Hungarian language

Hungarian or Magyar (Hungarian: Magyar nyelv) is a language of the Uralic language family spoken by about 15 million people in central and eastern Europe. It is spoken in Hungary and in Romanian Transylvania, in southwestern Ukraine, in southern Slovakia, in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, and in some border towns in Slovenia and Croatia. In Hungarian, the name of the language is written magyar. About 9 million speakers live in Hungary.

Historical, social and cultural aspects

History

According to the most widespread and accepted theory, Hungarian or Magyar comes from the Urals, where in the century IX d. C. the Magyar tribes emigrated to what is today Hungary. From here the language evolved. The following periods can be distinguished:

• Proto-Hungarian – 1000 a. C.
• Archaic Hungarian – 1000 a. C. until 896 d.C.
• Old Hungarian – 896 to the centuryXVI
• Hungarian half-centuryXVI until the end of the centuryXVIII
• Modern Hungarian - from the end of the centuryXVIII

The oldest texts in which Hungarian-speakers are already referred to as magyar date from the 12th century; The Funeral Sermon and Prayer (1192-1195) is considered to be the oldest surviving complete text in Hungarian, while the first printed books in the language appeared in the XVI.

Geographic distribution

Hungarian distribution in Europe and percentage of native speakers per country.

Hungarian is the national language of Hungary, but it is also spoken in neighboring countries: Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine, as well as in other countries around the world due to emigration. Most of the Hungarian speakers outside of Hungary are concentrated in Romania: mostly in the western part of the country, in the Transylvania region. This dispersion is due to the fact that all these territories belonged to Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and passed to the current countries at the end of the First World War as compensation and on the condition that the language should be respected.

The number of speakers in 2020 is around 13.2 million, of which approximately 11.5 million live in Hungary, 1.3 million in Romania and 0.4 million in other neighboring countries. Declining in use outside of Hungary over the decades because it is not the mother tongue of many of the people who speak it outside of Hungary, and the policies of abandonment of non-national languages after World War II. Magyar emigration led to some Hungarian-speaking minorities in the Midwestern US, southern Canada, and the southern tip of Argentina

Official Status

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary; In addition, since Hungary's entry into the European Union in 2004, it is also an official language in the Union. It is also official in three municipalities in Slovenia, in multiple municipalities in Vojvodina, a province in the north of (Serbia) and in southern Slovakia; it is also recognized as a minority in Austria and Croatia. ^{[citation needed]}Following the passing of a law on linguistic minorities in Ukraine in 2012, Hungarian gained official status in two Ukrainian cities, Béregovo and Vinogradov, both in the province of Transcarpathia; after the Europeanist and nationalist revolution of 2014 the Verkhovna Rada repealed this law. Romania has the largest number of speakers outside of Hungary (1,450,000 people, majority in three provinces and in multiple municipalities of Transylvania).

Dialects

The known dialects of Hungarian are Western (west of the Danube), Northern, Southern and Eastern. There are also some other smaller ones; in any case, any of the dialects is understandable by the rest. Many Hungarians, when asked about this, deny the existence of different dialects or accents within Hungary; however, they acknowledge regional differences, such as the use of the article to refer to people in Budapest, or the peculiar pronunciation of the e in the Szeged area. The Hungarians of Erdély (Transylvania) use a variant that the Hungarians of Hungary consider to maintain older forms and vocabulary.

Linguistic description

Classification

Hungarian belongs to the group of Finno-Ugric languages of the Uralic language family, more specifically, within this, to the subgroup of Ugric languages.

This affiliation is widely accepted by linguists, although there are others that claim to relate it to Turkish because of the similarities they have, or to Hunnic; however, most of these alternative theories do not have any linguistic-comparative foundation, therefore they are not accepted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and are considered pseudoscientific. On the other hand, the evidence for the Ugric group as a valid phylogenetic unit within the Uralic languages is weak.

Along with Estonian, Finnish, Maltese, and Basque, it belongs to the group of European languages that are not from the Indo-European language family; it shares with all of them, except Maltese, the typological feature of being an agglutinative language.

