Hungarian Runic Script

The Old Hungarian script or Hungarian runes ( hu, Székely-magyar rovás, 'székely-magyar runiform', or ) is an alphabetic writing system used for writing the Hungarian language. Modern Hungarian is written using the Latin-based Hungarian alphabet. The term "old" refers to the historical priority of the script compared with the Latin-based one. The Old Hungarian script is a child system of the Old Turkic alphabet.

The Hungarians settled the Carpathian Basin in 895. After the establishment of the Christian Hungarian kingdom, the old writing system was partly forced out of use during the rule of King Stephen, and the Latin alphabet was adopted. However, among some professions (e.g. shepherds who used a "rovás-stick" to officially track the number of animals) and in Transylvania, the script has remained in use by the Székely Magyars, giving its Hungarian name . The writing could also be found in churches, such as that in the commune of Atid.

Its English name in the ISO 15924 standard is Old Hungarian (Hungarian Runic).

Name

In modern Hungarian, the script is known formally as ('Szekler script'). The writing system is generally known as , , and (or simply 'notch, score').

History

Origins

Scientists cannot give an exact date or origin for the script.

Linguist András Róna-Tas derives Old Hungarian from the Old Turkic script, itself recorded in inscriptions dating from . The origins of the Turkic scripts are uncertain. The scripts may be derived from Asian scripts such as the Pahlavi and Sogdian alphabets, or possibly from Kharosthi, all of which are in turn derived from the Aramaic script.András Róna-Tas: ''On the Development and Origin of the East Turkic "Runic" Script'' (In: Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungariae XLI (1987), p. 7-14 Alternatively, according to some opinions, ancient Turkic runes descend from primaeval Turkic graphic logograms.

Speakers of Proto-Hungarian would have come into contact with Turkic peoples during the 7th or 8th century, in the context of the Turkic expansion, as is also evidenced by numerous Turkic loanwords in Proto-Hungarian.

All the letters but one for sounds which were shared by Turkic and Ancient Hungarian can be related to their Old Turkic counterparts. Most of the missing characters were derived by script internal extensions, rather than borrowings, but a small number of characters seem to derive from Greek, such as 'eF'.''Új Magyar Lexikon'' (New Hungarian Encyclopaedia) – Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1962. (Volume 5)

The modern Hungarian term for this script (coined in the 19th century), , derives from the verb ('to score') which is derived from old Uralic, general Hungarian terminology describing the technique of writing ( 'to write', 'letter', 'knife, also: for carving letters') derive from Turkic,András Róna-Tas ''A magyar írásbeliség török eredetéhez'' (In: Klára Sándor (ed.) ''Rovás és Rovásírás'' p.9–14 — Szeged, 1992, ) which further supports transmission via Turkic alphabets.

Medieval Hungary

Epigraphic evidence for the use of the Old Hungarian script in medieval Hungary dates to the 10th century, for example, from Homokmégy.István Fodor – György Diószegi – László Legeza: ''Őseink nyomában''. (On the scent of our ancestors) – Magyar Könyvklub-Helikon Kiadó, Budapest, 1996. (Page 82) The latter inscription was found on a fragment of a quiver made of bone. Although there have been several attempts to interpret it, the meaning of it is still unclear.

In 1000, with the coronation of Stephen I of Hungary, Hungary (previously an alliance of mostly nomadic tribes) became a kingdom. The Latin alphabet was adopted as official script; however, Old Hungarian continued to be used in the vernacular.

The runic script was first mentioned in the 13th century Chronicle of Simon of Kéza,Dóra Tóth-Károly Bera: ''Honfoglalás és őstörténet''. Aquila, Budapest, 1996. where he stated that the Székelys may use the script of the Blaks. Johannes Thuróczy wrote in the Chronica Hungarorum that the Székelys did not forget the Scythian letters and these are engraved on sticks by carving.

Early Modern period

The Old Hungarian script became part of folk art in several areas during this period. In Royal Hungary, Old Hungarian script was used less, although there are relics from this territory, too.
There is another copy – similar to the Nikolsburg Alphabet – of the Old Hungarian alphabet, dated 1609. The inscription from Énlaka, dated 1668, is an example of the "folk art use".

There are a number of inscriptions ranging from the 17th to the early 19th centuries, including examples from Kibéd, Csejd, Makfalva, Szolokma, Marosvásárhely, Csíkrákos, Mezőkeresztes, Nagybánya, Torda, Felsőszemeréd, Kecskemét and Kiskunhalas.

Scholarly discussion

Hungarian script was first described in late Humanist/Baroque scholarship by János Telegdy in his primer . Published in 1598, Telegdi's primer presents his understanding of the script and contains Hungarian texts written with runes, such as the Lord's Prayer.

