Hungarian phrasebook
Hungarian is a spoken in a linguistic island around Hungary (Hungary, parts of Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia). it is surrounded by Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, and borrows heavily from them (the ö, the ü and the knack for combining two-words-in-one from German, the soft sign from Slavs), but none of which it is related to. Hungarian's distant relatives, both spoken in Europe, are Finnish and Estonian. It shares with them the following properties:
- There is no grammatical gender.
- The first syllable is almost always stressed (except foreign words).
- Vowel and consonant length are distinctive; i.e., the meanings of words change when they are altered.
- Words are marked by case endings ("suffixes") which take on vowels similar to those in the words (e.g., a vonat Budára vagy Pestre közlekedik = the train goes to Buda or Pest). The importance of the similarity of vowels is a common aspect among languages which share a feature known as vowel harmony. The rules of vowel harmony are quite complex, but it basically consists of "front" vowels being placed with "front" vowels and "back" vowels placed with "back".
Remember, ONE difference in pronounciation or even vowel length can lead to misinterpretation.
Pronunciation guide
Vowels
Vowel length is indicated by the acute accent. Words are often distinguished only by vowel length: e.g., kór "disease" vs. kor "age".
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This page was last edited at 19:01, on 3 November 2008 by Anonymous user(s) of Wikitravel. Based on work by Jim Nicholson, David, Jack Dann and Stacy Hall, Wikitravel user(s) Valtteri and Jakupeti, Anonymous user(s) of Wikitravel and others.
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