Özet:

The origin of this word was correctly identified by the great scholar Professor András Róna-Tas as Turkic *kat-gan, but he himself rejected the idea. His reasoning is that the Hungarian form would involve at least two rare sound correspondences. In reality it involves three such correspondences. Is this a reason to reject the etymology? The purpose of this article is to show both that the etymology is correct, and that Róna-Tas’s reasoning is against it is a serious mistake. The relatively rare correspondences simply reflect the age of the borrowing: it is evidently more recent than the majority of the Hungarian words borrowed from Lir Turkic. While scientists usually employ invalid such reasoning to justify rejecting the ideas of others, it has been shown before that sometimes they do it to their own ideas (typically their own best, most daring ideas). The article briefly discusses a second such example too, involving the etymology of an Albanian word by Eric P. Hamp (another world-famous scholar). I argue that this kind of self-abnegation is not only a serious intellectual mistake but a political and sociological phenomenon. It serves to slow down progress and to preserve the power of an elite that controls a given field of science. And this is why it must be opposed with all possible force.

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