn

Vajda (et al. 2013) proposed that the ruling elite of the Huns spoke a Yeniseian language and influenced other languages in the region.<ref>Vajda, Edward J. (2013). Yeniseian Peoples and Languages: A History of Yeniseian Studies with an Annotated Bibliography and a Source Guide. Oxford/New York: Routledge.</ref> The Yeniseian people were likely assimilated later by Turkic and Mongolic groups.

Alexander Savelyev and Choongwon Jeong criticize the Yeniseian proposal by Pulleyblank and note that the more convincing Yeniseian words may be shared cultural vocabulary that was non-native to both the Xiongnu and the Yeniseians.Template:Sfn

Indo-EuropeanEdit

All three words described as "Hunnic" by ancient sources appear to be Indo-European.Template:Sfn

A number of scholars suggest that a Germanic language, possibly Gothic, may have coexisted with another Hunnic language as the lingua franca of the Hunnic Empire.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Maenchen-Helfen suggests that the words medos and kamos could possibly be of Germanic origin.Template:Sfn He argues that Attila, Bleda, Laudaricus, Onegesius, Ragnaris, and Ruga are Germanic,Template:Sfn while Heather also includes the names Scottas and Berichus.Template:Sfn Kim questions the Germanic etymologies of Ruga, Attila, and Bleda, arguing that there are "more probable Turkic etymologies."Template:Sfn Elsewhere, he argues that the Germanicization of Hunnic names may have been a conscious policy of the Hunnic elite in the Western part of the Empire.Template:Sfn

Maenchen-Helfen also classified some names as having roots in Iranian.Template:Sfn Christopher Atwood has argued, as one explanation for his proposed etymology of the name Hun that, "their state or confederation must be seen as the result of Sogdian/Baktrian [Iranian-speaking] leadership and organization".Template:Sfn Subjects of the Huns included Iranian-speaking Alans and Sarmatians,Template:Sfn Maenchen-Helfen argues that the Iranian names were likely borrowed from the Persians and finds none prior to the 5th century; he takes this to mean that the Alans had little influence inside of Attila's empire.Template:Sfn Kim, however, argues for a considerable presence of Iranian-speakers among the Huns.Template:Sfn

The word strava has been argued to be of Slavic origin and to show a presence of Slavic speakers among the Huns. Peter Heather, however, argues that this word "is certainly a very slender peg upon which to hang the claim that otherwise undocumented Slavs played a major role in Attila's empire".Template:Sfn In the 19th century, some Russian scholars argued that the Huns as a whole had spoken a Slavic language.Template:Sfn

UralicEdit

In the 19th century, some scholars, such as German Sinologist Julius Heinrich Klaproth, argued that the Huns had spoken a Finno-Ugric language and connected them with the ancient Hungarians.Template:Sfn

Possible scriptEdit

It is possible that a written form of Hunnic existed and may yet be identified from artifacts. Priscus recorded that Hunnic secretaries read out names of fugitives from a written list.Template:Sfn Franz Altheim considered it was not Greek or Latin, but a script like the Oguric Turkic of the Bulgars.Template:Sfn He argued that the runes were brought into Europe from Central Asia by the Huns, and were an adapted version of the old Sogdian alphabet in the Hunnic (Oghur Turkic) language.Template:Sfn Zacharias Rhetor wrote that in 507/508 AD, Bishop Qardust of Arran went to the land of the Caucasian Huns for seven years, and returned with books written in the Hunnic language.Template:Sfn There is some debate as to whether a Xiongnu-Xianbei runic system existed, and was part of a wider Eurasian script which gave rise to the Old Turkic alphabet in the 8th century.Template:Sfn

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FootnotesEdit

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ReferencesEdit

Template:Huns Template:Eurasian languages