Svenja Bonmann and Simon Fries, “Linguistic Evidence Suggests that Xiōng-nú and Huns Spoke the Same Paleo-Siberian Language” (Transactions of the Philological Society, 16 June 2025, open access):
Abstract
The Xiōng-nú were a tribal confederation who dominated Inner Asia from the third century BC to the second century AD. Xiōng-nú descendants later constituted the ethnic core of the European Huns. It has been argued that the Xiōng-nú spoke an Iranian, Turkic, Mongolic or Yeniseian language, but the linguistic affiliation of the Xiōng-nú and the Huns is still debated. Here, we show that linguistic evidence from four independent domains does indeed suggest that the Xiōng-nú and the Huns spoke the same Paleo-Siberian language and that this was an early form of Arin, a member of the Yeniseian language family. This identification augments and confirms genetic and archaeological studies and inspires new interdisciplinary research on Eurasian population history.
[…]Conclusion
Our investigation has shown that (a) there are several Old Arin loanwords in Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolic, (b) the Jié couplet, Xiōng-nú titles and glosses betray Arin features and thus probably reflect an old form of Arin, (c) Hunnish personal names likewise seem to be Arin in origin ultimately and (d) the Yeniseian hydronyms and hydronym-derived toponyms along the westward migration route of the Huns are predominantly Arin suggesting a correlation between speakers of Arin and the Huns. In a variation of a word by the master detective Sherlock Holmes (in the short story ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’) it can therefore be established in our view that while each of these pieces of evidence are suggestive, together they are conclusive, because they independently corroborate the implications of each other.
It therefore seems an inevitable conclusion to us that Huns and Xiōng-nú both spoke the same early form of Arin that we have tentatively termed Old Arin here and that consequently the linguistic and thus most probably also the ethnic core of the Huns derived from the Xiōng-nú. These findings corroborate recent archaeological and genetic findings and show that the application of the methodology sketched out here can lead to substantial insights into the linguistic history even of regions such as Inner Asia that are at present underresearched and the history of which is much less perfectly understood than that of many other parts of the world such as Central Europe or the Mediterranean. It is to be hoped that future archaeological excavations may uncover autochthonous texts of the Xiōng-nú or the Huns (perhaps in the recently identified Xiōng-nú capital Lóng Chéng or in southeastern Europe) that allow for further testing of our Old Arin hypothesis. The synthesis of historiographical, archaeological, genetic and linguistic data and the continued application of the methodology presented here will then hopefully gradually lead to an ever deeper understanding of the linguistic history of Inner Asia and similarly underresearched parts of the world so that one day we can draw a consummate picture of the linguistic evolution of mankind.
Wikipedia has a pretty thorough article on Arin; Svenja Bonmann turned up on LH a couple of years ago in relation to the Kushan script. This is exciting stuff! Thanks go to Y, who sent me the link and added “So Turkish göl ‘lake’ is ultimately a Yeniseian loanword?”
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