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Hungarian (magyar nyelv ) is a Finno-Ugric language, unrelated to the other languages of Central Europe. As one of the small number of modern European languages which do not belong to the Indo-European language family it has always been of great interest to linguists. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar .

There are about 14.5 million speakers, of whom 10 million live in modern-day Hungary. About three million live in areas ceded by Hungary after World War One. Of these, the largest group live in Romania, where there are approximately 1.4 million Hungarians, especially in Transylvania (Erdély), including the counties of Harghita (Hargita), Mureş (Maros), and Covasna (Kovászna). The remaining Hungarian-speaking minorities are to be found in Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia as well as about a million people scattered in other parts of the world (see Geographic distribution).

Classification

The beginning of the history of Hungarian language as such (and so the proto-Hungarian period) is set to 1000 B.C., when – according to current scientific understanding – it separated from its closest relatives, the Ob-Ugric languages.

Hungarian is a member of the Ugric languages, a sub-group of the Finno-Ugric language family, which in turn is a branch of the Uralic languages. Connections between the Ugric and Finnic languages were noticed in the 1670s and established, along with the entire Uralic family, in 1717, although the classification of Hungarian continued to be a matter of political controversy into the 18th and even 19th centuries. Today the Uralic family is considered one of the best demonstrated large language families, along with Indo-European and Austronesian.

Sound correspondences

There are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian á corresponds to Khanty in certain positions, and Hungarian h corresponds to Khanty , while Hungarian final z corresponds to Khanty final . For example, Hungarian ház "house" vs. Khanty "house", and Hungarian száz "hundred" vs. Khanty "hundred".

The distance between the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondances are also regular. The relationship is most obvious when comparing all the Ugric languages with all the Finnic languages, for then individual idiosyncracies are averaged out, but here we will just compare Hungarian with Finnish.

{| Finnish Hungarian meaning fa "tree" "snow flurry"

{| Finnish Hungarian meaning kéreg "bark" (of a tree) könny "a tear"

{| Finnish Hungarian meaning ház "house, hut" (Khanty *) hal "fish"

{| Finnish Hungarian meaning "to know" tél "winter"

{| Finnish Hungarian meaning hal "to die" lúd "bird, goose"

This is just a sample. Even in the small number of words above, other regular sound correspondances are evident, such as Finnish and Hungarian [d in "to know" and "bird/goose".

Geographic distribution

Hungarian is spoken in the following countries:
CountrySpeakers
Hungary9,546,374 (census 2001)
Romania
(mainly Transylvania)		 1,443,970 (census 2002)
Slovakia520,528 (census 2001)
Serbia
(mainly Vojvodina)		285,000 (census 2002)
Ukraine
(mainly Zakarpattia)		149,400 (census 2001)
Canada75,555 (census 2001)
Israel70,000
Austria22,000
Croatia16,500
Slovenia9,240
Sum 12,138,567
Source: National census, Ethnologue

Hungarian speakers are also found in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela and in other parts of the world, adding an additional million speakers.

Official status

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the European Union.

Hungarian is also one of the official languages of Vojvodina and an official language of three municipalities in Slovenia (Hodoš/Hodos, Dobrovnik/Dobrónak and Lendava/Lendva), along with Slovene.

Hungarian is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria, Croatia and Slovakia.

In Romania and Slovakia, it is an official language at local level in all communes, towns and municipalities with an ethnic-Hungarian population of over 20%.

Dialects

The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is not listed by Ethnologue, is spoken mostly in Bacău County, Romania. The Csángó minority group has been largely isolated from other Hungarians, and they therefore preserved a dialect closely resembling medieval Hungarian.

Phonology

Hungarian has 14 vowel phonemes and 25 consonant phonemes. The vowel phonemes are pairs of long and short vowels. Most of these pairs have similar vowel qualities, but the pairs written with and do not: they differ in length as well as in closedness.

Consonant length is also distinctive in Hungarian. Most of the consonant phonemes can occur geminate.

