# Hungarian is a crazy difficult language!!!! **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 14, 2019, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764 "2019-01-14T22:27:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/21 "2019-01-15T19:19:30Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > I wouldn’t call it “tense,” as it has nothing to do with time. Yes, I and shouldn’t have either. Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/22 "2019-01-15T19:24:05Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > Yes, I and shouldn’t have either. Thank you. Actually, maybe **Johanna** can help us with the term for this, assuming there is one. It’s not verb tense, aspect, or mood. Is it simply “definiteness” or something like that? ---
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/23 "2019-01-15T21:08:26Z")
> [@Ashtura](#): > > I don’t think the tense changes whther you’re quoting Morris or not. I mean, if Morris says “I have to take” (tenho que lavar), that’s different than “he has to take” (tem que levar), but that’s how most romance languages work and is not unusual at all. “Have” (ter) is a special verb of maybe a dozen common ones or so that doesn’t conjugate the same as most verbs however, same with “go”, “be”, “know”, etc. Are you 100% certain nothing exists in Portuguese (Lisbon, not Brazilian) that doesn’t exist in English that influences the verb form when you are quoting someone? Because if you are fluent, I’ll believe you - I never learned Portuguese well and it’s been 20 years since I have spoken what little I knew. So I could be wrong. But I am really, really sure that this, or something very like it, was an issue, because I enjoyed marveling about it. (I like learning about how different languages are structured, so even though I was a poor student I was delighted to learn about all the tenses and other grammatical stuff.) I did try to Google this and came up empty, but it’s not an easy thing to check on. It did remind me that there are “moods” and well as “tenses” so maybe this has something to do with the former. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/24 "2019-01-15T21:42:41Z")
Tense, as pulykamell pointed out is how a verb marks time. “I run” and “I ran” demonstrate two different tenses. Mood marks the way an idea is expressed. So “I run” is in the indicative mood as it shows only that I engage in the activity of running while “Run!” is in the imperative mood and expresses a command. I don’t know portuguese and I’m not immediately familiar with a ‘quote’ inflection. It sounds vaguely like an [evidential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality) but the use of a particular evidential implies a certain level of trust in the reported statement while it sounds like your quote inflection is simply showing that the statement is not original to the current speaker without assessing its veracity. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/25 "2019-01-15T21:58:47Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > Actually, maybe **Johanna** can help us with the term for this, assuming there is one. It’s not verb tense, aspect, or mood. Is it simply “definiteness” or something like that? That’s what I’d call it. Conjugation for definiteness. ---
**Author:** ![Lamoral](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lamoral/32/16078_2.png) [@Lamoral](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamoral)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/26 "2019-01-15T22:02:07Z")
Why are Hungarian and Finnish related anyway? The two countries are nowhere near each other. How did it come to be that those two countries, so far apart, share a linguistic heritage to be found _nowhere_ else in Europe? ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/27 "2019-01-15T22:16:49Z")
My interest in Hungarian goes back to my piano lessons when I was 16. My teacher had me learn Book 5 of _Mikrokosmos_ by Béla Bartók. Then I went on to Book 6, the most advanced pieces. Bartók has been my favorite composer ever since. Book 5 includes “New Hungarian Folk Song,” the only piece in _Mikrokosmos_ with lyrics and a vocal staff. I memorized it in Hungarian and sang it to my piano accompaniment. In college I was subscribed to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where I enjoyed the Varkela stories by Susan C. Petrey, set in the steppes. Her bio said she was studying Turkic languages. I found that especially fascinating. Some years later I attended a conference in İstanbul, studying a Turkish grammar on the flight over there, and walking around the city speaking Turkish with everyone. I picked it up the knack for it very quickly. When I read about Marc Okrand’s success in crafting conlangs I thought “Huh, I can do that,” and made my conlang by blending _a posteriori_ Uralic and Altaic languages. From that point on I began studying Hungarian, Finnish, and Mongolian in earnest. Prior exposure to Turkish helped with the others, thanks to their shared typologies. Vowel harmony is one of those shared typologies. It helps a lot in getting the feel of using a language. It’s quite intuitive, because you can feel for yourself if a vowel is sounded in the front or back of your mouth. The rhythm of Finnish and Hungarian, as rat avatar suggested, is also a great way to get the feel for it. The stress accent is universally on the first syllable. This lends itself to trochaic meter: many of you have probably heard how Longfellow made _The Song of Hiawatha_ in imitation of the Kalevala. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/28 "2019-01-15T22:40:21Z")
