I’m curious about the effect of the diacritical mark in Hungarian names like “Erdős” and “Erdő”?
Like in German or “eu” in French. Think trying to say an “eh” with rounded lips as if saying “oo.”
ETA: oh, wait, it’s the long one you’re asking about. Just pronounce it longer. Same sound, different length.
To complement what @pulykamell said, you’re basically combining two different diacritics here. One are the umlaut dots that turn the o into an ö. That will result in the same pronunciation that the ö has in, for instance, German or Turkish, rendered approximately by “eu”. The other diacritic is the accent aigu placed one top of a vowel (e becoming é). In Hungarian, that simply increases the length of the vowel. In the case of ö, that diacritic takes the form of turning both dots of the umlaut into accents aigus.
The Hungarian alphabet has 44 different letters, of which four are variations on the Latin letter O. This is unlike French, for example, where e, é, and è are all considered to be one letter. In Hungarian,
[short] O is pronounced /o/, like French eau
acute-O, Ó, is the long version of O, /oː/, like the above but longer
O-umlaut, Ö, is pronounced with rounded lips, /ø/, like the vowel in French peu
double-acute O, Ő, is the long version of Ö, /ø:/, like the above but longer
In Hungarian, there are likewise four letters that are variations of the Latin letter U (U, Ú, Ü, and Ű), but only two each derived from Latin A, E, and I (A, Á; E, É; I, Í). The vowel Y has only one form but occurs only in loanwords. Confusingly, the Y also occurs as the second element of consonant digraph letters like GY, which is considered to be one letter, as are TY, NY, and LY.
When my Hungarian colleague said Erdös (I know that’s not the correct accent), it always seemed to me to have a faint r sound. I would estimate it was something like the first syllable of Dershowitz, but with a fainter r.
How to pronounce [ø] - Here you go: Close-mid front rounded vowel - Wikipedia - It has an audio file.
[r] has nothing to do with it.
Thanks for the replies, everyone.
That’s generally true, but not for the specific example you are using. In Hungarian the letter ⟨e⟩ is pronounced /ɛ/ (as in the English “bet”) whereas ⟨é⟩ is /e/ (similar to English “bait”, but without the glide). In this case, the vowel quality changes, but not the length.
Same with the a and á — they are two different sounds, not just differing by length. /ɒ/
vs /aː/