Hungarian
Alternative name(s): Ungarisch (de), hongrois (fr), Magyar (hu), Hongaars (nl), ungerska (sv)
Language family: Uralic
Language Group: Finnish-Ugrian
Geographical use: Hungary, Romania (western Transsylvania) and in the south of Slovakia
Information: Hungarian is most closely
related to Khanti and Manshi, while Finnish
and Estonian are much more distantly related.
Hungarian has 15 million speakers, of which 4 million live outside of
Hungary.
The language has a rich system of vowels
and consonants. There are a total of 25 consonants, which can be determinde
according to the manner and the place of articulation, voicing and quantity.
Hungarian has 9 well defined vowels:
a as in "on"
a' as in "by"
e as in "ember" (by the way, this means "man" in Hu.)
e' as in "alien" ( this is "live" in Hu. as in "long
live")
i as in "in" (can be short or long, depending on the word)
o as in "old"( s. or l. as above)
o: as in "earl" (two points on top, short, two ',long)
u as "oo" (short, with u' long)
u: as in "ubermensch" in the german word (also s. or l.)
The language is basically agglunative. This means that grammatical relations are expressed by means of suffixes and affixes. The noun has about 25 cases, and the verb is inflected to a considerable degree. Hungarian has a definite article and an indefinite article, both of which are lacking in the related languages of Finnish and Turkish.
Hungarian does not have a passive voice (even though this can be found in old literary texts), nor does it have any gender. The pronunciation on the other hand is very easy, especially compared with neighbouring languages like Czech, German and Russian. The stress always falls on the first syllable of the word. The other syllables are pronounced distinctly, unlike other languages where these syllables are sometimes swallowed.