> [@Lamoral](#): > > Why are Hungarian and Finnish related anyway? The two countries are nowhere near each other. How did it come to be that those two countries, so far apart, share a linguistic heritage to be found _nowhere_ else in Europe? They are considered related because core words in both languages can be traced back to the same root word. I’m not familiar with any proposed paths the finno-ugric languages may have taken but I assume that at some point in the distant past a group of people was divided and one segment of the population ended up in Finland and the other in Hungary. Once they lost contact with each other and gained contact with neighbors who spoke different languages, their shared language developed in different ways and now look pretty dissimilar, just as English and Sanskrit don’t really look all that much alike but under the hood you can still see the proto-Indo-European that birthed both languages. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/29 "2019-01-15T22:49:36Z")
Estonian is also closely related to Finnish. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/30 "2019-01-15T22:57:11Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > The rhythm of Finnish and Hungarian, as rat avatar suggested, is also a great way to get the feel for it. I remember a couple years into my stint in Budapest covering a Nokia conference for the local business paper; it was just so disconcerting to me hearing Finnish being spoken. To me, who, at that time was familiar enough with Hungarian to understand the general gist of sentences being spoken, it sounded very much like Hungarian to my ears in terms of the rhythm and sound of the language, but with all the words being inscrutable. It felt to me like experiencing Hungarian again for the first time. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2019, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/31 "2019-01-15T23:06:07Z")
_oops, duplicate_ ---
**Author:** ![Eva\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/32 "2019-01-16T01:35:48Z")
I’ve never tried to learn Hungarian, but a childhood friend of mine is a giant math genius. His father died during his freshman year of college, and he got really depressed and dropped out and moved to Budapest to study with some Hungarian mathematician (as one does). Although he’d had a hard time with high school French, he convinced himself that a 6-week intensive Hungarian course would give him enough language skills to take advanced math classes. Fast-forward 30+ years: he has a Hungarian wife and three half-Hungarian kids. I don’t know how fluent he is these days (he has been living in Switzerland for years), but it definitely took him longer than 6 weeks to become functional in Hungarian! ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/33 "2019-01-16T01:53:28Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > They are considered related because core words in both languages can be traced back to the same root word. I’m not familiar with any proposed paths the finno-ugric languages may have taken but I assume that at some point in the distant past a group of people was divided and one segment of the population ended up in Finland and the other in Hungary. Once they lost contact with each other and gained contact with neighbors who spoke different languages, their shared language developed in different ways and now look pretty dissimilar, just as English and Sanskrit don’t really look all that much alike but under the hood you can still see the proto-Indo-European that birthed both languages. [Proto-Uralic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Uralic_language) has been reconstructed and you can trace the [roots](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Proto-Uralic_lemmas) of many words to both Hungarian and Finnish. Uralic has two main branches: Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic. The original homeland (_Urheimat_) of the Uralic languages was in fact the Ural Mountains. The best I can understand it: Proto-Samoyedic arose on the eastern slopes of the Urals and then the Samoyedic languages mainly dispersed eastward. Samoyedic was the first branch to split off. Proto-Finnic arose on the western slopes of the Urals and then the Finnic languages dispersed westward. Proto-Ugric arose right in the middle of the southern Urals (where the mountains are low or a plateau) and then the Ugric languages split up: the speakers of Proto-Ob-Ugric moved east and north into Siberia. The speakers of proto-Hungarian moved southeast at first, into the steppes of northern Kazakhstan. The early Magyars allied with a confederation of Turkic tribes on the steppes. After that they gradually moved westward, first settling by the Caspian, then by the Black Sea, and finally settling in the westernmost end of the great Eurasian steppes: the Danubian Plain, formerly Pannonia, soon to be named Hungary. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/34 "2019-01-16T01:57:49Z")
The proto-Ugric \*Urheimat \*in the southern Urals was still remembered in the Middle Ages as the homeland of the early Magyars. In fact, it was called _Magna Hungaria_. Nowadays the area is named Bashkortostan and is inhabited by Turkic-speaking people. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/35 "2019-01-16T12:03:51Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > Weird? They even came up with a new way to spell “SH” as in Saoirse Ronan and Aisling Bea. I figured the people who first wrote down Irish lacked experience with letters and how they work, but I see that they had a spelling reform in 1948 so now they’re just messing with us. Irish has 60 sounds (compared to 40 in English) and only 20 letters so everything does double-duty. That said, there actually are spelling rules that enable a person to figure out pronunciation. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 12:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/36 "2019-01-16T12:44:53Z")
