Old Hungarian — 600? AD, Hungary

Hungarian Runes “e”

Hungary, despite being solidly in Europe, has had a long history of trade with and conquest by Central Asian peoples.  It is not entirely clear where Hungarians came from — or more specifically, where the people who brought the Hungarian language came from — but the Hungarian language has a number of Turkic loan words.

Hungarians also appeared to be influenced by Orkhon (“Turkic runes”).  An ancient writing system called either “Old Hungarian”, “Hungarian Runes”, or “Hungarian rovas” (from the Hungarian word for “to carve”) appeared at some poorly-understood point, probably around 600.  All the glyphs in Orkhon/Old Turkic that represent similar sounds in Hungarian are also similar in the Old Hungarian and Orkhon writing systems.  For non-Turkic sounds, the Old Hungarian glyphs appear to be novel, or perhaps from Greek.  However, there are factions which contend that Old Hungarian came from Greek and others that contend that Orkhon derived from Old Hungarian.

There are three dialects of the Hungarian Runes: two in Hungary and one in Kazakhstan.  The existence of the Kazakh variant is another strong argument for the origin of the script to lie in Central Asia.

This script was quite successfully stamped out in Hungary (which perhaps accounts for why the origins of the Hungarian people are somewhat unclear?) in favour of Latin, starting around 1000 AD by Christian leaders.  (The Christian leaders associated the Old Hungarian with paganism.)  The eradication was not perfect, however, as some remote regions continued to use runes until the mid 1800s.  It remained popular perhaps in part because the Hungarian runes actually represent the Hungarian sounds better than Latin script does.  (Some people say that literacy in Hungary dropped with the coming of the Latin script.)  Old Hungarian has enjoyed a little bit of a revival in modern times.

Old Hungarian was written right to left, or occasionally boustrophedonically. While Old Hungarian is an alphabet, the writers would occasionally drop vowels if doing so did not make the word ambiguous.

Old Hungarian script used three vertical dots to denotes word boundaries.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot, Ancient Scripts, Upon Reflection, Hungarian Heritage, Origins of Hunnish Writing claims that Turkic runes descended from Hungarian runes, RovasPedia