In the 19th century, scholars began to research the rules and the other features of the Old Hungarian script. From this time, the name ('runic writing') began to re-enter the popular consciousness in Hungary, and script historians in other countries began to use the terms "Old Hungarian", , and so on. Because the Old Hungarian script had been replaced by Latin, linguistic researchers in the 20th century had to reconstruct the alphabet from historic sources. Gyula Sebestyén, an ethnographer and folklorist, and Gyula (Julius) Németh, a philologist, linguist, and Turkologist, did the lion's share of this work. Sebestyén's publications, (''Runes and runic writing'', Budapest, 1909) and (''The authentic relics of Hungarian runic writing'', Budapest, 1915) contain valuable information on the topic.

Popular revival

Beginning with Adorján Magyar in 1915, the script has been promulgated as a means for writing modern Hungarian. These groups approached the question of representation of the vowels of modern Hungarian in different ways. Adorján Magyar made use of characters to distinguish ''a''/''á'' and ''e''/''é'' but did not distinguish the other vowels by length. A school led by Sándor Forrai from 1974 onward did, however, distinguish ''i''/''í'', ''o''/''ó'', ''ö''/''ő'', ''u''/''ú'', and ''ü''/''ű''. The revival has become part of a significant ideological nationalist subculture present not only in Hungary (largely centered in Budapest), but also amongst the Hungarian diaspora, particularly in the United States and Canada.Maxwell, Alexander (2004)
"Contemporary Hungarian Rune-Writing: Ideological Linguistic Nationalism within a Homogenous Nation"
''Anthropos'', 99: 2004, pp. 161-175

Old Hungarian has seen other usages in the modern period, sometimes in association with or referencing Hungarian neopaganism, similar to the way in which Norse neopagans have taken up the Germanic runes, and Celtic neopagans have taken up the ogham script for various purposes.

Controversies

Not all scholars agree with the "Old Hungarian" notion, mainly based on the actual literary facts. The linguist and sociolinguist Klára Sándor told in an interview that most of the "romantic" statements about the script appear to be false. According to her analysis, the origin of the writing is probably runiform (and with high probability its origins are in the western Turkic runiform writings) and it's not a different writing system and contrary to the sentiment the writing is neither Hungarian nor Székely-Hungarian; it is a Székely writing since there are no authentic findings outside the historic Székely lands (mainly today's Transylvania); the only writing found around 1000 AD had a different writing system. While it may have been sporadically used in Hungary its usage was not widespread. The "revived" writing (in the 1990s) was artificially expanded with (various) "new" letters which were unneeded in the past since the writing was cleanly phonetic, or the long vowels which were not present back in the time. The shape of many letters were substantially changed from the original.
She stated that no works since 1915 has reached the expected quality of the state of the linguistic sciences, and many was influenced by various agendas.

The use of the script often has a political undertone as it is often used along with irredentist or nationalist propaganda, and they can be found from time to time in graffiti with a variety of content. Since most of the people cannot read the script it has led to various controversies, for example when the activists of the Hungarian Two-tailed Dog Party (opposition) exchanged the rovas sign of the city Érd to ''szia'' 'Hi!', which stayed unnoticed a month.

Epigraphy

The inscription corpus includes:
* A labeled crest etched into stone from Pécs, late 13th century (Label: ''aBA SZeNTjeI vaGYUNK aKI eSZTeR ANna erZSéBeT''; We are the saints unsof Aba; who are Esther, Anna and Elizabeth.)
* Rod calendar, around 1300, copied by Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli in 1690. It contains several feasts and names, thus it is one of the most extensive runic records.
* Nicholsburg alphabet
* Runic record in Istanbul, 1515.
* Székelyderzs: a brick with runic inscription, found in the Unitarian church
* Énlaka runic inscription, discovered by Balázs Orbán in 1864
* Székelydálya: runic inscription, found in the Calvinist church
* The inscription from Felsőszemeréd (Horné Semerovce), Slovakia (15th century)

Characters

The runic alphabet included 42 letters. As in the Old Turkic script, some consonants had two forms, one to be used with back vowels (a, á, o, ó, u, ú) and another for front vowels (e, é, i, í, ö, ő, ü, ű). The names of the consonants are always pronounced with a vowel. In the old alphabet, the consonant-vowel order is reversed, unlike today's pronunciation (''ep'' rather than ''pé''). This is because the oldest inscriptions lacked vowels and were rarely written down, similar to other ancient languages' consonant-writing systems (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.). The alphabet did not contain letters for the phonemes dz and dzs of modern Hungarian, since these are relatively recent developments in the language's history. Nor did it have letters corresponding to the Latin q, w, x and y. The modern revitalization movement has created symbols for these; in Unicode encoding, they are represented as ligatures.