Irish and Polish orthographies aren’t as crazy as they first appear. Polish, especially, has very regular pronunciation rules that are well expressed by its orthography. Irish is very much improved since the reform (if you want to know how crazy it used to look, see Scots Gaelic), and its pronunciation is fairly predictable from spelling once you learn the rules, probably even better than English, but it still has a lot of irregularities. Hungarian and Finnish have two of the best orthographies in Europe for their sounds. Finnish is at least as good as Spanish: a perfect one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound. Hungarian is very regular too, once you learn the digraphs and trigraph: ch, cs, dzs, gy, ny, sz, ty, zs all stand for single phonemes. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/37 "2019-01-16T12:45:35Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > Weird? They even came up with a new way to spell “SH” as in Saoirse Ronan and Aisling Bea. I figured the people who first wrote down Irish lacked experience with letters and how they work, but I see that they had a spelling reform in 1948 so now they’re just messing with us. Funny enough, what we call an “sh” sound in English is spelled like a plain _s_ in Hungarian. What’s that you ask? How do they spell a plain"s" sound, then? With an _sz_, of course! ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/38 "2019-01-16T14:03:12Z")
> [@rat\_avatar](#): > > I should call out that Finnish has very clear and hard rules that Hungarian may not, but if you are hitting a wall in learning the language take a step back and spend some time training your ear. Perhaps spelling isn’t fully phonetic in Hungarian but people complain about Finnish being hard yet kindergarteners are expected to have a firm grasp on reading before they even arrive at school. That would never happen for English. Finnish was my uncle José Mari’s favorite language, mainly because the spelling was so absolutely perfect; he claimed the grammar was also very easy. I once read a children’s book in Finnish without really understanding any individual words, just the gist of it from the pictures, and according to the Finnish woman to whose child I’d been reading I only needed to correct how I treated double letters (I hadn’t learned about that from my uncle). But then, uncle spoke several dialects of Basque and half a dozen Indo-European languages by the time he started on his Finnish: he already had the mental setup necessary for “don’t expect any ‘friends’ between the vocabulary in this language and those you already know”. > [@Johanna](#): > > Finnish is at least as good as Spanish Uncle said Finnish was better. Spanish has some cases where the same sound can have multiple spellings (/b/ can be written “b” or “v” in most dialects), some where different sounds can have the same spelling (mainly because our spelling actually works at the syllable level and not the phoneme level: looking at the vowel tells you the sound of the consonant), a few confusing letters (“x” is the worst one) and that mute “h”. ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/39 "2019-01-16T14:57:39Z")
> [@Lamoral](#): > > Why are Hungarian and Finnish related anyway? The two countries are nowhere near each other. How did it come to be that those two countries, so far apart, share a linguistic heritage to be found _nowhere_ else in Europe? It makes more sense if you look at the [geographic distribution](http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Uralic_files/Uralic%20languages%20map.jpg) of the whole family. It spans an arc around Nothern Eurasia. Hungarian is indeed the outlier but then, [hungarian migrations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_prehistory#Early_westward_migrations_(before_600_AD_%E2%80%93_c._750_or_830_AD)) is more or less clear. Another family whose expansion is mind-boggling is[Austronesian](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Austronesian_family.png/1280px-Austronesian_family.png) : from Hawai’i to Africa. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2019, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764/40 "2019-01-16T21:03:43Z")
> [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](#): > > It makes more sense if you look at the [geographic distribution](http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Uralic_files/Uralic%20languages%20map.jpg) of the whole family. It spans an arc around Nothern Eurasia. Hungarian is indeed the outlier but then, [hungarian migrations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_prehistory#Early_westward_migrations_(before_600_AD_%E2%80%93_c._750_or_830_AD)) is more or less clear. On the Uralic map, Komi-Permyak is the closest to where Proto-Uralic first arose. Picture Proto-Finnic just to the northwest of there, Proto-Samoyedic just to the northeast, and Proto-Ugric just to its south. Volgaic, Permic, and Saamic were all branches of Finnic, the way I learned it when young. Though lately it looks like more distance is posited between those groups and Baltic Finnic. They’re all formed into separate branches of Finno-Ugric. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hungarian-is-a-crazy-difficult-language/827764.md?page=3)