The Eighth Tribe, 1975 (2. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1975-01-01 / 1. szám
Page Six THE EIGHTH TRIBE January, 1975 ORTHOGRAPHICAL IDENTIFICATION Hungarian is readily identified in written form by its long and short umlauted vowels (ö, ő, ü, Ű), and to a lesser degree, by certain consonant groups (cs, gy, zs, dzs), according to Mario A. Pei. However, Pei does not mention the long cowels in the Hungarian language (i.e., á, é, í, ú) and also neglects to include in his list other consonant groups (such as ly, ny, sz) which are used with as much frequency as are the others he indicates. Pei goes on to say in somewhat encapsulated manner that in spoken form, stress on the first syllable, together with long vowels further on in the word, and the abundance of middle vowel sounds (Ö, ii), as well as the frequent endings in -ak, -ok, -unk, -ek, -ik, and the relative length of Hungarian words, caused by the piling on of suffixes, gives clues to the nature of the language. These clues indicate the importance of syllabiction. COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE ENGLISH AND HUNGARIAN LANGUAGES A. PHONETICS Since the Hungarian language is composed from a phonetic alphabet, its vocabulary can he added to almost immediately when new words are coined into usage in other languages of the contemporary world — i.e., an almost instantaneous pick-up of newlyinvented words is often done for ready and understandable communication; take the following examples for instance: rádió for radio, atom bomba for atom bomb, which can no doubt be seen as easily translatable into English. In fact, this type of thing can be quite advantageous at times and I should like at this point to enter some bits of evidence from this writer’s experience (expressed herewith in the hopes they might prove of mutual interest at least to some small degree) from correspondence received from a Hungarian-horn individual who set down in the contents English-known words as spoken via Hungarian phonetic ciphers — that is, some words in the sentences were written, like refrigirétor (meaning refrigerator) and gud báj (for goodbye), which can be sounded out fairly easily into their English equivalents. Perhaps it also might be well at this time to say that should a person wish to learn the Hungarian language, he need only put together the sounds of Hungarian letters of the alphabet and he or she would already be speaking or reading correctly even though he or she would not know fully well the meanings of the words themselves that he or she is using. For example, the sounds of the single letters of the Hungarian alphabet are respectively invariant with few exceptions; multiples have their own unique sounds also, as for instance the consonant combinations: cs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs, as obtained from the Bogár and Petrovits source book. Further to this, included in Bánhidi’s work are dz, dzs (in the Hungarian alphabet), with mention that q, w, x, y may also occur in foreign words and names. For our information, the total number of sounds in Hungarian are 40 or thereabouts (this compared to 26 letters in the English alphabet whose sounds total more than that). Hungarian vowels are plain, accented, and/or umlauted (e.g., a, á, e, é, i, í, o, ó, ö, ő, u, Ú, ü, Ű) with accompanying modifications in pronunciations — the longer accent marks requiring long sounding-out of the respective vowels, thereby showing that a phonics approach apparently is about the best means of instruction for learning this language. Some examples to elucidate the alteration of sounds would be the following: The Hungarian word orra (translation: nose) contains the short o sound, such as with the English pronunciation of dog; óra (trans.: clock) this word has the long o sound such as in the English word home; örök (trans.: eternal, forever) pronunciation in the English as word and in the French language as boeuf; and, őrök (trans.: guards, such as military or police), pronunciation closest to eu sound in the French word heureuse (happy). Usually absent from Hungarian phonetics are the English sounds of th and w (although these sometimes occur in proper names, etc. in the Hungarian) so that one can notice substitutions for these sounds that Hungarian immigrants use in learning to speak the English language — as with substituting d or t and v sounds, such as in the words this (vocalized by Hungarians as “dis”) and also, with (vocalized “t>/r”). B. PRONOUNS The first person singular in Hungarian is not capitalized (i.e., én) when used in the internal structure of sentences, which of course is not so with the English version (i.e., 1). A much more outstanding difference is evident with the third person singular forms of the English he, she, it; the Hungarians do not distinguish in this instance between the sexes and use one nondiscriminatory form, o, for either person but is not to be considered of neuter gender, since as with the English use of the word it (Hungarian trans.: az), the latter is reserved for reference to pets, animals or
