Hunfalvy Pál, Hunsdorfer

* Nagyszalók, March 12, 1810 – † Budapest, November 30, 1891 / lawyer, ethnologist, linguist, historian, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1858) ; ; He was a native German speaker, and only began to study Hungarian at the age of 6. He studied philosophy, then law and theology in Miskolc and Késmárk. From 1833 he was the tutor of Károly Podmaniczky's children. In 1838 he became a lawyer, then in 1842 he became a teacher of law at the Késmárk college, and from the 1846/1847 academic year he was the director of the college. In 1848–1849 he was a member of the parliament, a clerk of the Debrecen parliament, and joined the peace party. He followed the fleeing House of Representatives to Szeged and then to Arad. After the defeat of the War of Independence he retired for a while. In 1850, he received amnesty. From 1851, he was the chief librarian of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1865 to 1867, he was a member of the House of Representatives, and from 1867, of the House of Lords. In 1869, he went on a major study trip to the Baltic states and Finland, and from 1842, he was a member of the Kisfaludy Society and several other foreign scholarly societies. In 1856, he founded the first Hungarian linguistic journal, Magyar Nyelveszet. From 1862 to 1874, he edited the Linguistic Bulletins on behalf of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was the president of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society, which he founded with Antal Hermann in 1889. He began to deal with linguistics in 1840. He is one of the founders of Hungarian comparative linguistics. Initially, he was a supporter of the Hungarian-Turkish language relationship, but later became a supporter of the Finno-Ugric language relationship. He was also the first to raise the possibility of a Sumerian-Hungarian linguistic relationship! He argued a lot with Ármin Vámbéry (Dunaszerdahely), who claimed that Hungarian was related to the Turkic languages. This debate was the famous Ugric-Turkic war, and he, together with József Budenz (1836–1892), took a stand in favor of a Finno-Ugric linguistic relationship and “finally” clarified the place of the Hungarian language in the Finno-Ugric linguistic relationship. In addition to his works on comparative Finno-Ugric languages, he attempted to decipher the Vogul and Ossetian texts collected by Antal Reguly. In the last part of his life, he dealt with ethnography and historical studies. ; ; His main works: ; Aristoteles Poetics, 1842, ; A Vogul Legend, 1859, ; Finn Readings, 1861, ; The Vogul Land and People, 1864, ; The Konda Vogul language, 1872; The Northern Ossetian language, 1875; Travels in the Baltic Sea Regions I–II., 1875; Ethnography of Hungary, 1876; On the Székelys, 1880; Die Ungarn oder Magyaren, 1881; Is the Hungarian nation of Ugric or Turkic-Tatar origin?, 1883; The history of the Vlachs I–II., 1894.