Phonetics and phonology

Consonants

Hungarian has 25 consonant phonemes. Although some Hungarian phonemes have a correspondence in Spanish, the same does not happen with many others. Hungarian has some digraphs (eg «sz», «zs», «ty») and diacritics (eg «ű») that do not exist in Spanish, although they represent sounds that do occur in this language (p. eg «cs» = Spanish «ch», «ny» = Spanish «ñ»).

Hungarian spelling does not use caron or any other diacritics like the surrounding Slavic languages. Instead, the letters c, s, z are used alone (/t͡s/, /ʃ/, /z/) or combined in digraphs cs, sz, zs (/t͡ʃ/, /s/, /ʒ/), while y is used only in the digraphs ty, gy, ly, ny as a palatalization mark to write the sounds /c͡ç/, /ɟ͡ʝ/, /j/ (formerly /ʎ/), /ɲ/.

In addition, there is dz and dzs, which are rarely used today. Lastly, consonants can also be long or short: if they are geminate, they are reduplicated («nn», «rr»), except for digraphs, in which only the first consonant is doubled: sz becomes ssz and zs becomes zzs.

Do not use the letters q, w, x, y.

Vowels

Hungarian Vocals

Hungarian currently has 14 vowels. Long vowels are distinguished from short ones by having a single or double accent.

We can see the Hungarian vowels in the following table.

The pronunciation of the a is rounded and posterior /ɒ/ and looks more like an o, while its corresponding long is pronounced /a:/ like the a in Spanish, besides being longer. The e is open and short /ɛ/, and the é is closed and long /e:/. The rest of the vowels are pronounced as in Spanish, except for the ö (short) /ø/, ő (long) /ø:/, the ü (short) /y/, ű (long) /y:/. In addition to their duration, vowels can be classified into two groups: high (light) and low (dark).

Whether they are high or low is determined by the way they are pronounced, with the tongue in front or behind. This classification is very important, since it determines which vowel the added elements have (such as suffixes, infixes, endings, etc.), according to the rules of vowel harmony.

Prosody

The prosodic stress in Hungarian always falls on the first syllable and, taking into account that there are no diphthongs in Hungarian, the stressed vowel in words is always the first one. However, this prosodic accent, as it has no phonological or distinguishing value unlike the Spanish accent, is often not perceived in speech. Especially in the neutral language, which is disseminated by the media, there is a tendency to completely suppress the prosodic accent; consequently all the syllables of the words are heard with the same intensity.

As is well known, Hungarian is an agglutinative language: having to add suffixes raises the problem of which vowel or vowels to do it with, since a suffix can start with a consonant and the root end in another, which makes a link vowel necessary and it is this way of determining which link vowel is used to what is called vowel harmony. Thus, a word made up of low vowels will have a low link vowel, and if it is made up of high vowels, a high one. It may happen that a word is composed of both types of vowels, in which case the casualties generally win.

Examples:

• haz (house) - hazam (my house)
• bajusz (bigote) - bajuszod (your mustache)
• méz (miel) - mézThat's it. (honey)
• viz (water) - vizben (in water)

Vowels used as links are usually a, e, o, ö. With this rule, a good sonority of the language is ensured.

Grammar

Considering the predominantly Indo-European context surrounding the development of Hungarian, it's easy to see why Hungarian has earned a reputation for being difficult as a second language. For example, the Hungarian vocabulary is very foreign to the great classical Indo-European languages, so that although it has a large number of Latin and Greek etymons (obviously for historical reasons), it is difficult for a Spanish or French speaker to memorize. On the other hand, its phonological system presents certain peculiarities such as vowel harmonies that are uncommon in Indo-European languages. To give a rough example, the vowel harmonies can be imagined as the three different conjugations in Spanish, corresponding to the infinitives -ar, -er and -ir, since we never say *we sing or *we live, but we sing and live. Another example of vowel harmony is the pronunciation of plurals in Southeast European Spanish.

