#agglutination

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Part 2. Agglutination (aka why do we have so many noun cases) and vowel harmony

(I’m not sure if I have to explain this, but just to be sure: “a” and “az” are the definite articles in Hungarian. It’s “a”, if the word starts with a consonant and “az”, if it starts with a vowel. The indefinite article is “egy” (lit. “one”).)

If you have ever looked up Hungarian on wikipedia, you probably know that Hungarian has 18 noun cases. That’s true. The reason for their existence is that Hungarian does not have prepositions at all. We have a couple of postpositions, which work in a similar way, except for the fact that they come after the noun.

For example:

under the table – az asztal alatt

next to the bed – az ágy mellett

But to express the majority of things that English would use prepositions for, we use noun cases.

For example:

in the lake – a tóban

in the water – a vízben

And if you’re wondering why one ends in -ban and the other in -ben, well that’s called vowel harmony and it’s very important in Hungarian. The basic idea is that most suffixes have at least 2 (sometimes 3, very rarely more) different forms, and only one goes with a certain word. Based on what vowels they contain, we can distinguish

a. words, that only contain front vowels, which are e, é, i, í, ö, ő, ü and ű.

b. words, that only contain back vowels, which are a, á, o, ó, u and ú.

c. words that contain both and therefore are mixed.

If you look at the examples, you can see that the word “tó” contains a single back vowel, while the word “víz” contains a front one. Therefore, the adequate ending is the one that has the same kind of vowel in it.

For mixed words, we typically use the “back” endings, for example: in the car – a kocsiban. However, if it’s a compound word, and the second word only has front vowels, then we use the “front” ending. For example: in the computer room – a számítógépteremben. (Computer is számítógép (lit. calculating machine) and terem is one of the words for room.)

If a certain ending has more than 2 forms, then you also have to consider whether the vowels in your word are rounded or not. For example, the English preposition “on” has three equivalents in Hungarian: -on/-en/-ön.

“-on” is used for all back words, such as “asztal”, which I’ve already mentioned, therefore on the table = az asztalon.

“-en” is used for all front words, where the last vowel is unrounded, such as “jég”, which means “ice.” On the ice = a jégen.

“-ön” is used for all front words, where the last vowel is rounded, such as “föld”, which can either simply mean “ground” or if capitalized, “Earth”.  On Earth = a Földön.

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