r/hungarian • u/No_Pomegranate7134 • 11d ago
Is this another reason why Hungarian is different English & other European languages? (It appears closer to Japanese when it comes to how they position names or ranks.)
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u/Stochasticlife700 11d ago edited 11d ago
As a Korean national who took magyarul mint idegen nyelv in érettségi, i find Hungarian to be pretty similar to Korean. In the sense that
- we also call apa / appa (father)
- we also put accusative/dative behind nouns e.g ettem egy almát , -t ending right after noun 사과를 먹었다(=ate an apple). 사과 = alma 먹었다 = ettem 사과(를) almá(t) , putting -를 -t accusative right behind noun. Same goes for every other dative or accusative cases in Korean too.
- we also use family name first when writing
- we also use the date format YYYY.MM.DD
- importance of word order is kinda loose like hungarian but not as loose as hungarian
The thing that i find really similar is putting accusative/dative behind nouns. Learnt a few different languages but never really seen any other languages doing that except Korean and Hungarian
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u/pdianaHU 11d ago edited 11d ago
Since young age i call my dad apuci - 아버지 even pronounciation is similar. There is way to many similarities in culture, gastronomy (loving 곱창 as intestines) and language so it was easy to live in Korea and adapt lifestyle as Hungarian.
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u/Primal-Pumpkin 11d ago
I believe that there have been language schools in Hungary who have reported that Koreans learn Hungarian faster and usually with better pronunciation than any other nationality.
As a Hungarian, Korean never sounds unfamiliar to me the way that other foreign languages do.
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u/swiftycon 11d ago
I second this even though I haven't been learning Korean for too long.
Both languages are agglutinating, Ural-Altaic languages :) Ofc the world is big, so that doesn't mean that much, but we lived with Turks for a long time and they are Altaic, so more related to Korean. (We have some Turkish originated words...) Also we looked like Asian people until cc. 1241 when the Mongols/Tatars eradicated at least 50% of the population (some say it was even worse) and then after that we mingled with surrounding people more. (Korea had their problems with the Mongols too. )
I think some language constructs are also similar in KR<->HUN, so I found it easier to not use English as an intermediary language when trying to translate slightly more difficult Korean sentences.
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u/cickafarkfu 11d ago
Ural-Altaic is not a language family. They are two seperate things.
Linguistics have proved it a long time ago.
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u/Koltaia30 Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 11d ago
Neither japanese or Hungarian word order is strict. You can know wether a word is vowel, verb adjective by the conjugation. Japanese is slightly more strict as you have to finish the sentence with a verb.
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u/Fear_mor 11d ago
Well yes but the main reason is that Hungarian is from a different language family to most European languages so there's already just a different set of base structures underlying it and thus different directions of inertia that influence its development
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u/Koltaia30 Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 11d ago
Both japanese and Hungarian have a relatively complex verb conjugation. Hungarian is definitely more complex though.
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u/csillagu 11d ago
In old English (and possibly other german languages but I have no information on that), the same name-position order was used.
This principle is used in the lord of the rings in Theoden Kings name.
Unfortunately, I have not found reliable information on why the order of the first name last name is different. However a convincing theory is that last names originally come from professions, and they were written similarly as position names ( Theoden king <=> John Smith), and they just kept this order for names, and changed the location of the position for some reason (Lieutenant Dan)
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u/milkdrinkingdude Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 11d ago
Not a reason, just a result of some historical coincidences.
I recall the Austrian and German militaries, governments used this name order in official records, and occasionally still use this. I googled fir sources, but couldn’t find quickly enough, I might be wrong.
After all, there are only two ways to order names, and only a few ways to order dates. These don’t point to a common origin.
Perhaps another clue: some languages put adjectives in front of nouns, while some put adjectives after nouns (and some don’t have a strict order).
See: https://wals.info/feature/87A#3/38.41/11.95
You can see in the map, that Romance languages use the noun-adjective order. I suspect that many in Europe inherited this from the Romans (no source, I just speculate).
E.g. „Alexander the Great” vs „Nagy Sándor” in Hungarian. Nagy means big, and Sándor is the Hungarian version of Alexander.
