page_title: Old Hungarian script
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Old Hungarian script / History / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Steppean rovas inscription of Homokmégy-Halom (Hungary). Middle of the 900s. A homokmégy-halomi rovásírásos felirat. 900-as évek közepe.
context_page_description: The Old Hungarian script or Hungarian runes 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 and the Latin alphabet was adopted. However, among some professions and in Transylvania, the script has remained in use by the Székely Magyars, giving its Hungarian name rovásírás. 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.
context_section_description: 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 c. AD 720. 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 remotely derived from the Aramaic script. 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'.
  The modern Hungarian term for this script (coined in the 19th century), rovás, derives from the verb róni ('to score') which is derived from old Uralic, general Hungarian terminology describing the technique of writing (írni 'to write', betű 'letter', bicska 'knife, also: for carving letters') derive from Turkic, which further supports transmission via Turkic alphabets.
caption: The inscription found in Homokmégy-Halom. From the 10th century
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