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waqasblog2 · 5 years

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The curious case of Hungarian: Europe’s most complex language? | OxfordWords blog

The curious case of Hungarian: Europe’s most complex language?

Hungary might sit in Europe’s geographical heart, but its language bears little resemblance to its Indo-European neighbours. Originating from the Ugric subgroup from the Uralic group of languages, Hungarian, along with its far-flung distant cousins Finnish and Estonian, has little in common with other European languages. It’s an agglutinative language, in which complex words are made up of countless grammar prefixes and suffixes that serve very specific functions within each word, sometimes allowing a single word to translate into English (or related languages) as a relatively long sentence. Being such a lawless language for most Europeans, Hungarian is said to be one of the hardest languages to learn.

My history with Hungarian

Growing up with a Hungarian mother and an English father in the UK, people assume I grew up bilingual. But after about five minutes of conversation in Hungarian, the cracks begin to appear. A misused case or misplaced word will tarnish my deceptively well-pronounced Hungarian, prompting the surprised question: “Where are you from?”

I was a late talker, and a popular misconception held among child psychologists my parents took me to at the time caused them to blame my bilingual surroundings for the delay. Hence, before I even said my first words, we reverted to being a monolingual, English-speaking household. The concept of correlating bilingualism with language delay has since been widely disproven. But eventually, I finally said my first English words and I haven’t shut up since. Sadly, my Hungarian acquisition stopped until the age of eight.

My mother tried to communicate in Hungarian sometimes, only to be confronted with “Mummy, why do you speak to me funny and everyone else normally?” from a sassy toddler. I was stubborn, but my mother wouldn’t give up, so we moved to Budapest and she put me in a local school where no one spoke English.

I sat alone and listened to this strange, yet oddly familiar, language echoing around the classroom for three months without uttering a word. Hungarian, unlike French and even German, has virtually no words that someone with an English vocabulary can hook onto as a crutch.

Why is Hungarian so unusual?

Hungarian may use a Latin alphabet, adopted since the 13th century to replace the original runic script, but that’s where the similarity with other European languages ends. And even with its northern Finno-Ugric cousins Finnish and Estonian, the languages have little in common with each other. I can say that being a Hungarian speaker gave me little to no advantage when I travelled through rural Estonia earlier this year.

As Hungarian evolved away from what became the Baltic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages, it has infused itself with various linguistic influences that have left the language such a curiosity. Ugric languages can be found as far as Western Siberia, east of the Ural Mountains, where Mansi and Khanty are spoken and are perhaps Hungarian’s closest living relatives. But, with a geographical separation of 2000 miles, estimates place the linguistic distance of those Ob-Ugric languages from modern day Hungarian at about 2500-3000 years.

Making its way to Europe, Hungarian became a language moulded by its migration. Hungarian acquired many words with Iranian, Turkic, and Caucasian origin offering a linguistic breadcrumb trail towards its roots in the Urals. Later it also became influenced by its European neighbours, with words being picked up from languages from the Slavic, Latin, and Germanic families, and even its Turkish influences could be traced to the Ottoman occupation of the country which lasted for almost 200 years.

But while there may be the odd identifiable German or Slavic word, the language is still virtually indecipherable to its neighbours. Even though the language evolved over time, its grammar and phonology stays loyal to its Uralic origin. One of the greatest challenges for non-Hungarian speakers are its pronunciation, where you have three groups of vowels (totalling about 14 vowels) and groups of consonants clustered together, some of which make unique sounds, such as Ny (/ɲ/ – think the ñ in Spanish), Sz (/s/ – that’s a normal S to most of us), S (/ʃ/ – which sounds like Sh), Dzs (/dʒ/ – that takes on a J sound), or Gy (/ɟ/ – I have no idea how to explain this one to English speakers, but I can tell you the Hungarian surname Nagy is not pronounced “Naggy” as in your naggy relative).

