Electron
06-15-2007, 12:00 AM
Well, after seeing the impressive number of people who had read my last thread on Latin, I decided to say a few words about another interesting and little-known language, Hungarian. I do not yet speak the language fluently (mainly because my vocabulary is understandably poor, and that I have no one to speak Hungarian with), but I am learning it slowly.
For starters, here is a small piece of text in Hungarian to give you a feel of what the language is like:
Az űr a legvégső határ. Ennek végtelenjét járja az Enterprise csillaghajó, melynek feladata különös új világok felfedezése, új életformák, új civilizációk felkutatása, és hogy eljusson oda, ahová még senki nem merészkedett.
The loose English translation:
A mission to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man had gone before.
First of all, Hungarian is a language belonging to the Finno-Ugric category (more specifically, Ugric). It is in many ways unrelated to most other languages in Europe - in both grammar and vocabulary. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar. The closest resembling language might be the Kazakh language, which is spoken in Kazakhstan, geographically close to where the Hungarian language originated. Finnish has a very similar grammatical structure, but the languages are otherwise really quite unrelated (in vocabulary, for example).
Hungarian is an agglutinative language. This means that words in Hungarian are formed by joining words and sounds together. Hungarian is, like Finnish, well known for the extensive collections of suffixes. Suffixes are used to express many things, from case, possession, tense, to place. The language has 35 cases (compare it to the 6 in Latin, 0 in English and 7 in Croatian). Word order is extremely flexible, quite often changing word order has no effect on the sentence or just puts slightly more emphasis on one part or the other. The language also has some very different grammatical concepts, which prove to be difficult to accept for people learning the language, but the language itself is actually pretty simple. For example, once you learn a rule in Hungarian grammar, you can be sure there will be very little exceptions to the rule (unlike in English!). Also, there are only two tenses: referred to as present and past. Future is formed by using an auxiliary word plus present. Cool, isn't it?
The full Hungarian alphabet (with adopted foreign letters) contains 44 characters. Here it is:
a, á, b, c, cs, d, dz, dzs, e, é, f, g, gy, h, i, í, j, k, l, ly, m, n, ny, o, ó, ö, ő, p, q, r, s, sz, t, ty, u, ú, ű, v, w, x, y, z, zs
Each character has a unique pronunciation, which I will now try to explain. Bear in mind that like in any language, pronunciation is best learned by listening to the language being spoken. I listen to Hungarian music a lot, so I have a pretty good pronunciation. Chances are, you won't be seriously interested in learning Hungarian and you're reading this thread more out of curiosity, so don't worry about it.
(Unfortunately, I'll stop writing this thread now and post it because it's 2 AM where I am. Sometimes I get a bit carried away. But I'll continue)
For starters, here is a small piece of text in Hungarian to give you a feel of what the language is like:
Az űr a legvégső határ. Ennek végtelenjét járja az Enterprise csillaghajó, melynek feladata különös új világok felfedezése, új életformák, új civilizációk felkutatása, és hogy eljusson oda, ahová még senki nem merészkedett.
The loose English translation:
A mission to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man had gone before.
First of all, Hungarian is a language belonging to the Finno-Ugric category (more specifically, Ugric). It is in many ways unrelated to most other languages in Europe - in both grammar and vocabulary. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar. The closest resembling language might be the Kazakh language, which is spoken in Kazakhstan, geographically close to where the Hungarian language originated. Finnish has a very similar grammatical structure, but the languages are otherwise really quite unrelated (in vocabulary, for example).
Hungarian is an agglutinative language. This means that words in Hungarian are formed by joining words and sounds together. Hungarian is, like Finnish, well known for the extensive collections of suffixes. Suffixes are used to express many things, from case, possession, tense, to place. The language has 35 cases (compare it to the 6 in Latin, 0 in English and 7 in Croatian). Word order is extremely flexible, quite often changing word order has no effect on the sentence or just puts slightly more emphasis on one part or the other. The language also has some very different grammatical concepts, which prove to be difficult to accept for people learning the language, but the language itself is actually pretty simple. For example, once you learn a rule in Hungarian grammar, you can be sure there will be very little exceptions to the rule (unlike in English!). Also, there are only two tenses: referred to as present and past. Future is formed by using an auxiliary word plus present. Cool, isn't it?
The full Hungarian alphabet (with adopted foreign letters) contains 44 characters. Here it is:
a, á, b, c, cs, d, dz, dzs, e, é, f, g, gy, h, i, í, j, k, l, ly, m, n, ny, o, ó, ö, ő, p, q, r, s, sz, t, ty, u, ú, ű, v, w, x, y, z, zs
Each character has a unique pronunciation, which I will now try to explain. Bear in mind that like in any language, pronunciation is best learned by listening to the language being spoken. I listen to Hungarian music a lot, so I have a pretty good pronunciation. Chances are, you won't be seriously interested in learning Hungarian and you're reading this thread more out of curiosity, so don't worry about it.
(Unfortunately, I'll stop writing this thread now and post it because it's 2 AM where I am. Sometimes I get a bit carried away. But I'll continue)