The Funeral Sermon and Prayer () is the oldest known and surviving contiguous Hungarian text, written by one scribal hand in the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

and dating to 1192–1195. It is found on f.154a of the Codex Pray.

Importance

The importance of the Funeral Sermon resides from being the oldest surviving Hungarian and as such also the oldest Uralic, ''text'' — although individual words and even short partial sentences appear in charters, such as the founding charter of the Veszprém valley nunnery (997–1018/1109) or the founding charter of the abbey of Tihany (1055).

Structure

The whole monument has two parts: the sermon's text (26 lines and 227 words) and the prayer (6 lines and 47 words). Not counting repeated words, there are 190 individual terms in the text. The work was written after a Latin version, which has been identified and can be found in the very

codex The codex (: codices ) was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically, the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term ''codex'' is now r ...

. However, the Funeral Sermon and Prayer is a new composition based on it, rather than a mere translation. Since 1813, the manuscript has been kept in

Budapest Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

, and is currently in the National Széchényi Library.

Sources

Gábor: Régi magyar nyelvemlékek (I.). Buda, 1838

Zolnai, Gyula: Nyelvemlékeink a könyvnyomtatás koráig. Budapest 1984
* Benkõ, Loránd: Az Árpád-kor magyar nyelvű szövegemlékei. Budapest, 1980.

External links

English translation by Alan Jenkins
(Babel Web Anthology; original source: Hundred Hungarian Poems, Albion Editions, Manchester, 1976.)
Another English translation of the Funeral Sermon and PrayerA high-quality photographic reproduction
at the Hungarian National Széchényi Library
Old Hungarian Corpus
– searchable text of the Funeral Sermon and Prayer in its original orthographic form as well as its version normalized to Modern Hungarian spelling {{Hungarian literature Hungarian language Hungarian literature 1190s books Earliest known manuscripts by language Funeral orations Catholic liturgy Christian sermons Medieval documents of Hungary