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Like some others here, I have never heard "ethnicity" used to refer to anything other than ancestry in the past several decades I've heard the term. The person of Chinese descent living in Hungary is ethnically (Han or whatever his biological ancestors were), and culturally Hungarian, if it's important to make the distinction. Or if not, he is Hungarian, and racially Asian.
This may be because I'm American, and the usage is different in Europe. But if it's different, it's not recently different. If a person's biological ancestors are from France, but he's raised by Greek Americans, he is ethnically (some kind of French) and culturally American or (regional) American or Greek American, depending on how much he participates in Greek specific cultural customs. Calling him ethnically Greek would not so much confuse people as simply miscommunicate his background. And nobody calls anyone ethnically American unless they're emphasizing that they don't know where their ancestors are from.
The Census categories in America differentiate between Races and Ethnicities. With Hispanic being the only allowed ethnicity. This is because Hispanics can be pure European in ancestry or any amount of European, Native American or African.
It's especially ironic you use Hungarian as your example. Since the Magyars were originally East Asian Siberians. It's laughable for a Hungarian to talk about the dangers of race mixing.
Yeah, and I find that kind of odd, and refuse to answer that question. Apparently my state is about half and half hispanic and non-hispanic; hispanic is larger by far than non-hispanic white. This seems a little silly. "My abuela speaks Spanish, so I guess that's my ethnicity." Especially since it's asked as a yes/no question on forms, with no other options.
Come to think of it, I have heard "ethnic" used in a cultural adjacent way before -- "ethnic restaurants" serve food that can be traced back to a more specific culinary tradition than non-ethnic restaurants -- be that India or Ethiopia or Serbia or whatever, but are not regionally prevalent. American diners and Mexican restaurants are not ethnic in my region.
I used it because the OP did -- I admittedly know nothing about Hungary, and they may well use different distinctions than Americans. If a Hungarian-American said they were ethnically Siberian, I would believe them.
The point is race is a legal term in the USA. It used to be the case up until the mid 20th century that only people of the 'white' race could be naturalized as citizens. There was a case brought against Finnish people who sought naturalization and eventually the judge ruled that they despite being originally of East Asian Siberian origin were of enough Nordic stock to be considered white to be naturalized as citizens.
See also miscegenation laws.
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From what I gather, the Magyars were a warrior nobility who converted the central European peasants (who were not really that genetically distinct from the Germanic and Slavic people around them) to speaking Hungarian, but were never that huge in number and were mostly wiped out in wars with the Mongols and the Turks. Meaning today's Hungarians aren't really all that mixed, but ... not in the way you might think.
Anyway, the census categorization that calls 'Hispanic' an ethnicity is using the word 'ethnicity' in a somewhat non-standard way. Perhaps it has to, since the people of Latin America have, like you say, such a wide spread of degrees of admixture, from pure European, pure Amerindian and pure sub-Saharan African, to any combination of the above, that there aren't really neat boxes to put people in where ancestry and culture are tightly matched. But it's not an ethnicity in the sense that, say, Welsh, or Igbo is an ethnicity; more just a hold-all cultural category for 'people from south of the US/Mexico border, at least some of whose ancestors spoke Spanish'.
I don't think you understand that Europeans are themselves descended from extremely deeply diverged races. The Ancestral North Eurasians are as different from the Early European Farmers as modern Chinese people are from the French. There are countless examples of groups that are culturally descended from one group, but who have little ancestry from the original group. Every Uralic speaking people in Europe, the Hungarians being the most prominent, and least Uralic by ancestry, Chadic people in central Africa, even the largest ethnic group in the world the Indo Aryans who originally came from Europe. Genes and culture correlate, but not enough that having different terms to refer to these concepts isn't useful.
No, I'm well aware of that. Just that after millennia of intermarriage, modern Europeans are a lot more homogenous (and largely distinct from the original Magyars, even though modern Hungarians claim continuity with them). I'm sure that the same would happen in Latin America too, given time, and barring any further large population migrations.
If you read my responses to the original poster he was claiming as an American he had never heard the term ethnicity used to refer to anything other than ancestry, despite the fact any American would have had to fill out various government forms that list ethnicity as something other than race.
We need a term to denote if someone is culturally, genetically or phenotypically like a certain group. Ethnicity seems the most obvious and widely used term to denote culture.
Turks all consider themselves the same ethnicity despite ranging from people who look like Nazi propaganda posters to people who wouldn't be out of place on the streets of Beijing.
Usually in the field of population genetics they refer to people of being of different 'clusters' or 'ancestries' usually using some specific principle component analysis or the genomes of some ancient population as a reference.
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