The Funeral Sermon and Prayer ( hu, Halotti beszéd és könyörgés) is the oldest known and surviving contiguous Hungarian text, written by one scribal hand in the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...

and dating to 1192–1195. It is found on f.154a of the Codex Pray.

Importance

The importance of the Funeral Sermon resides from being the oldest surviving Hungarian and as such also the oldest

Uralic The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (w ...

, ''text'' — although individual words and even short partial sentences appear in charters, such as the founding charter of the

Veszprém Veszprém (; german: Weißbrunn, sl, Belomost) is one of the oldest urban areas in Hungary, and a city with county rights. It lies approximately north of the Lake Balaton. It is the administrative center of the county (comitatus or 'megye') of ...

valley nunnery (997–1018/1109) or the founding charter of the abbey of Tihany (1055).

Structure

The whole monument has two parts: the sermon's text (26 lines and 227 words) and the prayer (6 lines and 47 words). Not counting repeated words, there are 190 individual terms in the text. The work was written after a Latin version, which has been identified and can be found in the very

codex The codex (plural codices ) was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term ''codex'' is often used for ancient manuscript books, with ...

. However, the Funeral Sermon and Prayer is a new composition based on it, rather than a mere translation. Since 1813, the manuscript has been kept in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

, and is currently in the

National Széchényi Library The National Széchényi Library ( hu, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár) (OSZK) is a library in Budapest, Hungary, located in Buda Castle. It is one of two Hungarian national libraries, the other being University of Debrecen Library. History The ...

Text

Note on transcription

The text in the original manuscript is written in

Carolingian minuscule Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one reg ...

. This script uses ''ſ'' as the sole form for ''s'', even at the end of words. Likewise, for ''z'' the historical ''ʒ'' form is used by the scribe. In this transcription we follow Hungarian editing tradition, where the ''ſ'' is retained, but ''ʒ'' is replaced by its modern equivalent. Diacritics on vowels and ''y'' (dots, acutes) have been omitted.

The funeral sermon

The prayer

Sources

Gábor: Régi magyar nyelvemlékek (I.). Buda, 1838

Zolnai, Gyula: Nyelvemlékeink a könyvnyomtatás koráig. Budapest 1984
* Benkõ, Loránd: Az Árpád-kor magyar nyelvű szövegemlékei. Budapest, 1980.

External links

English translation by Alan Jenkins
(Babel Web Anthology; original source: Hundred Hungarian Poems, Albion Editions, Manchester, 1976.)
Another English translation of the Funeral Sermon and PrayerA high-quality photographic reproduction
at the Hungarian National Széchényi Library
Old Hungarian Corpus
– searchable text of the Funeral Sermon and Prayer in its original orthographic form as well as its version normalized to Modern Hungarian spelling {{Hungarian literature Hungarian language Hungarian literature 1190s books Earliest known manuscripts by language Funeral orations Catholic liturgy Christian sermons Medieval documents of Hungary