#study hungarian

Tu me manques.

It seems this concept is difficult for English-speakers to grasp (unless they speak another language that has a similar construction). So English-speakers will usually try to say, "Je te manque". But that means, "You miss me." A little presumptuous!

Here's how I explain it:

Imagine you are pie and all the people you love make you whole. When one of the people you love is not there, it's like a piece of the pie is cut out. You are no longer whole. There's a piece missing from the pie. So you say to your piece of pie loved one, "you are missing from me".

Hungarians use a similar construction. They also don't say, "I miss you", but more like, "You are missing to me".

Hiányzol nekem.

Do you know any other languages that have this way of expressing that someone's absence is felt?

https://clips.twitch.tv/BoredPoorBobaTooSpicy-NZCggkiC-INcJoCQ

Why did the word mocorog pop into my head and what English word could I have used instead? I realized that I'm not entirely sure what the word mocorog means, but as far as I know, it has the idea of sort of making small movements and shuffling around. To me it's sort of onomatopoeic, the word itself sounds like the little movements it describes.

This online dictionary translates it as move, stir. Yes, ok, that works. But mocorog just sounds more like what it means, lol. Move is far too broad of a term, and does anyone besides the Queen really use the word stir to mean move in every day life? (I mean, even the Queen doesn't use it anymore but you know what I mean.)

This link shows snippets of the word mocorog in action. As you can see, how you translate it into English depends on context (I didn't know it could describe jittery, excited movements).

Stir is really the best translation. We need to bring stir back into usage. I'll start the petition.

For those that like to thoroughly study new vocabulary, the infinitive of mocorog is mocorogni (to move/to stir).

Here's how to conjugate it for the present tense:

Én mocorgok

Te mocorogsz

Ő/Ez/Az mocorog

Mi mocorgunk

Ti mocorogtok

Ők/Ezek/Azok mocorognak

I don't have time at the moment to research this, but I suspect mocorog is derived from the word mozog (move). Hungarian likes to make diminutive words from existing words. Mozogni means to move, and mocorogni means to move but in a smaller way. See how that works? Perhaps I'll come up with other examples of this phenomenon in a future post.