The sound voiced palatal plosive , written , is unlike any in English. It occurs in the name of the country, "Magyarország" (Hungary), pronounced .

Primary stress is always on the first syllable of a word. There is sometimes secondary stress on other syllables, especially in compounds, e.g. "viszontlátásra" (goodbye) pronounced .

Front-back vowel harmony is an important feature of Hungarian phonology. See the details about Hungarian language in the linked article.

Grammar

Hungarian is an agglutinative language. Word order is extremely flexible; the standard order is subject-verb-object, but pronoun subjects are generally absorbed into the verb (when they occur explicitly it is generally to give special emphasis to the subject: te vagy az utolsó "you are the last one").

Suffixes

Most grammatical information is given through suffixes. For example: at the table = az asztalnál (space relation), at 5 o'clock = öt órakor (time relation). There are more than twenty-five case endings (some authors cite more than forty); these are conjugated only according to the root word's back- or front-vowel group, however.

Prefixes

There is one adjectival prefix (leg- for superlatives), as well as many verbal prefixes, including:
  • meg - repeated or extended
  • vissza - back
  • fel - up
  • le - down
  • át - across or through

See more at Hungarian language (verbs).

Definite and indefinite conjugations

An unusual feature of Hungarian are the 2 verb conjugations. The "definite" conjugation is used for a transitive verb with a definite object. The "indefinite" conjugation is used for an intransitive verb or for a transitive verb with an indefinite object. See also Definite and indefinite conjugations.

Lexicon

Giving an exact estimate for the total word count is difficult, since it is hard to define what to call "a word" in agglutinating languages, due to the existence of compound words. To have a meaningful definition of compound words, we have to exclude such compounds whose meaning is the mere sum of its elements. The largest dictionaries from Hungarian to another language contain 120,000 words and phrases (but this may include redundant phrases as well, because of translation issues). The deafult Hungarian lexicon is usually estimated to comprise 60,000 to 100,000 words. (Independently of specific languages, speakers actively use at most 10,000 to 30,000 words.)

Hungarian words are built around so-called word-bushes, for example kör-köröz-körös-kering-kerge-kurta (originally related to "circle", "round"; circle-be after somebody-arranged in a cirle or there are circles on something's surface-circulate-word for stupid-short). Thus, words with similar meaning often arise from the same root. The lexicon of Hungarian contains words borrowed from various Turkic languages, including Turkish, as well as numerous loan words from German and Slavic.

The basic vocabulary shares 1000-1200 words from Uralic languages like Finnish and Estonian (e.g., the numbers egy ~ yksi ~ üks (1), kettő ~ kaksi ~ kaks (2), három ~ kolme ~ kolm (3), négy ~ neljä ~ neli (4); víz ~ vesi ~ vesi (water); kéz ~ käsi ~ käsi (hand); vér ~ veri ~ veri (blood); fej ~ pää ~ pea (head) which have regular sound correspondences, so most linguists classify them as Finno-Ugric languages, a subgroup of the Uralic language family.

These 1000-1200 original word roots, however, account for about 80-90% of the words in an average present-day text, due to their wide-ranging compounds, derivations and formations, several dozens of words from a single root.

The proportion of the word roots in Hungarian lexicon is as follows: Finno-Ugric 21 %, Slavic 20 %, German 11 %, Turkic 9.5 %, Latin and Greek 6 %, Romance 2.5 %, Other of known origin 1 %, Other of uncertain origin 30%. Except for a few Latin and Greek loan-words, these are undiscernible for native speakers; they were entirely adapted into Hungarian lexicon. There are an increasing number of English loan-words, especially in technical fields.

Word formation

Words can be compound (as in German) and derived (with suffixes).

There are also compound words using verbs which have their individual meanings, for example egyedülálló single (eg. person), whereas egyedül álló means something which stands alone.

Noteworthy lexical items

Two words for "red"

There are two basic words for "red" in Hungarian. (They are basic in the sense that you can't say one is a sub-type of the other, like "scarlet" is a kind of "red".) When they refer to an objective difference in colour (like on a colour chart), piros is used for vivid red and vörös for dark red. – According to Berlin, B and Kay, P (1969) Basic Color Terms, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, Hungarian is unique in having two basic colour words for red.

