The Hunnic language, or Hunnish, was the language spoken by Huns in the Hunnic Empire, a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic tribal confederation which invaded Eastern and Central Europe, and ruled most of Pannonian Eastern Europe, during the 4th and 5th centuries CE. A variety of languages were spoken within the Hun Empire. A contemporary report by Priscus has that Hunnish was spoken alongside Gothic and the languages of other tribes subjugated by the Huns. As no inscriptions or whole sentences in the Hunnic language have been preserved, the attested corpus is very limited, consisting almost entirely of proper names in Greek and Latin sources. The Hunnic language cannot be classified at present, but due to the origin of these proper names it has been compared mainly with Turkic, Mongolic and Yeniseian languages, with a majority of scholars supporting Turkic. Other scholars consider the available evidence inconclusive and the Hunnish language therefore unclassifiable. Corpus Contemporary observers of the European Huns, such as Priscus and the 6th century historian Jordanes, preserved three words of the language of the Huns: The words medos, a beverage akin to mead, kamos, a barley drink, and strava, a funeral feast, are of Indo-European origin. They may be of Slavic, Germanic and/or Iranian origin. Maenchen-Helfen argued that strava may have come from an informant who spoke Slavic. All other information on the Hunnic language is contained in the form of personal and tribal names. Possible affiliations Many of the waves of nomadic peoples who swept into Eastern Europe, are known to have spoken languages from a variety of families. Several proposals for the affinities of Hunnic have been made. Unclassifiable Given the small corpus, a number of scholars hold the Hunnic language to be unclassifiable until further evidence, if any, is discovered. András Róna-Tas notes that "the very scant sources of information are often mutually contradictory." Turkic or Altaic sprachbund A number of historians and linguists including Karl Heinrich Menges, and Omeljan Pritsak feel that the proper names only allow the Hunnic language to be positioned in relationship to the Altaic language group, which is itself a widely discredited language family. Although Menges was reserved towards the language evidence, his view of the Huns was that "there are ethnological reasons for considering them Turkic or close to the Turks". As further possibilities, Menges suggests that the Huns could have spoken a Mongolian or Tungusic language, or possibly a language