This can prove to be a landmine when it comes to pronouncing certain words, where a carefully placed accent changes the meaning of the word, such as cheers, Egészségedre [ˈɛɡeːʃːeːɡɛdrɛ], which becomes a toast ‘to your whole posterior’, when missing an accent in the case of Egészsegedre [ˈɛɡeːʃːɛɡɛdrɛ].

A grammatical headache

Beyond that, Hungarian grammar offers learners an intellectual headache with its elaborate case system, where you have 18-35 cases depending on who you ask, that are used to express prepositional meaning. Tense, noun, adverb, adjective, person, number, and case are expressed through a complex directory of hundreds suffixes (along with prefixes), where an incorrectly used suffix will change the entire meaning of the word or sentence, for example the verb hív (call) changes to Jánossal hívathatnál egy taxit (you could have János call a taxi) in another sentence, where you have the stem, hív, followed by causative (+at), may (+hat), and conditional you (+nál).

Today, I feel lucky enough I still fell in the catchment period of learning the language. I was still young enough to learn a language like a sponge while being immersed in a Hungarian-speaking school, and after three months of silence, I spoke the language fluently. Returning to the UK for my studies put an end to my acquisition, and as a lazy teenager being bullied for having picked up a Bela-Lugosiesque accent, my Hungarian became a time capsule for the age I left, which was 11.

When I moved back to Budapest years later at 28, my Hungarian was rusty and stunted at the language abilities of a child in an adult’s body. Over the years, I grew up linguistically, but even so, I will still be far from a native speaker.

But when I look at the other English speakers living here, struggling to understand this difficult language, I can only be grateful that for me that I bypassed learning all the rules by picking up the language from my exposure to it as a child.

Hungarian is certainly a language that will offer an intellectual challenge to any daring language learner, so if you decide to learn this fascinating language as an adult then I wish you good luck on this linguistic Odyssey!

Source

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/10/21/hungarian/

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silverhands-etcetera · 7 years

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The End of the Line.

