Hungarian without Tears

It’s really rather strange how many Hungarian words I remember from 35 years ago. I never learnt the language properly, but picked up a considerable smattering as I grew up — a necessary task if I was to hack into the secret conversations my mother thought she was having with my aunt. Hungarian, friends, is a kind of good news bad news story.

The good news is that there's only a comaratively small vocabulary of Magyar words, and once mastered it’s amazing how they stick in the memory, even after 35 years. I probably acquired them at an impressinoable age, along with what some call a passable accent. Some words are amazingly easy to remember — a bar? “barás.” Easy!

The bad news is that the structure of the language, being Finno-Ugaric, ignores many customary Indo-European conveniences. Let me illustrate. I have been looking at grammatical notes extracted from some tome in the Cambridge Unversity Library as an earnest undergraduate in 1976, when, in the first flush of youth, I had illusions I would be able to master this lot someday.

My notes indicate there are in fact Eighteen Cases in Hungarian marked by enclitc particles (as aganst virtually none in English). So almost every noun declines as Nominative, Accusative, Dative-Genitive, and Ablative. Easy if you’ve done Latin. But then, according to my undergraduate notes, things hot up. You’ve got another fourteen cases to go — Instrumental, Causal-final, translative, terminative, essive-formal, essive-modal, inessive, superessive, adessive, illative, allative, sublative, elative and delative. Oh, and Labio-dental Fricative. No, actually I made that last one up becaue I am being silly, but if you think Hungaran is short of cses, it might be worth a whirl.

Got that? Let me illustrate (remember s = “sh” and zs = “s” — and remember how to pronounce “cs“ and “gy” which are separate letters from a now lost alphabet). This is our simple word for a bar, almost the same in Hungarian:

1. barás — The Bar (subject)
2. bart — The Bar (object)
3. barásnak — To the Bar
4. barástól — From the Bar
   
5. barással — With the Bar
6. barásért — For the Bar
7. barássá — Into the Bar
8. barásig — As far as the Bar
9. barásként — as the Bar
10. barásul — by way of the Bar
11. barásban — In the Bar
12. baráson — On the Bar
13. barásnál — At the Bar
14. barásba — In the General Direction of the Bar
15. barásra — Onto the Bar
16. baráshoz — To the Bar
17. barásból — Out of the Bar
18. barásról — About the Bar
    

Now, remember, even very stupid Hungarians have to have this stuff off pat. No wonder they knock spots off us at Maths, and pack the Economists’ think-tanks, Dentists’ surgeries and Financial Capitals of the world. No wonder they follow you into revolving doors and come out ahead. Easy when you’ve mastered the case structure of their language.

Surveying the height of the grammatical mountain I failed to scale with any confidence in 1976, when I actually had a few spare brain cells, I retreated with the gang this evening to a delightful pavement restaurant in Pest, where they make paprikás csirke just like my late lamented Aunty Helene, with Gnocchi, and was transported. The summit remains elusive, and I fear I will not be jabbering away in Hungarian for a while yet, if ever. Budapest is still Divine.