However, the two words are also used independently of the above in collocations. Piros is often used for inanimate, artificial things, as well as for things seen as cheerful or neutral. Children are first taught this word for "red". On the other hand, vörös is usually found with animate or nature-related things (biological, geological, physical and astronomical objects), as well as with serious or emotionally involved/affected things. Since these attributes don't overlap in every case with each other, nor with the above-mentioned hues of red, the usage of the names is not regular or predictable. The word vörös is in a word-bush with vér, the word for blood, and resembles the word véres, bloody.

Examples:

  • piros: red pencil, red ink, red sign (prohibition, disqualification or a tourist mark), the red line of the metro, a red-letter day in the calendar, the red nose of a clown, rose-cheeked looks, red lips, whatever red clothes, red flowers, red apple, red peppers and paprika, red cars, red cards (hearts and diamonds), red traffic lights, eroticism and red light district, the red stripes on flags and a few plant and animal names (eg poppy, ox-pecker) etc
  • vörös: socialism or communism, red army, red wine, red carpet (for elegant guests), (naturally) red hair, red beard, the colour of love itself, red lion (as a mythical animal), Red Cross, Red and Black by Stendhal, the Red Sea, the red colour of the spectrum, red-shift, Red Giant, blood-cells, blood-corpuscles, red death, tippler's nose, in the name of several animals and plants (eg red oak, larch, cranberry, rowan, robin redbreast, red fox), ferric and other red minerals, red copper, red phosphorus, the colour of red-hot, onion, red cabbage, Scotch kale, "it's like a red rag to him", sky is red if a wind-storm is approaching and at dawn or dusk, red when blushing with anger or shame, red-eye effect when taking photos etc

Some things, including inks, lights, roses, ribbons, and tapes, can be described by either colour name.

Kinship terms
In Hungarian there exist separate words for brothers and sisters depending on relative age:
youngerelderno relative
age given		no gender
given
brotheröcsbátyfivér or
fiútestvér		testvér
sisterhúgnővérnővér or
lánytestvér

(There existed a separate word for "elder sister", néne, but it has become obsolete and has been replaced by the generic word for "sister".)

Besides, separate prefixes exist for up to the 5th ancestors and descendants:

parentgrandparentgreat-
grandparent		great-great-
grandparent		great-great-great-
grandparent
szülőnagyszülődédszülőükszülőszépszülő
(OR ük-ükszülő)
childgrandchildgreat-
grandchild		great-great-
grandchild		great-great-great-
grandchild
gyer(m)ekunokadédunokaükunokaszépunoka
(OR ük-ükunoka)

On the other hand, no lexical items exist for "son" and "daughter", but the words for "boy" and "girl" are applied with possessive suffixes. Nevertheless, the terms are differentiated with different declension or lexemes:

boy/girl(his/her)
son/daughter		(his/her)
boy/girl (-friend)
malefiúfiabarátja
femalelánylányabarátnője

Fia is only used in this, irregular possessive form; it has no nominative on its own. However, the word fiú can also take the regular suffix, in which case the resulting word (fiúja) will be synonymous with barátja ("his/her boyfriend").

Extremely long words
  • Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért
(This is often thought of as the longest used Hungarian word, virtually untranslatable.)
(most exact possible) "for your constant mentioning of the fact that is unprofanable [cannot be profaned/desecrated"
(approximate) "For the impossibility of you * committing multiple acts of desecration."
  • Legeslegmegszentségteleníttethetetlenebbeiteknek (48 letters)
"to those of you who can the very least be made profaned / desecrated"
  • Töredezettségmentesítőtleníttethetetlenségtelenítőtlenkedhetnétek (65 letters)
"you could constantly mention the lack a software that makes it impossible to have anyone make something free of a defragmenter"

Source: Hungarian tongue-twisters.

Writing system

For more information see also Hungarian alphabet.

