If there was something really nasty contained in the message, we could understand disguising it with Hungarian runes (rovásírás), which may or may not precede others alphabets, but it’s not like what the runes say is really all that scandalous. If you can’t figure out what it is, look at the picture’s file name to find out.
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Doh, cant believe these people living in the past
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Trianon
How funny, I believe the guy made a “rovás” spelling mistake. For the “I” sound in Trianon he substituted the “D” character.
@FL: So you really know that old rune script ?
Wow, must be terribly difficult – I can see no connection or similarity to our European/Latin/Greek/Cyrillic varieties …
Congratulations! How many Hungarians know this ? My wife just “heard about it” – it seems in socialist times it wasn’t mentioned too often …
Wow, I never knew FL could read Hungarian runes!
I’m not an expert but from what I do know about Hungarian runic script it seems to bear similarities to many runic scripts. However, this is not in itself an indication of linguistic connection. Runic scripts, with their clean, simple lines, are perfect for engraving into stone and wood por pressing into wet clay. Hence, oghams from Eire, runes from Scandinavia, Cunieform script, Old Turkic script and Hungarian runes all bear many similarities in how their characters are formed.
What I find most interesting about Hungarian runes is that they were still being used after the culture came into contact with such things as inks, paper, vellum and other materials where more complex, curving shapes could be produced. This is, as far as I can tell, why Hungarian runes have several characters that incorporate more complex curving shapes than either of the runic scripts I am most familiar with, Irish oghams and Nordic runes.
Rovásírás is taught in the Hungarian scouts, which is where I learned to read/write it. The only application I’ve found for this ability in the real world is reading it on the tattoos of (generally but not exclusively) far-right individuals and on the backs of cars, such as in the image above.
Hi Wolfi and pip!
Ever since I was a kid, I used to have a lot of fun with the Hungarian runes! One had to be so careful though, because under communism an “overenthusiasm” for this subject would have brought on suspicion from the authorities. People were taught about them, but for one to start writing personal texts in this script would have brought on charges of nationalistic/racial romanticism and possibly fascist sympathies. There was some foundation to that, when you consider that the people who are attracted to the runes in Hungary today tend to be very anti-communist.
Scholars think the writing is derived from some ancient Turkic script, and has no close similarity to Celtic and Germanic runes.
The whole subject gained considerable notoriety as well as political overtones because of the Third Reich. Nazism glorified pre-christian, pagan Germanic customs and culture, and a revival of the old runic script was part of that. An ability to read runes was a required part of SS training, and Himmler found the subject particularly fascinating. He, along with his boss, were very interested in occult and metaphysical topics. It was believed by them that the runic letters were not just letter symbols, but were also keys to metaphysical and interdimensional portals; doorways through wich power can be conducted from another realm. It was taught in the SS, especially at the elite levels, as a form of symbol magic. Small wonder that an excessive interest in the subject threw up a huge red flag under communism!
The Hungarian script remained in common use for many centuries, some say as recently as 1850. It experienced a revival in the 20th cnetury. From what I understand, there is no Unicode for the writing, so I’m not sure one can word process in the script without resorting to cumbersome symbol insertion.
The script interestingly features numeric notation, up to 1,000. The lower numbers closely resemble Roman numerals; e.g. the number 6 is written as “IV”. Even moe interesting is that there was a character for zero, something the Romans lacked.
Existence of the script on very ancient archeological sites and monuments in Bosnia and in the Carpathian area, fuels pseculation that the Hungarians are more ancient that originally thought, and might have had a longer presence in the area than which conventional theories assume.
Since I can’t post hyperlinks on pesticide, I’m going to put up a few on politics.hu about the subject!
Thanks, FL!
Fascinating somehow – but in the end I’m glad that I didn’t have to learn old Germanic runes either when I went to school.
Of course that wasn’t “Großdeutschland” anymore but the French Occupied Zone …
At least I was lucky not to have to live in the Russian zone or even in my father’s hometown – that part of Germany is part of Poland now …
Hi wolfi,
I believe you once said your family was from east Prussia?
@FL:
Actually my father’s family lived in “West Prussia” which is the region around Danzig (In Polish: Gdansk) that was inhabited by a mixture of Polish and German people (yes, mixture, because they intermarried a lot).
So after WW1 they found themselves in the “Free City Danzig” a very uneasy construction wedged between Germany and Poland.
My father became a policeman and when in 1935 Hitler started the buildup of the German army, all policemen were invited to join, that’s how he came into “Schwabenland”.
He often told us how strange he felt in southern Germany at first as a strict protestant – until he found the love of his life: a young blonde catholic girl aka my mother.
PS:
One of my sisters and her English husband took my parents to Danzig for a visit in the early 80s.
Afterwards my father complimented the Poles on their work in restoration of the town, he hadn’t expected that it would become so beautiful again …