Hungarian
is spoken by about 10 million people in Hungary, 1.5 million
in Rumania, and smaller minorities in the former Yugoslavia
and Slovakia. It is one of the Finno-Ugric languages, which
include Finnish, Estonian, and a number of languages spoken
in the Russia. Most of these languages, however, belong to the
Finnic branch of this group, while Hungarian belongs to the
Ugric. The only other existing Ugric languages, and thus the
only other languages to which Hungarian is closely related,
are the remote Ostyak and Vogul languages of Siberia, spoken
in an area more than 2,000 miles from Hungary.
As
may be gathered from these facts, the original Hungarian people
came from Asia, having long lived a nomadic life on the eastern
slopes of the Urals. Forced to migrate westward between the
5th and 9th centuries A.D., they eventually reached the Danube
where they settled in 896. In the more than a thousand years
that have elapsed since that time the Hungarians have become
completely Europeanized, with only their language serving to
reveal their Asian origins.
The
Hungarians call their language Magyar. It is considered extremely
difficult for foreigners to learn, with its vocabulary largely
from Asia and its grammar containing a number of complex features
not to be found in other Western languages. The alphabet, however,
is phonetic, with s pronounced sh (e.g., sör—beer),
c pronounced ts (ceruza—pencil), sz pronounced s (szó—word),
cs pronounced ch (csésze—cup), zs pronounced zh
(zseb—pocket), and gy pronounced dy (nagy—big).
The many vowel sounds in spoken Hungarian are indicated by acute
accents, umlauts, and the unique double acute accent which appears
over o and u (bor— skin, fu—grass). The stress in
Hungarian is always on the first syllable. The most important
English word of Hungarian origin is coach, after the village
of Kocs (remember cs = ch), where coaches were invented and
first used. Others are goulash and paprika.
Hungarian Studies at the University of Kansas
