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.

Summertime: living is easy

This summer has seen the longest intermittency of this blog in three years — a bit of of sabbath with the family. I’ve caught up with a few domestic jobs in the strange on/off semi-staycation before a week with the whole family and friends in Budapest. This will be profoundly amazing, as I have not been there since 1976. I visited with my mother (who was born there) at various times before that when it was still very much the other side of the Iron Curtain. How intermitten next week will be depends on the state of internet connections, but I anticipate the blog spluttering back gently towards life again over the next few days, DV.

Back at home, Job No. 1 on the Big Guilt Prevarication Domestic List for some time has been the fish tank, which has needed a comlete reboot for a not inconsiderable time. Ridden with algae and worse, it contained, by the beginning of August, one single minnow, known in the trade as Michael Fish. Michael has been looking at me reproachfully for most of last year, and I have now bumped up his accommodation and social lfe with 20-odd companions, aided and abbetted by Chris and Erica, friends of Lucy’s who are moving and needed to find a home for some of theirs.

So now we have a cheerful tank in the hall, the little darlings chuntering around as tropical fish do. Most unanticipated has been our first pet crustacean, Kevin the Raw Prawn. He isn’t cuddly, but he’s got a certain je ne sais quoi (Why, after all, would anyone with half a braincell keep a prawn as a pet?). He is shy and retiring, but comes out about twice a day, stands on a rock like the Lion King banging his chest, and waves his multifarious arms and legs around cheerfully at anyone who can be bothered to give him any attention.

Lucy and I have found fish to be a restful accompaniment to morning prayer, even slighty disturbing see-through Glass Catfish.

We have sat together a couple of evenings wondering how fish can be so much more engaging, in their own way, than anything on 600 odd channels of TV next door...

Chicago 2010: Cleaning the Bean

August brings the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit; followed by a time back home of catching up with various jobs off the guilt list.

This year’s GL included another bit of cleaning — reconditioning the disshevelled fish tank in our front hallway, but that’s another story...

From GL to GLS —

Chicago was in fine fettle. Every year I think there cannot be a new angle to photograph on Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, and every year I come back with another thirty new angles! Look on the cleaning of the bean in glorious clean early morning light as a metaphor for the whole trip.

For a start I realise that learning about leadership is something worth giving a couple of days of regular sustained reflection to, among friends. I will comment separately on what I think I’ve learned this year in particular, but if life is a “school for the Lord’s service,” a period of structured reflection and learning helps, I find, to sharpen up the whole pattern of my work.

People this side of the pond sometimes seem to think it’s clever to be superior about US Evangelicals. Some of them, of course, are doubtless the most appalling people — but then so are some UK Anglicans, and others. Lay all that stuff aside, engage the irony over-ride, and there’s plenty to learn and to enjoy. The warmth, honesty, openness, empathy and positive faith of many US Evangelicals I meet refuses to be bound by all snotty stereotypes, and brings its own honest inspiration.

I found worship this year, especially on the Friday of the Leadership Summit, brought me directly to where my journey in faith began forty years ago — faith in Jesus Christ. I see I have 2.4 days of Bach in my iTunes library to enjoy back in Blighty, but at for a couple of days a year it does me nothing but good to learn and throw myself wholeheartedly into an American Evangelical environment. It’s also good, every year, to catch up with Anglican friends from the Diocese of Chicago. We are sometimes prey, this side of the pond, to a rather flat and stereotypical view of the Episcopal Church, and it’s good to be disabused of that by contact with real people. Real people, real faith, is the great reality checkpoint.

Heaven 10 in Milton Keynes

Saturday morning at Heaven 10, a Music and Arts Festival organised by Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga-Steele artist adn priest, at the Church of Christ the Cornerstone in Milton Keynes. Anouar Kassim put together a celebration of Islamic Arts heritge and culture, incuding fascinating and beautiful stuff from Iran and Somalia, as well as work by a remarkable Muslim Caligrapher, Haji Noor Deen. He combines Arabic and Chinese writing in ingenious and thought-provoking ways, at all shapes and sizes including some giant originals that would test most caligraphers’ art to destruction.

I was also fascinated by an installation by Air-MK, which produces multimedia sensory zones to stimulate prayer and reflection. Howard Williams and friends transformed the small chapel at Cornerstone into a remarkable reflective space, with a screen on which people could react to questions about themselves and God, in their own time. There’s a great vibrancy and creativity in the air in MK, and the way the city is sucking in people from all over the world in interesting ways is becoming very apparent...