From WikiLang
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Hungarian |
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| Finno-Ugric | Ugric | Official language in: Hungary , European Union Regional or Minority language in:  Austria ,  Croatia ,  Romania ,  Serbia ,  Slovakia ,  Slovenia ,  Ukraine |
Latin alphabet (Hungarian adaption) |
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This page links to various pages on Hungarian grammar and gives a breif outline of the contents of the pages it links to, and explains the way parts of speech work. Although it serves as an introductory page to Hungarian grammar it is not strictly necessary to read this page in order to understand the other pages.
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Meet Hungarian morphology (magyar morfológia)
Hungarian grammar is the object of considerable fear and disdain on the part of students. Normally it would be doled out in small portions so as not to scare people. However Hungarian grammar is nowhere near as formidable as those of many other languages, and certainly but a fraction of what people make it sound like. Hungarian is said to be one of the hardest languages on earth, probably due to the two underlying rules:
While these are true, and there are very few rules which are not broken, and just as few exceptions without further exceptions, one must realise that nearly all Hungarian words are based on the same paradigm as the other words of their class (i.e. all nouns work the same way and all verbs work the same way) and even those that don't are pretty close. Furthermore, Hungarian is an agglutinative language. That is, it expresses each idea as small independent unit which can be used in conjunction with others. for instance the plural accusative is formed with the plural marker and the accusative marker together, unlike most European languages where it would have its own form, making more work for the student.
An unfortunate by-product of millennia of laziness is that vowels are prone to change or shorten or disappear entirely on occasion, and consonants can mutate to their surroundings. In this regard it is easier to understand a written word than predict the changes it may undergo, but again, there are rules to guide you, and again there are exceptions to confuse you.
This page and associated pages will focus mostly on the morphology of open word classes which are mainly comprised of nouns (except pronouns), (non-auxiliary/modal) verbs, adjectives (except demonstrative adjectives), and adverbs (but not adverbs of time or place). These words are prone to change and even in the course of a generation or less. Words of these classes can be born or become obsolete. All slang words belong to this class. Examples are “house”, “big”, “walk”, and “quickly”.
Vowel Harmony
In order to understand Hungarian morphology one must cover a very important point. Vowel harmony. Speakers of English may not be familiar with the concept of vowels changing to “agree” with other vowels, but in Hungarian some endings have five different forms depending on the vowels in their surroundings, so this is a rather important topic to discuss.
Meet Hungarian nouns (magyar főnevek)
Meet noun declension (főnévragozás)
Meet Hungarian noun stems (magyar főnévtövek)
Hungarian nouns generally do not change their stems but add a series of suffixes which suffer vowel harmony but otherwise remain the same for all nouns. Although the endings are the same for all nouns, there are some exectional categories of nouns who change their stems which are discussed in the following page.
