rents, we may safely assume with Hunfalvy that they are a branch of the Cumans, if they be not offspring of the same mother-stock.
Next come the Palócz folk,[1] who live scattered among the other races in several of the northern counties of Hungary, and speak a dialect of their own. Hunfalvy asserts that they are the same people as the "Polovczi" mentioned by early Russian and Slavonic writers. And as Jerney, in his paper The Palócz Nation and The Palócz Chronicle, has proved beyond doubt that, whatever the Magyar Chronicles and Byzantine writers relate anent the Cumans can be traced, statement for statement, in Russian and Polish writers, with reference to the Polovczi, Hunfalvy draws the conclusion that the Palócz people are Cumans.[2]
Their name first occurs in Russian Annals A.D. 1061, and the Magyar savant to whose rich store of learning this work is so deeply indebted thinks that the migration of the Cumans into Hungary took place in two distinct streams, one, an earlier one, from the North, viâ the Slave countries across the Northern Carpathians, and another, later one from the south-east, through the passes and defiles of the south-eastern extension of the same range of mountains.
Before leaving this part of the subject, the reader must be reminded that all the foregoing races or nationalities at the present time speak one or other Magyar dialect,[3] and that the
- ↑ Vide infra, p. 412, &c.
- ↑ Ethnography of Hungary, p. 362.
- ↑ The true born Magyar repudiates with scorn the idea that there is any such thing as a dialect, boasting that rich and poor speak the same tongue. Cf. Galcoti Martii, de Matthiæ egregie, sapienter, fortiter et jocose dictis ac factis libellus. ed. Cassoviæ, 1611. "Unde fit ut carmen lingua Hungarica compositum rusticis et civibus, mediis et extremis, eodem tenore intelligatur." Galeoti was an Italian by birth, and Papal Nuncio at the Court of Matthias I. (Corvinus), King of Hungary.
