Fun with Hungarian

To understand Hungarians, you’d do well to first understand their language. Not like understand understand it—like speak it—but understand its idiosyncrasies.¹ And it is indeed idiosyncratic.²

To start with, it’s not even remotely related to the Slavic, Romance, or Germanic languages that surround it in Central Europe. That surprises a lot of people, as if they just learned that the family Labradoodle, Waggleton P McFlufferton, is in fact a rare type of Tibetan yak.

The consensus is that Hungarian started from somewhere east of the Ural Mountains. Which is really, really far away and people use different alphabets over there so it’s scientifically impossible to figure it all out. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, classifies Hungarian as a Category IV language for English speakers—meaning it should take about 1,100 classroom hours to reach professional fluency. That puts it in the same class as Russian and Hindi. Not quite Mandarin-level panic. But close enough to make you reconsider moving to Budapest anytime soon.

How did Hungarian end up in Europe? “Nobody know who they were or what they were doing,” to quote Nigel Tufnel.³ Scholars argue about the specifics, but generally agree that they just rode in on their fancy horses in their fancy warlord outfits one day, made camp, and never, ever left. Like peacocks strutting around in a field of pheasants.⁴

“Hungarian is like an alien language that landed in a spaceship.”

—Eddie Izzard

What that really means is that no matter what language you speak, Hungarian is a whole different animal. To start with, they have 44 letters.⁵ And 14 of them are vowels. Now before you have a fit and fall right in it, understand that there’s a method to their madness. See, Hungarian is one of the few truly phonetic languages in the world. Imagine a world where every word was as easy to read as "cat" or "dog." There are exactly zero curveballs in Hungarian like “tough,” “bough,” “though,” and “through”—what you see is what you get.

There’s more good news. Tenses. Yep, the language element in English responsible for more headaches than cheap champagne. Present progressive, past pluperfect, future perfect continuous? It’s enough to drive you mad. At least, we console ourselves, it’s not as bad as Spanish. Hungarians took one look at that hot mess and said, “No thank you.” They prance around with just three tenses. There's no worrying about whether you're going somewhere tomorrow, or you went yesterday before you ate, or you were reading while you rode the bus to get there. Nope. You just pick a simple past, present, or future tense, slap it on, and voilá!—you're speaking Hungarian.

And while you have to conjugate verbs for present and past, for the future tense you just stick in a little “will” word and use the infinitive. Oh. My. Lord. Using the future tense is so ludicrously easy I use it all the time. I mean, everyone thinks that I never do anything today but that I always have big plans to do things tomorrow. But being considered a slothful dreamer is a small price to pay.

“Hungarian is a language that even the devil respects.”

—Mark Twain

Another simplification—pronouns. English has “he,” “she,” “it,” and “they.” The Hungarians felt that too complicated, so they just use “it” (or “ő”), which is great for efficiency, but not so great for romantic poetry.⁶

Now, if I’m being honest, those are the only easy things about Hungarian. First off, it’s an agglutinative language, which means words can and do get pretty long. The longest is “megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért.” Sure, you can say it (because, and say it with me, “Hungarian is a perfectly phonetic language!”) but you’ll never use it. Well, unless you need to say, “for your [plural] continued attempts at desecrating it.”

There’s also some to-do around the use of direct and indirect verb conjugations. Meaning it matters whether you read a book or you read that book, or if you’d like a donut or you’d like that donut. Oh and you have to change a word based on whether it’s the subject or the object of the sentence. And yes, the word order moves around too. Because Hungarian marks grammatical relationships directly on the verb and noun endings, it doesn’t need fixed word order to preserve meaning.

Which means that instead of “subject-verb-object” like in English, Hungarian sentences can be, well, anything. In English I might say, “Brenda punched Dwayne right in the face.” But in Hungarian, it all depends:

Is it important that Brenda did the punching? Then maybe say it the same way.

Is it important that it was Dwayne’s face that got punched instead of, say, his throat? Then you might say, “It was the face belonging to Dwayne Brenda punched.”

Is it important that it was Dwayne on the receiving end of the punch instead of, say, Dwight? Then you might say, “Dwayne’s face was punched by Brenda.”

Is it important that it was a punch instead of, say, a don’t-be-fresh slap? Then you might say, “Punching is what Brenda did to Dwayne’s face.”

But whatever you say, you can be sure Dwayne totally deserved it.

“Hungarian is a language that is so difficult that even Hungarians can’t speak it properly.”

—Frigyes Karinthy

Hungarian can also be a bit difficult when it comes to its absolute precision around location. They use suffixes (See “agglutinative” above) to replace our prepositions. And they use a lot. There’s not just “in,” there’s into, inside, out of, onto, on, from on…the list goes on. Hungarian even distinguishes between being “in” something versus being “inside and moving further toward the interior of” something. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a GPS that refuses to be vague in its directions. This obsession with motion and direction makes their curses epic. “You want me to insert a what directly into my where?!?” It’s the sense of active motion that makes it really hit home.

Hungarian doesn’t so much stretch language as refuse to participate in the usual European group project. It does its own thing—calmly, confidently, and occasionally at great length. And because you can stack meaning onto a word like architectural additions, simple sentences start to feel engineered rather than assembled. Not poetic exactly. But precise.

To learn Hungarian, then, is not merely to learn a new way of speaking. It is to accept that meaning doesn’t have to line up the way you’re used to. It’s not mystical. It’s structural. All wrapped up in 42 (sorry, 44) phonetic letters.

So here's to Hungarian, the peacock of languages.