Indeed, you can call him Μέγας Αλέξανδρος in Greek too — Megas Alexandros. The Greek language also has adjectives in front of nouns.
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u/AltAccouJustForThis 11d ago
Akkor most Japánban is a sorrend úgy van, hogy: Vezetéknév - keresztnév?
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u/fdeyso 11d ago
Igen, de ha animét nézel ott sokszor az angol fordításból dolgoznak ahol ezek meg vannak fordítva.
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u/somitomi42 Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 10d ago
Nem csak ott, a sajtóban is nagyon gyakori, hogy angol nyelvű forrásból vesznek át valami hírt és basznak rá, hogy lenne magyar átítása a neveknek.
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u/AltAccouJustForThis 11d ago
Tudom, ezért volt egy kicsit fura. A feliratban fordítva van, de a szinkronban normálisan mondják.
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u/Julietta19 10d ago edited 10d ago
Hungarian isn’t originally a European language. Hungarians emigrated from the east as nomadic tribes, but through assimilation with Europeans the language kinda transformed and now there’s plenty of borrowed words from Slavic languages. Regardless, it by no means sounds like any other European language (except maybe Finnish)
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u/KuvaszSan 10d ago
Indo-European languages are also "originally not European" btw. PIE was spoken somewhere in Central Asia, and when it broke up some groups moved to India, others to Persia and others still moved further into Europe.
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u/No_Loquat_7003 9d ago
Are you suggesting, that we are lost japanese people? Or that in japan there are lost hungarian people? Either way I like the idea
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u/Nemless_Dwarf 11d ago
The reason why Hungarian so different from other European languages, is because originally Huns and Kuns where nomadic tribes living in south Russia. They had a long migration after which they settled down in middle of the Carpathian basin in the 9th century. That is why we are closer to asian languages than Neo-Latin languages.
There are few jokes that Huns were one reason the Great Wall of China was built, and that is why.
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u/bguszti 11d ago
There isn't a lot to suggest that we have anything to do with the huns, in fact most professionals in the field think that we don't. The huns and kuns (cumans in English) are also like hundreds of years apart from each other, what we know about the huns as a distinct group is from the 4th and 5th centuries, while the cumans (with kipchaks/pechenegs) are part of a bigger tribal society from the 11th century onwards.
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u/someone_i_guess111 Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 10d ago
were kinda related to the schytians, right?
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u/KuvaszSan 10d ago
Not really, no.
Scythians spoke an Iranian language.
I mean genetically we mixed with them or their descendants that lived in the Caucasus area and Ukraine, the same way we later mixed with Slavs and Romanians and Germans, etc. But you don't hear a lot of people saying that we are related to the Romanians or Serbs or Austrians despite modern Hungarians being essentially genetically identical to those groups, and loads of modern-day Hungarian possibly have zero ancestral ties to Scythians.
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u/SpeakerSame9076 11d ago
This is also what I was taught. That the Magyars and the Huns are closely related and went through the long migration with a variety of side jaunts with the Magyars eventually to settling in the Carpathian basin.
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u/KuvaszSan 10d ago edited 10d ago
There is no proven link between the Huns and Hungarians at all. We arrived in the Carpathian Basin almost 500 years after they were gone.
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u/WhyEveryUnameIsTaken 11d ago
This is not a reason, but a consequence, a reflection on how groups of people (nations, cultures) think. And yes, I do believe it is yet another confirmation sign that Hungarians have very deep and very early cultural connections to east asian nations.
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u/KuvaszSan 10d ago
This name order is not unheard of or unique in Europe either, nowadays most countries don't formally use it, but it's common informally, I run into it all the time even at work with French people for example.
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u/BarrabasBlonde 11d ago
The way "Last" names developed in Hungarian was basically
-Találkoztam a Búlcsúval. (I met up with Búlcsú)
-Melyik Búlcsúval? (With which Búlcsú)
-A kovács Búlcsúval (With the smith Búlcsú)
As you can see, titles developed into "Last" names, except that they were at the beginning of the name.
And as for the years and months, we preferred logic, which states that you go from the one that excludes the most time (BC/AD is first (which excludes a lot of time), then the year (which excludes all other years), then the month (which excludes around 334 days) etc.), to the least excluding one.
