August 19, 2002

12:53 PM

KEKeKEKe"Possession of blue objects."
Visual poetry diamond of the Hungarian language - I'd love a pronuciation guide. Have you a favorite lexical chunk?
posted by dorcas (10 comments total)

I don't get it.
This is the visual image of the agglutanating Hungarian language.
Is that even a word?
posted by ColdChef at 12:58 PM on August 19, 2002

ag-glu-ti-nate :

Linguistics. To form (words) by combining words or words and word elements.
ummm... the coder here prefers concatenate...
posted by dorcas at 1:05 PM on August 19, 2002

Ah. Thank you. Now, what's a lexical chunk?
posted by ColdChef at 1:12 PM on August 19, 2002

Something like "Okay, oh no! yo, yoko ono!" but it would take me all day to turn it into a nifty little table like that. Neat!
posted by DenOfSizer at 1:19 PM on August 19, 2002

A lexical chunk. A different kind of Chunk.
posted by MUD at 5:11 PM on August 19, 2002

My friend's father is a Hungarian immigrant (left during the 1956 uprising), I'll have to run this by him when we're bottling this weekend at their winery. I'll have to put up with him getting all sotted up and yowling Hungarian love songs to his wife anyway, might as well listen to him read this!
posted by RevGreg at 6:25 PM on August 19, 2002

In Czech, there's a tongue twister with no vowels that means something like "stick your finger through your neck": Strc prst skrz krk.
posted by muppetboy at 6:55 PM on August 19, 2002

It's like saying

BLUEsBLUEs.

So?
posted by neu at 7:15 PM on August 19, 2002

on a mildly related note, i really like the catalan saying for "i'm hungry". it's tinc fam. i think the word "tinc" sounds a lot nicer than "i have", and english would sound a lot prettier when people were yammering on about themselves.
posted by mawlymawnster at 2:14 AM on August 20, 2002

Hungarians love punning and poetry. Get three of them together and they will start blurting out dozens of similar language games. Their jokes are hilarious, but virtually untranslateable. Being a virtual language isolate in Europe (no- Finnish isn't that close) makes Magyars extremely language conscious (but still stubbornly monolingual...)
posted by zaelic at 2:36 AM on August 20, 2002