"Azt mondja, hogy az angyalok a mennyországban magyarul beszélnek"

April 23, 2023 3:37 AM

Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it. Like much else seen in hindsight, my enterprise seems to me now to have been inevitable. In my early years I envied various persons for various reasons, but my strongest envy was always directed at those who could read and write and speak and sing in more than one language.

—The Angel's Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life by Australian writer Gerald Murnane.
posted by Kattullus (16 comments total)

I'm not entirely sure when the essay was originally written and published, but probably 2003.
posted by Kattullus at 3:38 AM on April 23, 2023

Oh, and I should mention that Murnane has never traveled to Hungary, nor indeed has he ever left Australia.
posted by Kattullus at 3:43 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

tl;dr

Okay, not really. But the answer to that question does come rather late in the essay.
posted by Pararrayos at 5:09 AM on April 23, 2023

"...left...at...lights."
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 5:16 AM on April 23, 2023

my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it

Aren’t you just the quirky one!
posted by Phanx at 7:10 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember wanting to learn Magyar (Hungarian) after The Usual Suspects came out, but I didn't stick with it. Láttam a Keyser Söze-t!
posted by goatdog at 8:22 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is a fascinating piece of writing on the mystery of the mother tongue.

It may be an unhelpful comparison, but if an English word or phrase is a pane of clear glass with something called a meaning on its far side, a Hungarian word is a pane of coloured glass. The meaning on the other side of that glass is apparent to me, but I can never be unaware of the rich tints of the glass.
posted by chavenet at 8:43 AM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

My husband and I just finished Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and then started the next K Drama. I'm getting so used to hearing korean (but not understanding) that when I do my weekly shop, starting at Lotte Market, our local korean international supermarket, it just seems comfortable to my ear, despite not understanding a word. WEIRD.
posted by atomicstone at 9:35 AM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Hungarain, and Finnish, are languages most closely related to Korean, or Manchu. The Manchu language is part of the Altaic group, why they don't recognize the connect between Mongolian, Siberian, Dine, Manchu, Finnish, and Hugarian, escapes me.
posted by Oyéah at 11:19 AM on April 23, 2023

I think the latest consensus is that most of those aren't related, at least not in a genetic sense.
posted by gimonca at 12:22 PM on April 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

I enjoyed this very much.

Perhaps it was just the periodic style and the many references to old school Catholicism and racing, but I also got a whiff of Flann O'Brien/Brian O'Nolan...
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:54 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I went to Budapest once for a work conference. On the plane I was talking to a native Hungarian woman who was returning to visit family, so I asked her to teach me a few handy phrases: please, thank you, where's the bathroom, etc. She said "Don't bother. It's not worth the effort and you'll be able to get by in English." I later found out that Hungarian is one of the hardest languages because it's kind of out there by itself on a limb of the linguistic tree.
posted by caryatid at 1:47 PM on April 23, 2023

Interesting link, thanks!
posted by ogorki at 1:59 PM on April 23, 2023

Just putting in a word here for Estonian as part of the same family as Finnish and Hungarian. Estonian and Finnish are fairly closely related to each other, with Hungarian a kind of weird, distant cousin. I studied Estonian back in the '90s and have never been able to spot much similarity with Hungarian when I've clapped eyes on it (whereas with Finnish I can usually pick out a few bits and pieces).

There was one Hungarian studying at Tartu University (in Estonia) at the same time as me, who said he could see connections, but he was a linguistics student, and I think said the similarities were at a pretty deep linguistic level rather than shared vocabulary etc.

I'd never heard the purported Korean link until recently, and this is the 2nd time I've heard it in quick succession. I did once have an Estonian tell me that when I spoke Estonian it sounded "Nice, kind of Japanese!" (I'm from the UK) and I didn't really know what to do with that!

There are also various other Finno-Ugric people and languages dotted around parts of Russia, like the Udmurt and Mari.

Anyway. It's always nice to hear about other people developing a curious interest in a slightly obscure (in their location) language just because it gets its hooks into them, not because they need it.
posted by penguin pie at 3:03 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have never met anyone - with the exception of people raised abroad with Hungarian parents - who could speak Hungarian without having spent some time immersed in the language while living in Hungary or the neighboring countries itself. It is one thing to learn to read it and parse the maddening grammar, another to hear and speak it fluently.

Hungarian is very idiomatic, and the dense grammar leads to constantly coined new usages and a very free word order system quite different from Indo-European languages. For an English speaker its like speaking backwards and sideways. Almost any noun can be used as a verb: smoking a cigarette can be "cigizni" (cigaretting) and if that bothers you go outside for a bit of "levegőzni" (airing). Answering questions is not as simple as saying "yes. "If somebody asks you if you are going out - elmész? - you answer by repeating the preposition "el" (out). And while you can establish location by saying you are "in" a city, most cities have their own specific preposition to indicate you are in them: Budapesten (in Budapest) Pécsett (in Pécs ) Miskolcban (in Miskolc)

The relationship to other Finno-Ugric languages is thousands of years in the past, so besides a few similarities in words like "eye" or "hand" there is no recognizable vocabulary to make conversing with a Finn or and Estonian any easier. Over time the original Ugric root language continued to adapt to new migrations and adopted loanwords, so in one sense Hungarian is a composite language, much like English' relationship to the Germanic branch of Indo-European, although 70% of is vocabulary is from Romance and other languages.

I once had the pleasure of chaperoning a group of Khanty women who were in Budapest as part of a folklore symposium on a shopping trip. The Khanty are a small Siberian ethnic group whose language is closest to old Hungarian, but in no way intelligible to it. I speak no Russian so we couldn't use that language, but the women exploded in giggles discovering that our word for "ass" has not changed in three thousand years.
posted by zaelic at 10:04 PM on April 23, 2023 [12 favorites]

Hungarain, and Finnish, are languages most closely related to Korean, or Manchu. The Manchu language is part of the Altaic group, why they don't recognize the connect between Mongolian, Siberian, Dine, Manchu, Finnish, and Hugarian, escapes me.

The existence of the Altaic group (as noted by gimonca) is disputed and not currently mainstream. I don't think that Finno-Ugric languages were ever included in Altaic either (and apparently the wider Finno-Ugric language family is also disputed although I think consensus is still on the side of it existing in that case, just a dispute over how to include Samoyedic). This is also as zaelic points out, a very old and remote linguistic relationship that is of no use in learning or understanding.
posted by atrazine at 2:57 AM on April 26, 2023 [1 favorite]