For more information about the transliteration's pronunciation, see Hungarian alphabet.

The Old Hungarian runes also include some non-alphabetical runes which are not ligatures but separate signs. These are identified in some sources as "" (likely a misspelling of ). Further research is needed to define their origin and traditional usage. Some common examples are:
*TPRUS:
*ENT:
*TPRU:
*NAP:
*EMP:
*UNK:
*US:
*AMB:

Features

Old Hungarian letters were usually written from right to left on sticks. Later, in Transylvania, they appeared on several media. Writings on walls also were right to left and not boustrophedon style (alternating direction right to left and then left to right).

The numbers are almost the same as the Roman, Etruscan, and Chuvash numerals. Numbers of livestock were carved on tally sticks and the sticks were then cut in two lengthwise to avoid later disputes.

* Ligatures are common. (''Note'': the Hungarian runic script employed a number of ligatures. In some cases, an entire word was written with a single sign similar to a bind rune.) The Unicode standard supports ligatures explicitly by using the zero width joiner between the two characters.
* There are no lower or upper case letters, but the first letter of a proper name was often written a bit larger. Though the Unicode standard has upper and lowercase letters, which are the same in shape, the difference is only their size.
* The writing system did not always mark vowels (similar to many Asian writing systems). The rules for vowel inclusion were as follows:
** If there are two vowels side by side, both have to be written, unless the second could be readily determined.
** The vowels have to be written if their omission created ambiguity. (Example: – can be interpreted as – (wheel) and – (rounded), thus the writer had to include the vowels to differentiate the intended words.)
** The vowel at the end of the word must be written.
* Sometimes, especially when writing consonant clusters, a consonant was omitted. This is a phonologic process, with the script reflecting the exact surface realization.

Text example

Text from Csíkszentmárton, 1501.
''Runes originally written as ligatures are underlined.''

Unicode transcription:

Interpretation in old Hungarian: "ÚRNaK SZÜLeTéSéTÜL FOGVÁN ÍRNaK eZeRÖTSZÁZeGY eSZTeNDŐBE MÁTYáS
JÁNOS eSTYTáN KOVÁCS CSINÁLTáK MÁTYáSMeSTeR GeRGeLYMeSTeRCSINÁLTÁK
G IJ A aS I LY LY LT A" (The letters actually written in the runic text are written with uppercase in the transcription.)

Interpretation in modern Hungarian: "(Ezt) az Úr születése utáni 1501. évben írták. Mátyás, János, István kovácsok csinálták. Mátyás mester (és) Gergely mester csinálták gijas ily ly lta"

English translation: "(This) was written in the 1501st year of our Lord. The smiths Matthias, John (and) Stephen did (this). Master Matthias (and) Master Gregory did (uninterpretable)

