Hungarian language Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Hungarian language is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and in adjacent areas of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Slovenia (all territories lost after World War I). The Hungarian name for the language is Magyar.There are about 14.5 million speakers, of whom 10 million live in Hungary.
| Hungarian (Magyar) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Hungary and 10 other countries |
| Region: | -- |
| Total speakers: | 14.5 Million |
| Ranking: | 66 |
| Genetic classification: | Uralic Finno-Ugric Ugric Hungarian |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Hungary, Slovenia, Vojvodina |
| Regulated by: | -- |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | hu |
| ISO 639-2 | hun |
| SIL | HNG |
| Table of contents |
|
2 Geographic distribution 3 Phonology 4 Grammar 5 Lexicon 6 Writing system 7 Examples 8 External links |
Classification
Hungarian is generally believed to be 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.
There are various alternative theories about the origins of Hungarian language, but these are dismissed by most linguists owing to a lack of evidence:
- Hungarian has often been claimed to be closely related to Hunnish, since Hungarian legends and histories show close ties between the two peoples. Some people believe that the Székely, a minority people in Hungary, are descended from the Huns. However, the link with Hunnish is uncertain, as are other theories (such as Hungarian being derived from the Sumerian language, which is also agglutining).
- For many years (from 1869), it was matter of dispute whether Hungarian was a Finno-Ugric language, or was more closely related to some Turkic languages, a controversy known as the the "Ugric-Turkish war". It is only in the discipline of linguistics that the "victory" of the Finno-Ugrists can be described as complete, due to a lot of evidence from the languages themselves. However, significant evidence in some other sciences, including genetics and mainly archeology, still clashes with this theory. Scientists explain this phenomenon by stating that the origin of the language is not necessarily equal with the origin of the people, genetically. Thus the language is Finno-Ugric, some scientists say, but according to genetics and anthropology, the Hungarian people are rather similar to their neighbors: Germans and Slavs, than the Finnish, who are like the Swedes according to these points.
Geographic distribution
Hungarian is spoken in the following countries:
| Country | Speakers |
|---|---|
| Hungary | 10,298,820 |
| Romania (mainly Transylvania) | 1,700,000 - 3,000,000(X) |
| Slovakia | 597,400 |
| Serbia and Montenegro | 293,000 |
| Ukraine | 187,000 |
| Israel | 70,000 |
| Sweden | 35,000 |
| Austria | 22,000 |
| Croatia | 16,500 |
| Slovenia | 9,240 |
(X) of which, according to the 2002 census, 1,450,000 speak it as mother tongue.
Hungarian is also spoken in Australia, Canada, and the USA.
Source:Ethnologue
Official status
Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the EU.
main article: Hungarian phonology
There are some sounds which do not exist in English, such as /ɟ/. For example the pronunciation of "Magyarország" (Hungary) is /mɑɟɑrorsaːg/, with the stress on the first syllable.
The passive voice is almost extinct, but can be found in old literary texts.
Many grammatical and syntactic functions, elements and constructions are based on suffixes. The mark for the plural of a noun is a suffixed -k, preceded by a vowel if the word ends in a consonant. Usually, vowels are inserted between the word and its suffix to prevent a buildup of consonants (and hence to prevent unpronouncable words).
Hungarian has many different cases (esetek). Most common are the Nominative case, Accusative case and Dative case; some express location and placement (see the chart below); and some express other relations (Terminative case, Essive-formal case, Instrumental-comitative case, Translative case, Causal-final case). There are further cases of restricted use (Locative case, Essive-modal case, Distributive case, Distributive-temporal case, Sociative case). For examples of some of these cases, refer to the article on the Finnish language.
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.Phonology
Grammar
The order of words in a sentence is determined not by syntactic roles, but rather by pragmatic - i.e., discourse-driven - factors. Words can be compound (as in German) and derived (with suffixes).Nouns
| interior | surface | neighborhood | |
| from | házból (Elative case) | házról (Delative case) | háztól (Ablative case) |
| at | házban (Inessive case) | házon (Superessive case) | háznál (Adessive case) |
| to | házba (Illative case) | házra (Sublative case) | házhoz (Allative case) |
Forms are presented in this order:
I, You, He/She/It, We, You, They
én, te, ő, mi, ti, ők
The polite form of Thou is either ön or maga: ön is official and distancing, maga is personal and even intimate. (There are some older forms for you, like kend, which is still used in rural areas.) As you probably noticed, Hungarian does not have gender-specific pronouns.
The infinitive of verbs is the radical suffixed by -ni.
PastTense: voltam, voltál, volt, voltunk, voltatok, voltak
FutureTense: leszek, leszel, lesz, leszünk, lesztek, lesznek
PastTense: lettem volna, lettél volna, lett volna, lettünk volna, lettetek volna, lettek volna
The lexicon of Hungarian contains many words borrowed from various Turkic languages, including Turkish, as well as several hundred loans from German and Slavic languages, but has retained its Ugric originality.
The basic vocabulary shares many basic words with Finnish and Estonian (e.g., the numbers egy ~ yksi ~ üks, kettő ~ kaksi ~ kaks, három ~ kolme ~ kolm, négy ~ neljä ~ neli; víz ~ vesi "water"; kéz ~ käsi "hand"; vér ~ veri "blood"; fej ~ pää ~ pea "head", etc.), so linguists classify both as Finno-Ugric languages, a subgroup of the Uralic language family.
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, the diaereses ö and ü and their long counterparts ő (unicode Ő and ő) and ű (unicode Ű and ű). Sometimes ô or ő is used for ő and ű for ű, due to the limitations of the Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1 codepage. 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 the ő and ű codes.) Of course, Unicode includes the glyphs, and they therefore can be used on the Internet.
Additionally, the letter pairs <ny>, <ty>, and <gy> represent the palatal consonants /ń/, /tj/, and /dj/ (like the "dy" sound in British "duke" or American "would you").
Hungarian uses <s> for /S/ and <sz> for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish.
Single R's are tapped, like the Spanish "pero"; Double R's and initial R's are trilled, like the Spanish "perro" or "romper".
Hungarian distinguishes between long and short vowels, where the long vowels are written with accents, and between long consonants and short consonants, where the long consonants are written double. The digraphs, when doubled, become trigraphs:
Primary stress is always on the first syllable of a word. There is sometimes secondary stress on other syllables, especially when two words have been combined (like "viszontlátásra" (see you later) pronounced "VEES-ohnt-LAH-tahsh-raw").
While it seems unusual to English speakers at first, once one learns the new orthography and pronunciations, Hungarian is nearly totally phonemically written.
This is an Article on Hungarian language. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Hungarian language Verbs
As a beginning of a more complete vocabulary (szókincs), an extract for the verb "to be" in Hungarian, lenni.Indicative Mood
PresentTense: vagyok, vagy, van, vagyunk, vagytok, vannakConditional Mood
PresentTense: lennék, lennél, lenne, lennénk, lennétek, lennénekImperative/Subjunctive Mood
PresentTense: legyek, legyél (or légy), legyen, legyünk, legyetek, legyenekLexicon
Writing system
Examples
There is a Hungarian Wikipedia at hu.wikipedia.org.External links
Dictionaries
Online Language Courses
More links for learners