The captain was looking over her maps, preparing to embark with all sails loosed, despite the perils of the night before and the questionable limits of an empty, poisoned stomach. We tied up at Casa Bruno once more on the way out of town for some coffee. And with all gauges reading in operating range, we finished with all of our vices, devices, grocery stores & mixed metaphors, and drove our horses straight out of the harbor. The terrain switches up dramatically as you leave Cerro Muriano. You'll find yourself on twisting climbs, walking paths with floors made of all forms of crumbling rock -my zero-drop quasi-moccasins passing every crag and crack onto the soles of my feet. There's hardly a level piece of Camino for the first several miles, as it winds through pastures and parks. We were barely out of town when we met a peregrino going north (only the second of this Camino) who was completely out of water, despite the short sixteen kilometers from Córdoba. Luckily, he had only a half-hour or so to walk, and we had the emergency water bottle to give him. -the next beings to meet our path were a man & a dog who came from our same direction as we were stopped in a grove of cork trees, relishing the shade. They were on a short run, and after a short chat about Caminos (everybody has a story) they turned around and we picked up again to keep walking towards the Mediterranean. Vamos a la playa... I'm not sure who noticed it first, but the remark was made between Blanka & I, about the yellow painted dots that we were seeing along the trail. Neither of us knew anything about the phenomenon, but most often, they were placed on stones or posts, on the opposite sides of the yellow arrows showing the way to Santiago. It appears as though someone is making an effort to mark the camino backwards -this intention being only a perceived explanation, from our perspective, so we gave it little credence, and persisted in seeking reverse arrows for confirmation whenever we met a fork in the path. -- There are more dogs on this camino, and I gravitate towards them. But upon meeting any type of equine friend, I can do little to connect to them, despite my efforts. I was walking ahead, as I tend to do on the uphill sections of the path, and spotted a beautiful grey stallion munching flowers behind a barbed wire fence. I walked through the tall grass, up to the edge of the pasture, and called out to the big fella, trying to invite him nearer, but every time I stepped or spoke, he moved a little further away. I persisted in our long-distance relationship until I heard Blanka coming up the path at her unhurried uphill pace. The stallion had retreated far into the pasture by this point, but she spotted him and walked to the fence calling out. The big horse lifted his head and walked straight over to Blanka without a moment's hesitation, stopping right in front of her to bat his eyelashes & literally kiss her hand through the wires of the fence. Some people have it, some of us are still trying. At least the dogs love me, I'm still learning horse. A lot of folks engage in baby talk when addressing an animal. I will do nothing of the sort when trying to speak Dog or Horse, but Blanka pointed out an unnoticed-by-me, but absolutely-true-observation -that my voice rises several tones in pitch whenever I speak Spanish. Study finds her to be correct. Am I engaging in upspeak? Am I seeking approval of my Spanish?... Weird. My spoken English descends into an inaudible rumble, but in Spanish I lift into a higher register than I use when I'm singing. Maybe I need to practice my voice in conjunction with my Spanish. Both issues are obviously entirely mental. -- Suburbs. Villas. Neighborhoods outside the city proper. The last few miles leading into Córdoba depart from the countryside and degrades into dirty paths between poblaciones. We duck under overpasses and past rows of dumpsters of every sort, followed by a mile or so of tires, televisions, tile, and furniture that just couldn't be carried the last 50 feet and were left on the ground. At every closed gate there's a dog snout poking out underneath, barking her guts out, so excited for a tiny bit of excitement in the long hot afternoon. There's a giant arch at a dry fountain, and paths cutting in all directions across every patch of unpaved ground. We continue, wordlessly following the yellow dots, which we have come to rely on over the course of the day. At the last hill, we had a vantage of the city of Córdoba, but now we were in a little gulley, and had lost the course. We doubled back under the highway and a toasty-brown man tending sheep with two beautiful dogs asked us where we were heading. -Córdoba was just over the hill, he said. We were on the right track, despite having left the Camino proper. Upon reaching the crest, we had a deep gulley at our right, a steep incline to our left, and a miserable traffic jam on the streets straight ahead. The narrow valley gave us only a glimpse of a patch of street, and a gasolinera. It was an anonymous picture of any Spanish city, but as we closed in, I recognized it as the very same place that I caught the car that took me out of town. Right. I know exactly where we're at, kid. Take a break, Captain, I can guide us in from here. Vamos a la playa.. -- Córdoba is boiling hot. There's no escaping the heat, the best you can do is find some shade. The best tourist trap restaurants monopolize the shade, but in the Plaza de Corredera, down on the low ground there is still a little hole-in-the-wall existing among the overly-staffed rip-off joints charging 8€ for a watery salmorejo. We chilled in the shade, enjoying the boquerones & tortilla with a couple beers. Learning to appreciate instead of curse the impromptu jam session happening on the terazza. I did my best to hold Blanka's attention in my direction as an inch long cock-a-roach climbed up on the napkin rack, and I acted as naturally as possible in shaking the little critter off the table, as though I was suddenly interested in reading the menu, and nothing else. There's a big city to see. We walked as far as the river, over the roman bridge, navigating all the souvenir shops & restaurants with menus in English, hyping their hamburgers & pizza. Swarms of people were mobbing the Mezquita -a converted/reconverted mosque/cathedral (I tend to imagine the conversations of the bishops, upon capturing the city from the Moors.. "well, I wouldn't have made the arches like that either, Paco, but we're gonna need a church...") -- So it's the end of the line for Equipo Contrario, but not for the Captain. Blanka is walking on, I don't have enough days left on the peninsula to allow me to walk out into the sticks, far from the buses & trains. People continue to blow my mind. What could I possibly have to talk about with a college kid from Budapest? Apparently anything. The network is expanding. Still doing the good work, still taking over the world. As for me, I'm a short-timer here in Spain. Keeping to myself on the city streets, keeping company with the world over the satellites. Cheers. Salud. Egészségedre...

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