Hunnic language

Corpus

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

In the villages we were supplied with food - millet instead of corn - and medos as the natives call it. The attendants who followed us received millet and a drink of barley, which the barbarians call kamos.

When the Huns had mourned him [Attila] with such lamentations, a strava, as they call it, was celebrated over his tomb with great revelling.

The words medos, a beverage akin to mead, kamos, a barley drink, and strava, a funeral feast, are of satemised Indo-European origin. They may be of Slavic, but also Germanic and Iranian origin. Maenchen-Helfen argued that strava may have come from an informant who spoke Slavic.

Possible affiliations

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.

Altaic-Turkic

A number of historians and linguists including Peter Heather and Karl Heinrich Menges feel that the proper names only allow the Hunnic language to be positioned in the broad group of Altaic languages. Heather argued that "opinions differ even over their linguistic affiliation, but the best guess would seem to be that the Huns were the first group of Turkic, as opposed to Iranian, nomads to have intruded into Europe". Although Menges was also 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".

Omeljan Pritsak in his study (1982),"The Hunnic Language of the Attila Clan", who analyzing the 33 survived personal names 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".

Otto Maenchen-Helfen pointed out that many tribal and proper names among the Huns appear to have originated in Turkic languages, and they spoke one. Some scholars suppose that Hunnic may have been mainly Turkic, possibly a member of the Oghuric branch of the Turkic language family, to which Bulgar, Khazar, and Chuvash also belong.

Lászlo Marácz noted that in recent years "increasing number of linguists demonstrate that the basis of the Turkic and Mongolian languages was the language of the Huns", and that on this basis were reconstructed some Hun words found in Chinese chronicles. In 2013, Hyun Jin Kim concluded that "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".

Indo-European

Maenchen-Helfen classified a few names as Germanized or Germanic, and Iranian.

Uralic

Attempts have been made to identify the Hunnic language as Hungarian. These have not achieved scholarly approval. The thesis that Simon of Kéza, who dedicated his Gesta Hungarorum to Ladislaus IV (1272–1290), preserved genuine Magyar traditions about the Huns has long been refuted. Eighty years ago Hodgkin wrote: "The Hungarian traditions no more fully illustrate the history of Attila than the Book of Mormon illustrates the history of the Jews". Hungarian legends and histories from medieval times onwards assume close ties with the Huns. The name Hunor is preserved in legends and (with a few Hunnic names, such as Attila) is used as a given name in modern Hungary and in Turkey as Atilla and Onur respectively. Some Hungarian people share the belief that the Székelys, a Hungarian ethnic group living in modern-day Transylvania, are descended from a group of Huns who remained in the Carpathian Basin after 454; this myth was recorded in the medieval Gesta Hungarorum.

Xiongnu

It has been suggested that the Hunnic language was related to that of the Xiongnu (or Hsiung-nu) of Mongolia – itself a language of unknown affiliations.

Yeniseian

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 and/or Hunnic languages. Marácz claimed, however, that any purportedly Yeniseian words could also have Mongolian and/or Turkic origins.

Possible script

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. Franz Altheim considered it was not Greek or Latin, but a script like the Oguric Turkic of the Bulgars. 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. 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. 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.

Professor Azgar Mukhamediev of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan (part of the Russian Federation) has suggested that some of these unidentified inscriptions are in an unidentified Turkic language, in a script that he calls "Turanian". Mukhamediev believes that one of the inscriptions refers to a "Khan Diggiz" and that this is reference to one of Attila's sons, Dengizich, thereby also implying that the language concerned is Hunnic. Marácz noted that some Mongolian researchers collected alleged Hunnic runes.

Probably similar runic writing was preserved today by the Hungarians (Old Hungarian alphabet) and Crimean Tatars.