History of the Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic language of the Ugric group. It has been spoken in the region of modern-day Hungary since the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century. Hungarian's ancestral language probably separated from the Ob-Ugric languages during the Bronze Age. There is no attestation for a period of close to two millennia. Records in Old Hungarian begin fragmentarily in epigraphy in the Old Hungarian script beginning in the 10th century; isolated Hungarian words are attested in manuscript tradition from the turn of the 11th century. The oldest surviving coherent text in Old Hungarian is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, dated to 1192. The sermon begins with the words Latiatuc feleym zumtuchel mic vogmuc. ysa pur es chomuv uogmuc (/laːtjaːtuk fɛlɛim symtyxːɛl mik vɔɟmuk iʃaː por eʃ xɔmou vɔɟmuk/ — "Do you see, my friends, what we are: truly, we are only dust and ash.") The first Hungarian translation of the Bible is the Hussite Bible, dated to 1416. The Old Hungarian period by convention covers Medieval Hungary, from the initial invasion of Pannonia in AD 896, to the collapse of the Kingdom of Hungary following the Battle of Mohács of 1526. Printing begins during Middle Hungarian, from 1526 to 1772, i.e. from the first books printed in Hungarian to the Age of Enlightenment, which prompted language reforms that resulted in the Modern Hungarian language. Events of the 1530s and 1540s brought a new situation to the country: the time of Humanism – which had flourished only a few decades earlier under Matthias Corvinus – was over; the population, both in villages and towns, was terrorized by Ottoman raids; the majority of the country was lost; and the remainder began to feel the problems of the new Habsburg rule. This predicament caused backwardness in the cultural life as well. However, Hungary, with the great territorial and human losses, soon entered into a new cultural era, the Reformation. This religious movement heartened many authors to find new ways.