Rona-Tas, Andras

Linguist

He was born in 1931 in Budapest. He received a degree in folklore and eastern linguistics (Tibetan, Mongol, later Turkish). He has spent his working life researching the eastern relations of the Magyars and Magyar popular culture. His teachers were Gyula Ortutay, István Tálasi, Gyula Németh and Lajos Ligeti. In 1957 and in 1958 he worked in Mongolia where he carried out linguistic and folklore fieldwork, studying the nomad life, language and dialects of the Mongols. He then worked on the Tibetan-Mongol linguistic relationships. From 1965 he did linguistic and folklore fieldwork among the Csuvas people of the Volga river region. He defended his doctoral thesis on "The Theory of Linguistic Affinity and the Linguistic Relations between the Csuvas and Mongol Languages" in 1971. His book entitled, Linguistic Affinity, appeared in 1978. He has published several monographs on the Csuvas language, the ancestor of which was related to the Hungarian language prior to the Hungarians settling in the Carpathian basin, known as the Hungarian Landtaking. His general work, The Landtaking Hungarians, appeared in 1996, an extended version of which also appeared in English in 1999. He has been teaching at Szeged University since 1968. He was a visiting professor at several foreign universities in the USA, Germany and Austria. He has been Professor Emeritus since 2002

People and Language - The Formation of the Magyars