Fun with Hungarian 

To understand Hungarians, you’d do well to first understand their language. Not like understand understand it—like speak it—but understand its idiosyncrasies.* And it is indeed idiosyncratic.**

To start with, it’s not even remotely related to the Slavic, Romance, or Germanic languages that surround it in Central Europe. That surprises a lot of people, as if they just learned that the family's beloved Labradoodle, Waggleton P McFlufferton, is in fact a rare type of Tibetan yak.

The consensus is that Hungarian started from somewhere east of the Ural Mountains. Which is really, really far away and people use different alphabets over there so it’s scientifically impossible to figure it all out.

How did it end up in Europe? “Nobody know who they were or what they were doing,” to quote Nigel Tufnel.*** One day they just rode in on their fancy horses in their fancy warlord outfits, made camp, and never, ever left. Like peacocks strutting around in a field of pheasants.†

“Hungarian is like an alien language that landed in a spaceship.”

—Eddie Izzard

What that really means is that no matter what language you speak, Hungarian is a whole different animal. To start with, they have 44 letters.†† Fourteen of them are vowels.

Now before you have a fit and fall right in it, understand that there’s a method to their madness. See, Hungarian is one of the few truly phonetic languages in the world. Imagine a world where every word was as easy to read as "cat" or "dog." There are exactly zero curveballs in Hungarian like “tough,” “bough,” “though,” and “through”—what you see is what you get. It's like having a language cheat code.

There’s more good news! Tenses! Yep, the language element in English responsible for more headaches than cheap champagne. Present progressive, past pluperfect, future perfect continuous? It’s enough to drive you mad. At least, we console ourselves, it’s not as bad as Spanish.

Hungarians took one look at that hot mess and said, “No thank you.” They prance around with just three tenses. There's no worrying about whether you're going somewhere tomorrow, or you went yesterday before you ate, or you were reading while you rode the bus to get there. Nope. You just pick a damn tense, slap it on, and voilá!—you're speaking Hungarian!

And while you have to conjugate verbs for present and past (I, you, he/she, blah blah blah), for the future tense you just stick in a little “will” word and use the infinitive. Oh. My. God! Using the future tense is so ludicrously easy I use it all the time. I mean, everyone thinks that I never do anything today but that I always have big plans to do things tomorrow. But being considered a sloth is a small price to pay.

“Hungarian is a language that even the devil respects.”

—Mark Twain

Oh! There’s a third awesome thing about Hungarian—the pronouns! English has “he,” “she,” “it,” and “they.” The Hungarians looked at that and thought, "Nah, too complicated.” So they just use “it” (or “ő”)—which is great for efficiency, but not so great for romantic poetry. †††

Now, if I’m being honest, those are the only easy things about Hungarian. First off, it’s an agglutinative language, which means words can and do get pretty long. The longest is “megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért.” Sure, you can say it (because, and say it with me, “Hungarian is a perfectly phonetic language!”) but you’ll never use it. Well, unless you need to say, “for your [plural] continued attempts at desecrating it.”

There’s also some to-do around the use of direct and indirect verb conjugations. Meaning it matters whether you read a book or you read that book, or if you’d like a donut or you’d like that donut. Oh and you have to change a word based on whether it’s the subject or the object of the sentence. Oh and you also have to change the word order in the sentence to convey exactly what you mean. Those first two things make the third things possible.

Which means that instead of “subject-verb-object” like in English, Hungarian sentences can be, well, anything.

In English I might say, “Brenda punched Dwayne right in the face.” But in Hungarian, it all depends:

– Is it important that Brenda did the punching? Then maybe say it the same way.

– Is it important that it was Dwayne’s face that got punched instead of, say, his throat? Then you might say, “It was the face belonging to Dwayne Brenda punched.”

– Is it important that it was Dwayne on the receiving end of the punch instead of, say, Dwight? Then you might say, “Dwayne’s face was punched by Brenda.”

 – Is it important that it was a punch instead of, say, a don’t-be-fresh slap? Then you might say, “Punching is what Brenda did to Dwayne’s face.”

But whatever you say, you can be sure Dwayne deserved it.

“Hungarian is a language that is so difficult that even Hungarians can’t speak it properly.”

—Frigyes Karinthy

One other thing that I love about Hungarian that is a bit difficult is its absolute precision around location. They use suffixes (See “agglutinative” above) to replace our prepositions. And they use a lot. There’s not just “in,” there’s into, inside, out of, onto, on, from on…the list goes on. This obsession with motion and direction makes their curses epic. “You want me to insert a what directly into my where?!?” It’s the sense of active motion that makes it really hit home.

But as perplexing as it may be, there's an undeniable charm to Hungarian. Its words boldly push the boundaries of what we consider possible in language. They stretch and twist, refusing to be confined by the conventional linguistic boxes. And the result is a language that is as delightfully unique as it is challenging.

And the ability to combine words means simple sentences in Hungarian can be a kind of poetry. Words blend and merge like colors on a palette, creating new shades of meaning. This language isn’t afraid to create, to invent, to play.

To learn Hungarian, then, is not merely to learn a new way of speaking. It is to embrace a new way of seeing the world, a new way of thinking, a new way of understanding the human experience. It's not just a language—it's an adventure, a mystery, and a riddle, all wrapped up in 42 (sorry, 44) phonetic letters. So here's to Hungarian, the peacock of languages!

* “Idiosyncrasy” was today’s Word of the Day in my calendar!

** Double points!

*** The Hungarians like to talk about magic deer or a magic bird or whatever that led the Seven Tribes of Etelköz here. I assume that either they were smoking something or someone had just binged Battlestar Galactica.

† Hmmm…now I’m thinking chicken for dinner.

†† It used to be a much more manageable 42, but they added a couple in the late 1980s because they had nothing else going on. And to make it interesting, that’s when they decided to introduce their first-ever trigraph letter, “dzs.” It sounds like a regular English “j” as in “Geoff.” They must’ve heard I was coming and they wanted to be able to spell my name in Hungarian. I get it.

††† The side effect of this it that Hungarians speaking in other languages often get mixed up on their pronouns, no matter how fluent they might be, constantly jumbling “he” and “she” based apparently on whichever one first comes to mind. That means you can be sitting comfortably listening to your friend’s story about how her daughter is doing well in school, but she is challenged by a bully during recess and that he hit him just the other day and she ran to tell the principal, Mr. Kass, but she didn’t really help at all, and the bully’s mother had no interest in disciplining her. Or him. Wait, who’s hitting who here?