From WikiLang
 Hungarian pages
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| Introduction · Determiners · Grammar · Lexicon · Nouns · Pronouns · Sounds & Spelling · Verbs |
| Finno-Ugric Languages | |
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| Baltic-Finnic |  Estonian ·  Finnish ·  Ingrian ·  Karelian ·  Livonian ·  Veps ·  Votic ·  Võro
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| Mordvinic |  Erzya · Moksha
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| Permic |  Komi ·  Udmurt
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| Ugric | Hungarian ·  Khanty ·  Mansi
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| Difficulty of Hungarian | |||
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| 5Grammar | 5Lexicon | 2Pronunciation | 2Regularity |
The lay-out of this wiki is designed to allow students to quickly find exhaustive grammatical information. While each page endeavors to be self contained, some pages will link to others which may follow along one trail of thought, and each page or section will give links when prerequisite knoweldge is deemed necessary.
This wiki does not assume the reader has any formal linguistic training or has learnt or studied another language, although it does assume that the reader is a high-level or native speaker of English with at least a basic grasp of English grammar. The reader should be able to emmulate (or at least recognise) the sounds of RP (received pronunciation) English, in which all pronunciation aids are given, and/or be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet which will be used between slashes ( // ).
This wiki is for those who want to learn from a grammatical and analytical perspective as opposed to text-book style immersion. Readers can go through the pages in pretty much whatever order they wish, although it is recommended they start at Hungarian:Sounds_and_Spelling.
An Introduction to the Language
The Hungarian Language is the official language of Hungary (or Republic of Hungary), and has been an official language in all the territories once belonging to the Kingdom of Hungary, which is the land within the Carpathian mountains known to the Romans as Pannonia. It is the language of the Hungarian people who number some ten million in Hungary and about a further four million abroad. Hungarian is spoken world wide by about 15,000,000 people.
Hungarian has been our language for a very long time. It sounds strange to say something so seemingly obvious but it is in fact noteworthy. Languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian (the modern day romance languages with national language status) Have not existed very long. French for instance, arose in France, wherein people used to speak first Latin then vulgar Latin along side Celtic and Iberian languages, most of which are now extinct. As these languages mixed and mingled and moved, they changed, and eventually a new language arose from the mix. The earliest attested documents in a language which we would identify as “French” (specifically “Old French” or by its original name, “langue d'Oïl”) are the Oaths of Strasbourg (842AD) some 1,160 years ago. Italian, similarly, begins its linguistic independence from vulgar Latin with a collection of legal documents dated 960-963AD, over a century after the first “French” documents. It is little wonder then, that Italian and French, who have evolved along side one another, for just over one millennium, and arose from a common ancestor are so similar in grammar, vocabulary, and style. The further one goes back in time, or the closer one travels to the historic borders, the harder it becomes to see where one language ends and the next begins.
The Hungarian People were a nomadic tribe however. Seven in fact. Our language is not “Indo-European” but rather “Uralic” from the Ural mountain range which historically divides Europe from Asia. Having been continually on the move, Hungarians did not linger long enough to absorb much from any one language, nor did we disperse our language and allow it to diverge. Hungarian's closest linguistic relatives are Khanti and Mansi (or as we call them Osztyák and Vogul) spoken in the Khantia-Mansia Okrug in Russia. They comprise the Ob-Ugric branch of the Ugric language sub-family (so named because they are spoken in the expanse between the Ob river, and Ural mountains), while Hungarian stands alone under the Ugric heading. Along side the Ugric languages, Uralic languages are divided further into Finno-permic, Samoyedic, and Yukaghir. The Finno-Permic branch contains the highest number of languages including the only two other languages with national language status: Finnish and Estonian.
It is estimated that Hungarian left the other Ugric languages behind in the 11th century BC (3,000 years ago) and the Finno-permic languages behind far before that. Although linguists can find links between Hungarian and its relatives, to the average speaker those 3,000 years of separation have made even our closest relatives as unintelligible as ancient Inca.
Hungarian is a language quite unlike any other. For the past thousand years Hungary has bordered and spoken Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, and has borrowed from all of them but remains vastly different to any of them. To speak Hungarian is, in a way, to speak a little bit of everything in Europe.
Hungarian today is a language with a rich literary history, with renowned authors and poets many of whose works have not been translated into English, while many which have are very poor translations indeed. Speaking Hungarian opens up a world of literature spanning centuries in time and vast expanses in style and topic. Hungarians have, in their hunger for literature also translated mountains of works by authors from nearly country in Europe much of which has similarly not been translated into English.