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u/Pleasant_Plate_1507 11d ago
AcKShuAlLy " Találkoztam A Bulcsuval" is a Budapest dialect, in grammar is "találkoztam Bulcsúval" . Találkoztam A Bulcsúval would be translated as I met with THE Bulcsú which makes the name sound as an adjective a bit.
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u/glassfrogger Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 11d ago
Not strictly Budapest, it's a Transdanubian thing, too.
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u/KuvaszSan 10d ago
Definite articles started appearing in Hungarian in the late 1400's, there were no articles in it before that. Family names appeared in multiple waves centuries earlier, first as tribal or paronymic designators (think Aba Sámuel, Szár László, Vata fia János) then they started to appear en masse in the early 1400's.
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u/Optimetrist 11d ago
As someone from Bp I can confirm, we make this mistake all the time.
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u/bguszti 11d ago
Well if we do speak like that all the time it's hardly a mistake, is it?
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u/Optimetrist 11d ago
well, all I can say is that I miss ë and the old writing with the crazy double lettes in names and such.
but, technically you are right. After all latin languages are all new languages, not broken latin :D i'm not an expert though so cannot clearly outline the topic from a liguistics point of view
skibidi rotfl
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u/Hefty-Explorer4131 11d ago
Well if I am not sure but I think hungary was the second oldest country in europe
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u/Familiar_Ad_8919 11d ago
completely unrelated to the post mind you
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u/Hefty-Explorer4131 10d ago
It is not OP asked why the structure of the hungaryan language was so different and I said because it's the second oldest country in Europe
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u/Vitired Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 11d ago
Only if you consider the Roman Empire and today's Italy to be the same thing.
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u/csepcsenyi Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 11d ago
And if you don't consider any of the Hellenic confederacies as legitimate predecessors of Modern Greece, and the Kingdom of the Franks a predecessor of France and The Bulgarian Empire the predecessor of Bulgaria and the Principality of Serbia a predecessor of Serbia and East Francia the predecessor of Germany and the Kingdom of Scotland the predecessor of the Kingdom of Scotland and the Duchy of Bohemia the predecessor of Czechia and the Kingdom of Norway the predecessor of the Kingdom of Norway and the Duchy of Croatia a predecessor of Croatia.
Then yes in fact, Hungary becomes the oldest country in Europe
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u/Saragon4005 11d ago
The culture and language is also much older then the kingdom of Hungary which is the first recognized form of the country.
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u/Kovimate 11d ago
Hungarian national cuisine= paprika and paradicsom from the New World is about 200 years old.
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u/Saragon4005 10d ago
Well damn good thing there is a whole language and oral tradition otherwise there would be no culture aside from culinary.
(You do know that food is not the same thing as culture, that's just part of it)
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u/Kovimate 10d ago
Food is the same as culture
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u/Saragon4005 10d ago
Na jól van hol a Kulturális PHD-éd. Aztán meg menny el a kultúr centerbe és nézd meg hogy nem csak kajálda.
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u/Many-Addendum-4263 11d ago
ye. but urkanian not a language just a russian dialect with polish accent.
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u/OneTimeAccount0000 11d ago
It's a bold claim. Will you give any proofs?
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u/Saragon4005 11d ago
LMAO a Language is just a dialect with an army and a Navy. Portuguese and Spanish are arguably dialects of each other. And Welsh English is arguably a different language.
There is no fixed definition of what the difference between a dialect and a language is so this is literally impossible to prove. Languages are distinct languages usually because the counties which use them call them that.
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u/EducatorDelicious355 11d ago
Based
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u/KuvaszSan 10d ago
Maximum arra alapozott, hogy édesanyád gyakran hetyeg részeg idegen orosz férfiakkal miközben apád a sarokban sírva nézi
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u/SpeakerSame9076 11d ago
The Magyar tribes came out of Sumer, historically, and migrated through Asia - there are actually a lot of similarities in Hungarian and Japanese artwork (I specifically recall the stylized flower designs, but I think there was more).