Before 1000 AD, Hungarian had another writing system. The first Christian king, Saint Stephen decided to destroy the old system. However, it survived the centuries, so it is known but not used. For more information about this writing system, see Old Hungarian script.

Hungarian is written using a variant of the Latin alphabet, and has a phonemic orthography, i.e. pronunciation can generally be predicted from the written language. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several additional letters. These include letters with acute accents (á,é,í,ó,ú) which represent long vowels, with umlauts (ö and ü) and their long counterparts ő and ű. Sometimes ô or õ is used for ő and û for ű, due to the limitations of the Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1 codepage, though these are not part of the Hungarian language. Hungarian can be properly represented with the Latin-2 / ISO-8859-2 codepage, but this codepage is not always available. (Hungarian is the only language using both ő and ű.) Of course, Unicode includes them, and they therefore can be used on the Internet.

For a complete table of the pronunciation of the Hungarian alphabet, see X-SAMPA Magyar nyelvhez (in Hungarian, but the table is obvious), which transliterates Hungarian letters into IPA and X-SAMPA characters.

Additionally, the letter pairs <ny>, <ty>, and <gy> represent the palatal consonants , , and (a little like the "d+y" sounds in British "duke" or American "would you"). Also like saying d with your tongue pointing to your upper palate. Hungarian uses <s> for and <sz> for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish. is and <cs> is . All these digraphs are considered single letters. is also a "single letter digraph", but is pronounced like /j/ (English <y>), and mostly appears in old words. More exotic letters are <dz> and <dzs> . They are hard to find even in a longer text. Examples are madzag ("string"), edzeni ("to train (athletically)") and dzsungel ("jungle").

Single R's are tapped, like the Spanish "pero"; Double R's and initial R's are trilled, like the Spanish "perro".

Hungarian distinguishes between long and short vowels, where the long vowels are written with acutes, and between long consonants and short consonants, where the long consonants are written double. The digraphs, when doubled, become trigraphs: +=, but when the digraph occurs at the end of a line, all letters are written out:

... busz-
szal...

Usually a trigraph is a double digraph, but there are a few exceptions: tizennyolc "eighteen" is tizen + nyolc. There are doubling minimal pairs: tol (push) vs. toll (feather or pen).

While it seems unusual to English speakers at first, once one learns the new orthography and pronunciations, written Hungarian is nearly totally phonemic.

Name order

The Hungarian language uses the so-called eastern name order, in which the family name comes first and the given name comes last. However, as a rule, names are represented in the western name order when used in foreign languages. Thus for example Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist, is known in Hungary as Teller Ede.

On the other hand, foreign names have retained their order when used in Hungarian. Therefore:

  • Kiss János, amikor Los Angelesben járt, látta John Travoltát.
translates to
  • When János Kissor John Kiss. While common prior to the 20th century, given names are usually not translated into English. However, in Hungarian usage, at least three 19th-century foreign personalities have often had their names Hungarianized even in recent times: Verne Gyula (rather than Jules Verne), Marx Károly (rather than Karl Marx) and Engels Frigyes (rather than Friedrich Engels). Other exceptional forms include Kolumbusz Kristóf (Christopher Columbus), Luther Márton (Martin Luther), Husz János (Jan Hus) and Kálvin János (John Calvin). was being in Los Angeles, he saw John Travolta.

Notes:

See also: Hungarian name.

Vocabulary examples

Note: When a word has its own stress (rather than clinging on the previous ones), it is practically always placed on the first syllable in Hungarian.

