Intro to Hungarian
The Hungarian language (magyar nyelv, [ˈmɒɟɒr ɲɛlv], is the official language of Hungary and is spoken in several surrounding countries and among diaspora communities, especially in North America. It is one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. As any other language on this site, Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family. Being on the Ugric branch, its closest relatives are Mansi and Khanty.
History Currently mainstream linguistics agree that the Hungarian tribes diverged from the other Ugric tribes around the 1st millenium BC. The movement of the proto-Hungarian tribes is fairly trackable, mainly thanks to linguistics. The first and oldest layer of loanwords were borrowed from neighbouring also semi-nomadic Iranian tribes. Centuries later, the Ugric speaking proto-Hungarians formed a tribal alliance with different Turkic speaking populations, the name of this alliance was on-ogur (meaning ten arrows in Oghur Turkic). This word became the source of the exonym of Hungarians used generally by Europeans (German: Ungarn, Czech: Uhorsko). The endonym (a name used by Hungarians) is magyar [ˈmɒɟɒr], which originally meant something like “speaking person”. The word magyar shares an etymology with the word Mansi. Hungarians broke away from the On-ogur alliance around the 6th century AD, and started moving West from the Volga area. Following the northern shore of the Black Sea, they arrived to the Carpathian Basin in 896, and conquered the land relatively quickly. The language adapted many loanwords from the surrounding Slavic and Germanic populations, but these languages didn’t really influence the phonology or grammar of the language.
Hungarian (even though spoken by the elite of the Hungarian Kingdom) only served as an official language after 1867, before that, the language of documents and any administration was Latin.
Literature
The earliest and longest written text in Hungarian is actually a fragment from the Establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany from the 11th century that reads “feheruuaru rea meneh hodu utu rea” (Fehérvárra menő hadiútra, ‘onto the military road leading to Fehérvár’). Most of the text is in Latin, like the majority of the relics from this era – hardly anything survived the years from vernacular literature. In 1541, János Sylvester translated the New Testament of the Bible with a foreword written in hexameters, which was the first of its kind in Hungarian. In 1590, the whole Bible was translated to Hungarian by Gáspár Károli (called Vizsolyi Biblia, Bible of Vizsoly, after the town where it was first published).
During this time, the first encyclopaedia, Magyar encyclopaedia (‘Hungarian encyclopaedia’, 1655, Utrecht) was composed by János Apáczai Csere, and many attempts were made to have a comprehensive grammar book of the language, for foreigners, written in Latin.
The birth of modern literature was in the late 18th century, after the language reform. Its content mostly originate from Vienna, as Empress Maria Theresa formed her Hungarian guard in her court in Vienna. They were inspired by French Enlightenment, and drifted away from what Hungary was at the time, trying to compare it to Western Europe. With that, a longing for West European ideas has begun.
In the early 20th century, a periodical called Nyugat (West) was born, most of its writers and authors endorsed the French and the English among a variety of other Western European countries and their sentiment.
After World War II and its enormous destruction in Europe, the Soviet oppression in Hungary didn’t leave enough room to breathe for poets, thus they had to share their traumas through complex metaphors to pass censorship.
In the 21st century Hungary, slam poetry joined the literature forces, and monthly slam poetry nights are held across the country, addressing modern day issues.
Some features of Hungarian
Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means affixes get “glued” to word stems to change the words’ grammatical function. In Hungarian, these are mainly suffixes. These suffixes have 1-3 forms, depending on the case, to create vowel harmony between the morphemes, and the choice is made by observing the vowel in the head word.
Although Hungarian is said to have a free word order, different word orders are not interchangeable, as there can be a shift in meaning. However, the neutral word order is subject-object-verb (SOV).