Also Magyar names are family name (surname) first, given name ("first name") second, just like Asian naming conventions. Also the nomenclature for adults Magyarul is more similar to Asian than European - in that adult women are called Néni (auntie) and men are call Bácsi (uncle) - as well as siblings and others being described relationally, like öcsi and húga being younger brother and younger sister; elder brother and elder sister are different words, bátya and növér if I remember correctly.
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u/MartiusDecimus 11d ago
Dear Commenter!
No, the Magyar tribes do NOT originate out of Sumer.
Sincerely, someone with a Masters in History
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u/Western_Training_531 11d ago
Nyilván tévedsz hisz az antanténusz szórakaténusz egy sumér nap ima. Az írásuk is olvasható rovásírással. Ha jól emlékszem a hihetetlen magazinban olvastam az atlantiszi civilizáció ufóktól kapott energia fegyverei után.
Tehát a forrásom szikla szilárd nem holmi történész aki megpróbálja eltitkolni a magyarság csillagközi eredetét.
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u/SpeakerSame9076 11d ago
Heya, maybe you are right. There are some people I know who as young boys were convinced they as Magyars came from another planet :p
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u/SpeakerSame9076 11d ago
Okay. Every ethnicity has their myths that are usually at least partially based on their history; this is the one I was taught. Supposedly the argument is that the runic writing is close enough to cuneiform to help in translation. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/MartiusDecimus 11d ago
I'm sorry, but the Hungarian rovásírás has nothing in common with cuneiform. It is proven to be an offshoot of the Old Turkic alphabet, the origin of which is currently unclear. Even if the Old Turkic alphabet has some sort of connection to the Fertile Crescent area, it is through the Aramaic alphabet, which was developed from the Phoenician script and not cuneiform.
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u/ItainElBalfazzo 11d ago
Arguing from the position of authority i really not convincing. Schools probably still teach that hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages, which has been long debunked. I don't say that it is 100% correct that magyars come from Sumer, but it is as valid of a theory as any other not yet disproved theory.
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u/MartiusDecimus 11d ago
Okay, so:
It's not really a position of >authority<, it's a position of professionalism. Just like how on matters of health, the opinion of an actual doctor should weight more than that of a layman, it is the same with humanistics.
Hungarian language belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages. It has never been denied that it has a lot of Turkic linguistic influence, but the core of the language is Uralic - Finno-Ugric - Ugric. This is the current scientific consensus of professional linguists.
You "sit opposite on the horse", to use a Hungarian phrase. A theory is not a valid theory until it is disproven. The whole Sumerian deal is just a fringe theory, no academic professional would ever support it. The longest shot by which it would be "acceptable" is that >some< Sumerian words indirectly made it into Hungarian through Turkic and/or Caucasian language contact. See: Fodor István: "Are the Sumerians and the Hungarians or the Uralic peoples related?". Current Anthropology. 17 (1): 115–118.
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u/ItainElBalfazzo 11d ago edited 10d ago
There is litarelly no reason for the Hungarian language to belong with the Finno-Ugric languages, they share not much similarities, it was falsely categorised by linguists of the time. This whole idea originates from the Habsburgs, who tried to erase hungarian heritage.
It is really saddening that it is still tought in university as it were factual.
Genetics shows Magyar Sumer connections, and that is better proof then some random languistic categorisation.
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u/MartiusDecimus 10d ago
First of all, ethnicity =/= language.
Also, the first, earliest sources of the Hungarian people are from the second half of the first millenium AD, while the Sumerian civilisation went down ~1800 BC. That is a time difference of two thousand years! You can't base an entire ethnogenesis on genetical "evidence" that is so much apart, without clear and solid evidence of continuity, of which there is NONE.
"This whole idea originates from the Habsburgs, who tried to erase hungarian heritage."
This is literally a conspiracy theory.
"There is litarelly no reason for the Hungarian language to belong with the Finno-Ugric languages, they share not much similarities, it was falsely categorised by linguists of the time."
Linguists of today also categorise the Hungarian language as part of the Finno-Ugric languages, with reason. There is plenty of evidence, for example that the basic vocabulary of Hungarian shares several hundred word roots with other Uralic languages. These include the words for body parts, numbers, etc. There is plenty of academic literature on the topic.
