Christianity: Details about 'Hungarian Language'
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The Hungarian language is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and in the adjacent states of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia (all are countries to which Hungary had to retrocede territories 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. Approximately 1,434,377 ethnic Hungarians (Magyars) live in Romania. The largest minority concentrations are in the Romanian counties of Transylvania, including Harghita (Hargita), Mureş (Maros), and Covasna (Kovászna).
Classification
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 correspondencesThere are numerous regular sound correspondances 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.
This is just a sample. Even in the small number of words above, other regular sound correspondances are evident, such as Finnish and Hungarian in "to know" and "bird/goose". Geographic distributionHungarian is spoken in the following countries:
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, and in other parts of the world, adding an additional million speakers. Official statusHungarian 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 (Hodos, Dobronak and Lendva), along with Slovene. Hungarian is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria, Croatia and Slovakia. In Romania, it is an official language at local level in all communes, towns and municipalities with an ethnic-Hungarian population of over 20%. DialectsThe 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 all 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 Consonant length is also distinctive in Hungarian. Most of the consonant phonemes can occur geminate. The sound voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/, written 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" (see you later) pronounced /ˈvisontˌlaːtaːʃrɒ/. Front-back vowel harmony is an important feature of Hungarian phonology. Grammar
Hungarian is an agglutinative language. 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 is also one grammatical prefix (leg- for superlatives). 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. LexiconGiving 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). 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"). Due to this feature 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 several 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. Word formationWords 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 itemsTwo 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".) Piros is used for lighter or vivid red, and often for inanimate, artificial things, as well as for things seen as cheerful or neutral. Vörös is used for darker red, and often for animate things, as well as for serious or emotionally involved/affected things. Since these attributes don't overlap in every case, their usage is not entirely regular or predictable. – 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. Kinship termsIn Hungarian there exist separate words for brothers and sisters depending on relative age:
(The original word for "elder sister" 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:
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:
Writing systemFor more information see also Hungarian alphabet. 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 the X-SAMPA description in the Hungarian (in Hungarian, but the table is obvious), which transliterates Hungarian letters into IPA and X-SAMPA characters. Additionally, the letter pairs 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:
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 orderThe 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, western names retain their order when used in Hungarian. Therefore:
translates to
Note: or John Kiss. While common prior to the 20th century, given names are usually not translated into English. See also: Hungarian name. ExamplesWhen a word has its own stress (rather than clinging on the previous ones), it is practically always placed on the first syllable in Hungarian.
ReactionsMarc MartinThe book Járt utat kétszer járj ("Tread twice the trodden path", ISBN 9633675820) was published in 2004, a sultry declaration of love for the Hungarian language, written by a native Frenchman, a translator, Marc Martin. (His name is given on the cover in the Hungarianized form, Martin Márk.) He first met the language through a record of Bluebeard's Castle by Bartók. The back cover dedication was written by Péter Nádas (whose novel A Book of Memories he had translated into French). The "trodden path" refers to his original life, family, neighbourhood, which he wanted to break away from, by being re-born into a new life and a new language. Controversy over originsMainstream linguistics holds that Hungarian is part of the Uralic family of languages, related ultimately to languages such as Finnish and Nenets. However, there exist various alternative speculations about the origins of the Hungarian language, even fanciful ideas about Hungarian being derived from the Sumerian language, but these are dismissed by linguists owing to a lack of evidence:
See also
Linguistic chapters from the Encyclopaedia Humana Hungarica (1–5)
Dictionaries
Online Language Courses
More links for learners
Húngaru Mađarski jezik Hongarèscv:Венгр чĕлхи Maďarština Ungarsk (sprog) Ungarische Sprache Ungari keel Idioma húngaro Hungara lingvo Hongrois Lingua húngara 헝가리어 Mađarski jezik Hungariana linguo Bahasa Hongaria Lingua ungherese הונגרית Hungarek Hongaars Magyar nyelv Унгарски јазик Hongaars ハンガリー語 Ungarsk språk Ungarsk språk Język węgierski Língua húngara Limba maghiară Венгерский языкse:Ungárgiella Hungarian language Maďarčina Madžarščina Мађарски језик Unkarin kieli Ungerska Macarca 匈牙利语
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