Hungary is referred to by a strange name in Ukraine, but in Russia we are also referred to in a funny way

Have you ever wondered why many people call Hungary Hungary or where the name Hungária comes from? It can be traced back to the Turkish word onogur, which is a folk name. It was a tribal confederation made up of different peoples, of which the Hungarians might have been members. The Ten Ogurs were a Bulgarian-Turkish confederation of steppe origin that appeared in the field of view of the Europeans and Byzantines in the 5th century, which is the territory of today’s southern Russia and southern Ukraine.

It is not known whether the Hungarians could really have been members of this ethnic group, as there is no evidence for it, it could easily be that this name stuck to us only because our ancestors appeared where the Onogurs used to be.

Later, this name spread throughout Europe, one of the oldest forms of which is known from German, which sounds like:

Hungary.

But of course the name of our country sounds completely different in different languages, and this also has an interesting reason. In fact, the word entered most Slavic languages ​​in such a way that the letter ‘n’ was already dropped, and instead the ‘u’ became nasal; thanks to this, the name of the country is already Uhry, Uhersko for the Czechs, and Uhorsko for the Slovaks (and of course in these languages ​​the ‘g’ always became the letter ‘h’, just think of the Czech capital, Prague, which was originally Praha).

In Polish, the nasal remained, but the lip-rounding element in u became an independent letter ‘v’, while the vowel u became ‘e’:

Wengry.

And at this point, Russia comes into the picture, because it was transferred to Russian in the form of Hungary. Ukraine is another matter, it is written in a completely different form and Hungary is called by a different name:

Uhorschina.

Of course, it is also interesting outside of Europe to see how our country is written and referred to in other languages ​​in other countries, but for now let’s stay with our continent. We show you a map where you can see what the name of our country looks like in each European country.

It is worth looking at how divided the continent is from the point of view of where the letter ‘u’ from German has remained, where it has been transformed into the letter ‘v’, and where it begins with the letter ‘m’.

^{(Photo: Facebook)}