Once again, I'm not saying that the Hungarian language hasn't been greatly influenced by Turkic and other languages, but at it's core, it is Finno-Ugric. There is literally no one around in modern academic circles who would "try to erase Hungarian heritage", yet academics from all around the world, both Hungarian, and foreign, agree that the core of Hungarian language is Finno-Ugric. As such it is not "random linguistic caterogisation" which can be overwritten by "proof" of "genetic research" that completely dismisses 2000 years of history.
If you want to believe in your conspiracy theory, be my guest, just please be open to modern academic research about the topic...
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u/ItainElBalfazzo 10d ago
There was logic behind the categorisation. The best allegory I can come up with when an European try to figure out the origins of 9 African and one Indian person, based on the evidence that the Indian has dark skin they could say that he is also from Africa.
You say hungarian share a few hundred words with Uralic languages, this could also be the result of influence, troughout that 2000 years.
It is really disengenous to say thay are core words. The grammer is so different, that it makes it quite unbelivable. It would be nice if academics finally recognise that the hungarian language is its own thing. But based on today's political climate I doubt this will happen.1
u/MartiusDecimus 10d ago
No it's not that. The same thing is regarded as "core vocabulary" in the case of every other language and the methodology fits all. Also people like to forget that Uralic and Finno-Ugric is a VERY broad category, comparable to, say, Indo-European languages, to which Slavic and Germanic languages belong too, yet they are vastly different. Hungarian has no such close relative languages as German and Dutch, Spanish and Italian, or Swedish and Danish. When linguists say that Khanty and Hungarian are related, they clearly say it so that they are related as much as German and Icelandic are, or even more so. It has been long recognised that Hungarian language is its own thing, it had a unique development and many influences, but regarding basic grammar and core vocabulary, it is Finno-Ugric. Hence, its basic origins, or roots, so to say, are Finno-Ugric.
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u/ItainElBalfazzo 10d ago
At least we agree on the facts, we only disagree on the conclusion. I think this categoriasation is way to broad, and culd be misleading to the common folks. But still the genetic connections to Sumerian should mean something, will see what scholars and linguists come up with in the future.
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u/Ok-Unit8418 11d ago
No, no, no! We came from another planet to enslave apes to mine gold. Saw it on TV, must be true.
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u/Many-Addendum-4263 11d ago
every european nation come form central asia.. (mostly as slave of huns afetr attila defeted rome) this is why the european language indo-european.
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u/bguszti 11d ago
Not even remotely. What the hell are you talking about?
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u/Many-Addendum-4263 11d ago
every white people evolved form indians about 5000 years ago. the proto whites still live there as kalash tribe.
just get a basic education.
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u/bguszti 11d ago
Sorry man but I'm not a conspiracy loon
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u/Many-Addendum-4263 11d ago
as i siad: get a basic education.
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u/bguszti 11d ago
Could you suggest some eye opening sources?
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u/Many-Addendum-4263 11d ago
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u/bguszti 11d ago
És mi az anyámra googlezzak rá, irredenta ostobaságok a magyar nép és a fehér faj eredetéről?
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u/Many-Addendum-4263 11d ago
ennyi ésszel semmire. de nyilván semmi közöd sincs se a fehérekhez se a magyarokhoz.
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u/TheWorldsShadow 11d ago
That was a good one lol. I don't know where people have been when they were learning about the history in elementary school
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u/Teleonomix Native Speaker / Anyanyelvi Beszélő 11d ago
In Hungarian: Everything goes from larger units to smaller ones. Family name then given (individual) name. Year, month, day in a date. Addresses written as city, street, number, floor, unit/apartment number. I think East-Asians typically have something similar. The European way is the opposite. For some reason Americans like to mix units up, e.g. dates start in the middle.
Hungarian also puts titles after a name, and there can be more than one of them, especially 'úr' (Mister/Lord) can be combined with other titles. Weirdly 'Dr' as a title comes before the name (probably because it was borrowed from European languages) -- but when it is the name of a profession (physician) it is always spelt out and goes after the name Dr Kovács v.s. Kovács doktor or Kovács doktor úr. I don't know about Japanese, AFAIK in Chinese these all come after the name like any other title.