Unicode

After many proposalsOld Hungarian/Szekely-Hungarian Rovas Ad Hoc Committee
Old Hungarian/Sekely-Hungarian Rovas Ad hoc Report
, 2012-11-12
* Jenő Demeczky, György Giczi, Gábor Hosszú, Gergely Kliha, Borbála Obrusánszky, Tamás Rumi, László Sípos, Erzsébet Zelliger
About the consensus of the Rovas encoding – Response to N4373 (Resolutions of the 8th Hungarian World Congress on the encoding of Old Hungarian)
Registered by UTC (L2/12-337), 2012-10-24
*György Gergely Gyetvay (World Federation of Hungarians)
Resolutions of the 8th Hungarian World Congress on the encoding of Old Hungarian
, 2012-10-22
* Jenő Demeczky, György Giczi, Gábor Hosszú, Gergely Kliha, Borbála Obrusánszky, Tamás Rumi, László Sípos, Erzsébet Zelliger
Additional information about the name of the Rovas script
, 2012-10-21.
*Jenő Demeczky, Gábor Hosszú, Tamás Rumi, László Sípos, Erzsébet Zelliger
Revised proposal for encoding the Rovas in the UCS
, 2012-10-14.
*Tamás Somfai
Contemporary Rovas in the word processing
, 2012-05-25
* Michael Everson & André Szabolcs Szelp
Consolidated proposal for encoding the Old Hungarian script in the UCS
, 2012-05-06
*Miklós Szondi (president of the "Természetesen" society and chair of the "Egységes rovás" conference
Declaration of Support for the Advancement of the Encoding of the old Hungarian Script
, 2012-04-28
*Gábor Hosszú (Hungarian National Body)
Code chart font for Rovas block
, 2012-02-06
*André Szabolcs Szelp
Remarks on Old Hungarian and other scripts with regard to N4183
, 2012-01-30
*Michael Everson (Irish National Body)
Code chart fonts for Old Hungarian
, 2012-01-28
*Gábor Hosszú (Hungarian National Body)
Proposal for encoding the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas, Carpathian Basin Rovas and Khazarian Rovas scripts into the Rovas block in the SMP of the UCS
, 2011-12-15
*Hungarian Runic/Szekely-Hungarian Rovas Ad Hoc Committee
Hungarian Runic/Sekely-Hungarian Rovas Ad-hoc Report
, 2011-06-08
*Gábor Hosszú
Issues of encoding the Rovas scripts
, 2011-05-25
*Gábor Hosszú
Comments on encoding the Rovas scripts
, 2011-05-22
*Gábor Hosszú
Revised proposal for encoding the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas script in the SMP of the UCS
, 2011-05-21
*Gábor Hosszú
Notes on the Szekely-Hungarian Rovas script
, 2011-05-15
* Michael Everson & André Szabolcs Szelp
Mapping between Hungarian Runic proposals in N3697 and N4007
, 2011-05-08
*Deborah Anderson
Comparison of Hungarian Runic and Szekely‐Hungarian Rovas proposals
, 2011-05-07
*Deborah Anderson
Outstanding Issues on Old Hungarian/Szekler‐Hungarian Rovas/Hungarian Native Writing
, 2009-04-22
* Michael Everson
Mapping between Old Hungarian proposals in N3531, N3527, and N3526
, 2008-11-02
* Michael Everson and Szabolcs Szelp
Revised proposal for encoding the Old Hungarian script in the UCS = Javított előterjesztés a rovásírás Egyetemes Betűkészlet-beli kódolására)
, 2008-10-12
*Gábor Hosszú
Proposal for encoding the Szekler-Hungarian Rovas in the BMP and the SMP of the UCS
, 2008-10-04
*Gábor Bakonyi
Hungarian native writing draft proposal
, 2008-09-30
* Michael Everson and Szabolcs Szelp
Preliminary proposal for encoding the Old Hungarian script in the UCS
, 2008-08-04
* Michael Everson
On encoding the Old Hungarian rovásírás in the UCS
, 1998-05-02
* Michael Everson
Draft Proposal to encode Old Hungarian in Plane 1 of ISO/IEC 10646-2
, 1998-01-18 Old Hungarian was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2015 with the release of version 8.0.

The Unicode block for Old Hungarian is U+10C80–U+10CFF:

Pre-Unicode encodings

A set of closely related 8-bit code pages exist, devised in the 1990s by Gabor Hosszú. These were mapped to Latin-1 or Latin-2 character set fonts. After installing one of them and applying their formatting to the document – because of the lack of capital letters – runic characters could be entered in the following way: those letters which are unique letters in today's Hungarian orthography are virtually lowercase ones, and can be written by simply pressing the specific key; and since the modern digraphs equal to separate rovás letters, they were encoded as 'uppercase' letters, i.e. in the space originally restricted for capitals. Thus, typing a lowercase ''g'' will produce the rovás character for the sound marked with Latin script ''g'', but entering an uppercase ''G'' will amount to a rovás sign equivalent to a digraph ''gy'' in Latin-based Hungarian orthography.

Gallery

File:Shield runic.jpg, Stone Shield pattern of Pécs with Old Hungarian Script (circa 1250 AD), Hungary
File:Nikolsburg.gif, The alphabet of Nikolsburg, 1483
File:Homorodkaracsonyfalva rovas.gif, Rovás inscription from Homoródkarácsonyfalva, 13th century
File:Enlaka rovas inscription.jpg, Inscription in Énlaka's Unitarian church (1668)

See also

* National symbols of Hungary

Notes

References

English

* Gábor Hosszú (2011): ''Heritage of Scribes. The Relation of Rovas Scripts to Eurasian Writing Systems.'' First edition. Budapest: Rovas Foundation,
fully available from Google Books
* Edward D. Rockstein: "The Mystery of the Székely Runes", ''Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers'', Vol. 19, 1990, pp. 176–183

Hungarian

* (New Hungarian Encyclopaedia) – Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1962 (Volume 5)
* Gyula Sebestyén: , Budapest, 1915

Latin

* J. Thelegdi: , Batavia, 1598

External links

on Omniglot
*
Rovásírás
(Gábor Hosszú)
*
Kiszely István: A magyar nép őstörténete
*
Learning Rovas
*

*
Hungarian Rovas Portal
*
Szekely-Hungarian Rovas

Szekely-Hungarian Rovas
on RovasPedia
* Old Hungarian Unicode fonts
*

by Juan José Marcos (commercial font)
*
Noto Sans Old Hungarian
*

b
Zsolt Sz. Sztupák
*
OptimaModoki
by Dare-demo Iie
*

by Thomas Buchleither (archived on 2019-07-17)

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