I’m here at work, not really doing much of anything as normal when I found myself searching for the hardest languages to learn. I discovered that Hungarian is considered on of the most difficult languages to learn. If you don’t know (which I’m sure you don’t) I am about 1/2 Hungarian and 1/2 Slovakian and am only about the 3rd or 4th generation to be born in America. I did a little research on the language and have discovered this:
It’s called Magyar. (I think pronounced mah-duar)
It’s spoken by approximately 14.5 million people.
It’s unique in it is not part of Indo-Euopean languages such as German, English, and Portuguese, but part of the Ugrian group of the Finno-Ugrian.
It has similar grammar structure to Finnish, but that is about where the relationship ends.
We don’t have ancestors in Europe, but more are the Kazahs. I don’t know from where they hail, but I have also found that we inhabited the Carpathian Basin for a while and have several words borrowed from Turkish surprisingly. I think we were inhabited by Turkey for about 150 years which would explain the common words from both languages. During Austro-Hungarian Monarchy lots of German words were borrowed and melted into the language, but are now considered undesirable to use.
Magyar used to have a different character set before 1000 AD , but was destroyed by the first christian king, saint Stephen for use of the current one. Below is a picture of the old script.
I has a unique alphabet which I have shown here.
It has different pronunciation than English so it looks different than said.
It’s hard to grasp how many words there are in Magyar because there is always new ones being invented by compounding words.
No genders in Magyar.
There are many ways to say a sentence, it is not fixed like English. It all depends on importance of words.
Here are some simple words:
yes = igen
no/not = nem
Hi (for one person) = Szia (si-ah)
Hi (for more than one person) = Sziasztok (si-ahstahk)
Thank you! = Köszönöm! (ker-ser-nerm)
So, that’s some basics of the crazy language of my ancestors. I would like to learn it someday actually, but after I have mastered the complexities of Japanese. Yeah sorry this entry was kind of way out of left field and I don’t know if you guys/gals found it interesting but it was to me, and it’s my blog. I will write something about my life again eventually.