ayearinlanguage: A Year In Language, Day 74: HungarianHungarian, known to itself as Magyar, is a Ura
A Year In Language, Day 74: Hungarian
Hungarian, known to itself as Magyar, is a Uralic language, a distant relative of Finnish, spoken in Eastern Europe.
Hungarian has a number of features westerners normally associate with East Asian languages. It is a pro-drop language which will omit subjects and other parts of speech inferable through context and has distinctive words for older and younger siblings. Politeness is important and while most European languages have a formal and informal “you” Hungarian has around 4 and often resorts to using third person. Even Hungarian names are ordered in the eastern style, family name first.
Hungarian is a very palatal language. It uses the uncommon palatal stops /ɟ/ and /c/. These are most similar to the English affricates written “j” and “ch” respectively, though not the same. The letter “s” in Hungarian is not the alveolar /s/ we might expect but instead represents /ʃ/ (English “sh”). What we would thing of as “s” is instead spelled “sz”. Like Turkish and other Uralic languages Hungarian exhibits vowel harmony, a process by which the vowels of suffixes conform to be more similar to the vowels of the root.
As in Finnish, Hungarian has a large case system normally listed as 18 though some claim more. More than half of these are to show motion; onto the noun, from within the noun, from without the noun, around the noun, through the noun, etc. It is an agglutinating language, which can make pinpointing cases apart from other forms of morphology can be academic at times.
Though it is now written in Roman script, Hungarian used to use “runes”. I put the word in quotes because strictly speaking only the Futhark alphabets of the Germanic people are runes, but this script, used up until the European Middle Age, looks quite similar despite being a descendant of the Old Turkic writing system. It’s not in standard Unicode, so you’ll just have to look it up if you’re interested.
While working at Amy’s Ice Creams I collected a tongue twister in Hungarian that I never mastered. Here it is with translation:
Egy picike pocakú picike pocok pocakon pöckölt egy picike pocakú picike pockot, mire a pocakon pöckölt, picike pocakú pocok pocakon pöckölte az őt pocakon pöckölő, picike pocakú pockot
[A tiny vole with a tiny tummy flipped a tiny vole with a tiny tummy on the tummy, when the vole with a tiny tummy flipped on the tummy flipped the vole with a tiny tummy on the tummy who flipped him on the tummy.]