The first thing to note is that it is an agglutinative language, which means that words are formed by joining one or more suffixes to the root. These suffixes may well be indicative of the case, possessive, plural, etc. In addition, there is no gender in Hungarian, unlike what happens in Spanish.

The order of the words is not established by fixed rules, but is established by the importance that you want to give to a certain part of the sentence, just like in Spanish. However, as a general trend, the basic order is that of subject, object and verb (SOV).

Hungarian vocabulary is quite extensive and can be expanded since there is the possibility of forming new words by joining nouns as it happens for example in German.

The plural is formed by adding the suffix -k to the noun, with the necessary linking vowel if needed. Also, nouns can be modified by the different cases that Hungarian has (18 in total). Hungarian has 18 cases (esetek). The most common are the nominative, the accusative and the dative; some express location (inside: inessive, on the surface: superessive, near: adhesive), some express placement (from within: elative, from the surface: delative, from a nearby place: ablative, inward: illative, toward the surface: sublative, towards a nearby place: allative); some express other relationships (terminative, esivo-formal, instrumental-comitative, translative, causal-final). There are other cases of restricted uses (locative, esivo-modal, distributive, distributive-temporal, sociative).

The infinitive of verbs is formed with the radical and the suffix -ni. Examples: go - menni, come - jönni, sleep - aludni...

Verbal voices are active and passive. The passive voice is practically not used, although it can be found in ancient literary texts.

Verb moods are limited to indicative, conditional, and imperative, and tenses to present, past, and future, with no further distinctions. Therefore, the phrase én írok can be translated as I write or I am writing. Verbs, in addition to following temporal and vowel harmony rules, have two conjugations: definite and indefinite. The use of one or the other depends on a series of rules that can be summarized in the presence or not of a direct object and that it is defined or not. For example, there can be a direct object, but if it is preceded by the indefinite particle egy (un, una), the indefinite conjugation is used.

Verb conjugations are constant for all verbs except irregular ones, such as lenni –ser /estar, jönni - come or menni - go. Also, irregular verbs have an irregular past tense.

Both in the third person singular and plural, the conjugated form of the verb ser/estar, van and vannak respectively, in the present tense.

Finally, in Hungarian there are verbal prefixes that, attached to the root of the verb, change or qualify its meaning.

Vocabulary

Due to its long history, Hungarian has received many borrowings, with loans from Iranic, Turkic, Slavic, and Western European standing out in chronological order. He has also given several.

• iranic loans: tej (‘leche’), Go (‘castillo’)
• loans of the Ottoman Turk (sixteenth century XVI-XVII(c): egyetem (‘university’), papucs (‘zapatillas’), mecset (‘mezquita’), dzsámi (‘Great Mosque’)
• Latin loans: iskola (‘school’), kollégium (‘major school’), múzeum (‘museum’), kastély (‘castillo’)
• Italian loans: cselló (‘violoncello’), konto (‘current account’)
• German loans: bejgli (Gypsy army species) fat. (‘sing’)
• Slavic loans: kapa (‘azada’), Kazakh (‘guadaña’)
• Spanish loans: gesztenye (‘castana’)

In Spanish there are words of Hungarian origin, for example, coche (from kocsi), húsar (from huszár) or sable (from szablya >).

Writing system

Today, Hungarian is written with the Latin alphabet, with the exception of the accented vowels (á, é, í, ó, ő, ű) or with umlauts (ö, ü). Because ő fonts are sometimes not available, ű is often written ô, û.

Hungarian can be written using the ISO/IEC 8859-2 code page or in Unicode.

Although today it is written with characters from the Latin alphabet, this was not always the case, so that until the Middle Ages Hungarian runes were used to write.^{[citation required]}

Details of a computer keyboard with the Hungarian alphabet in which you can see characters of the language.

Example of text with pronunciation

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Minden emberi lény szabadon születik és egyenlő méltósága és joga van. Az emberek, ésszel és lelkiismerettel bírván, egymással szemben testvéri szellemben kell hogy viseltessenek. (hearing)

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Endowed as they are with reason and conscience, they must behave fraternally towards each other».