  • Hungarian (person, language): magyar
  • Hello!:
    • Formal, when addressing a stranger: "Good day!": Jó napot (kívánok)!
    • Informal, when addressing someone you know very well: Szia! (it sounds almost exactly like American "See ya!")
  • Good-bye!: Viszontlátásra! (formal) (see above), Viszlát! (semi-informal), Szia (informal: same stylistic remark as for "Hello!" )
  • Excuse me: Elnézést!
  • Please:
    • Kérem (szépen) (This literally means "I'm asking (it/you) beautifully", as in German Danke schön, "I thank (you) beautifully". See next for a more common form of the polite request.)
    • Legyen szíves! (literally: "Be (so) kind!")
  • I would like ____, please: Szeretnék ____ (this example illustrates the use of the conditional tense, as a common form of a polite request)
  • Sorry!: Bocsánat!
  • Thank you: Köszönöm
  • that/this: az , ez
  • How much?: Mennyi?
  • How much does it cost?: Mennyibe kerül?
  • Yes: Igen
  • No: Nem
  • I don't understand: Nem értem
  • I don't know: Nem tudom
  • Where's the toilet?:
    • Hol van a vécé? (vécé/veːtseː is the Hungarian pronouncation of the English abbreviation of "Water Closet")
    • Hol van a mosdó? – more polite (and word-for-word) version
  • generic toast: Egészségünkre! (literally: "For our health!")
  • juice: gyümölcslé
  • water: víz
  • wine: bor
  • beer: sör
  • tea: tea
  • milk: tej
  • Do you speak English?: Beszél angolul? Note that the fact of asking is only shown by the proper intonation: continually rising until the penultimate syllable, then falling for the last one.
  • I love you: Szeretlek
  • Help!: Segítség!

Controversy over origins

Mainstream linguistics holds that Hungarian is part of the Uralic family of languages, related ultimately to languages such as Finnish and Nenets.

  • For many years (from 1869), it was matter of dispute whether Hungarian was a Finno-Ugric/Uralic language, or was more closely related to the Turkic languages, a controversy known as the "Ugric-Turkish war". Hungarians did absorb some Turkic influences during several centuries of co-habitation. For example, it appears that the Hungarians learned animal breeding techniques from the Turkic Chuvash, as a high proportion of words specific to agriculture and livestock are of Chuvash origin. There was also a strong Chuvash influence in burial customs. Furthermore, all Ugric languages, not just Hungarian, have Turkic loanwords related to horse riding. Nonetheless, the science of linguistics shows that the basic wordstock and morphological patterns of the Hungarian language are solidly based on a Uralic heritage.
  • There have been historical attempts to link Hungarian with e.g. Etruscan, Japanese, Turkic, and Sumerian. Such alternative theories are only advocated by non-specialists today.
  • Hungarian has often been claimed to be related to Hunnish, since Hungarian legends and histories show close ties between the two peoples. (although the name "Hunor" can also show a link with Khanti.) Some people believe that the Székely, a part of the Hungarians living in Romania, are descended from the Huns. However, the link with Hunnish is uncertain, and it is not even known which languages the Huns spoke.

See also

External links

Linguistic chapters from the Encyclopaedia Humana Hungarica (1–5)

Dictionaries

Online Language Courses

More links for learners

Hungarian language | Agglutinative languages | Languages of Austria | Languages of Croatia | Languages of Hungary | Languages of Romania | Languages of Slovakia | Languages of Slovenia | Languages of Serbia | Languages of Vojvodina | Vowel harmony languages

لغة مجرية | Húngaru | Mađarski jezik | Hungareg | Унгарски език | Hongarès | Венгр чĕлхи | Maďarština | Ungarsk (sprog) | Ungarische Sprache | Ungari keel | Ουγγρική γλώσσα | Idioma húngaro | Hungara lingvo | Ungarskt mál | Hongrois | Lingua húngara | 헝가리어 | Mađarski jezik | Hungariana linguo | Bahasa Hongaria | Lingua ungherese | הונגרית | Hungarek | Vengrų kalba | Hongaars | Magyar nyelv | Унгарски јазик | Hongaars | ハンガリー語 | Ungarsk språk | Ungarsk språk | Język węgierski | Língua húngara | Limba maghiară | Венгерский язык | Ungárgiella | Lingua ungarisa | Hungarian language | Maďarčina | Madžarščina | Мађарски језик | Mađarski jezik | Unkarin kieli | Ungerska | ภาษาฮังการี | Macarca | Венгер кыл | Угорська мова | 匈牙利语

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Hungarian language".

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