Talk:Hungarian language

Hungarian Wikibook

Hey guys, I just started a Wikibook for learning the Hungarian language! I would love for people to contribute, even if it's just organizing and adding information from this page.

Go here to help out!

== General==a

When you say the mark for the plural is "k," are you referring to verbs (as it seems) or nouns too? --RoseParks

Only for the nouns, although in many cases, conjugation of verbs looks similar.

Example: kérdés -- "question", kérdések -- "questions"; but három kérdés -- "three questions."

-Eek! Middle of commenting my change, it committed. Changed translation of "Hungarian" to "Magyar" because that's what everyone and all my dictionaries actually say. Cleaned up the link section which was messy. Have not looked over the rest much.the librarian

- This is imprecise. It's better to say that the approximation of pluralization uses -k, but it's really a form of expression in the indefinite. Hence the reason that words revert to their "singular" form once you attach a definite numerical quantity. And that, I think, would be RoseParks' legit confusion over verbs which can conujugate in the definite, indefinite, or both depending on the nature of the verb in question. 69.158.148.117 05:09, 8 November 2005 (UTC)Thomas Molnár-Boivin

--The -k suffix for plural nouns is imprecise in another way, namely that it does not apply to possessive constructs, where plural possessed entities are marked with a -i suffix. ( "autó" - car, "autók" - cars, "autói" - his cars. ) Unless you speak about body parts and organs that normally come in pairs. Except if you want to stress that you're speaking about both of them. Now, that's something that's guaranteed to drive anyone trying to learn this language mad. --Biziclop 23:59, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

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Make sure you know that Hungarian the adjective is magyar, and Hungarian the language is magyaru:l (dots over the u)

Hungarian (the language) is magyar (nyelv). Magyarul (without dots) means in Hungarian. Magyar ül (two words!) means: hungarian sits :) --vbzoli

Regarding the hungarian page: As a native hungarian I was surprised to learn about the letter pair <ky> (supposed to be the palatal consonant /kj/) in the section "hungarian orthography". I'm not a linguist, but I assume that it is a mix-up with the letter pair <ly> (also mentioned later on in that section). It is of course possible that the <ky> combination appears in certain words, but it is certainly not a palatal consonant, for that reason it also not part of the hungarian alphabet (unlike <ly>, which is). Then again, I might have missed something in all these decades. --Csaba

The orthography section was added by Pgdudda. I suggest that you ask him on his talk page (I suppose, that there are not many other people around here knowing enough about the issue); but since you are native Hungarian, you should know it and feel free to correct these parts of the article. -- Cordyph 21:58 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

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What's the point behind screwing up accents? Is there any browser released in this decade which cannot handle ő and ű somehow? o~ u~ o^ u^ and others are not Hungarian accents! Or is there any point to write i' when í is even in 8859-1? --grin 00:24 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

By all means fix it to use correct spellings. --Brion 04:15 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I did once, I'll do it again, but if someone "fixes" them again to 8859-1 then I'll scream. :-) Could there be any problem by using utf-8 characters? Do you know any browsers crashing or mishandling them in some unacceptable way? So far I tried not to avoid using utf-8 where it was appropriate. --grin 12:42 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Probably automatic misformatting by a broken browser...

UTF-8 unfortunately is also problematic with some browsers, including the current Internet Explorer for Macintosh and various versions of Opera. (On meta.wikipedia.org and wiktionary.org, which are UTF-8, it's not entirely a rare occurance for someone to wipe out non-ASCII characters across an entire page when making an edit.) Lynx and Links can also damage these characters, but they can be just as bad on Latin-1 text sometimes. :P So unfortunately, until we get a workaround or can force people to use better browsers :) we're stuck for now with Latin-1 plus whatever character entities are needed when dealing with the languages that don't primarily need other characters. (Polish, Esperanto, Japanese, Russian etc are using UTF-8.) --Brion 15:24 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

In case someone reads this note from 2003: UTF-8 is not a problem for Macintoshes using OS X. Also for OS 9 it can be viewed (with multilingual support), but Wikipedia should ignore the dwindling mass of OS 9 users and just use UTF-8. For OS X, Win and Linux this is no problem. Trondtr 06:22, 9 September 2005 (UTC).

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The theories on origin that were just added need polishing. Personally, I think whoever added them has an agenda since he writes Stichin's astounding work The 12th Planet. Stichin is a crackpot whose works assert that aliens colonised Earth, and there have been Wikipedia vandals who try to mention him in as many articles as possible. I'm going to remove the word "astounding" to maintain NPOV, and I would like to hear from others about whether to discard the mention of Stichin entirely. Kricxjo 18:48, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Was added by (cur) (last) . . 18:26, 15 Sep 2003 . . 204.235.103.102 some anonymous contributor, and I do not have any view on the information apart from that it seemed to me as useless crap. :) I don't disagree in removing it. --grin 20:25, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Ok, it's going. Kricxjo 20:36, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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"(Hungary is perhaps the only country which is surrounded by itself.)" What does this mean? Guaka 21:08, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Whether this is irredentism or merely pointing out that there are Hungarian speakers in all the regions of the countries bordering Hungary I cannot tell. Morwen 22:08, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I hope explanation satisfies both of you: it's not irredentism, but I believe it could be heavily misunderstood. I didn't write it into the article: don't blame it on me :-) --grin 17:47, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Steven Brust

Should this page mention the author Steven Brust who is of Hungarian origin and uses many Hungarian words/names in his stories? --Phil 16:43, Feb 19, 2004 (UTC)

Provability of language origin?

I am ashamed to see people here trying to prove something they do not know. Also, it is shameful to ridicule any idea, just because it looks remote or impossible. For one, nothing is impossible and not even an acclaimed professor can restrict anyone here of speaking out. Like it or not this is a forum. You may say what you wish, of course acceptance is optional. I am sorry to say, this is exactly why you cannot break away from politics. Barking at each other is not a gentleman‘s way. Personally, using improper tone in this section is something what people should really think about. Since none of the sides seam to have the upper hand (in their Hungarian language origin theories), I think there should be some compromise. Perhaps rephrasing the first sentence something like this: The origin of the Hungarian langue is still being disputed. However, it is currently believed to be part of the Finno-Ugric languages, yet other theories point towards Turkic or even Sumerian origin. Here are some Other links about this language: http://www.iridis.com/dsabljic/Hungarian_language http://countrystudies.us/hungary/49.htm http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/husa/origins/language.html http://www.indiana.edu/~iuihsl/1history.html http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07560a.htm Be peace with you all.

All these sources say that Hungarian is Finno-Ugric, so I don't see your point. (I'm not sure what a department bulletin from 2001 has to do with anything; another of these pages is a mirror of Wikipedia. Another is a summary of info very much like this article, and gives no sources for the alternate ideas, all of which are by now discredited anyway).

We could also say that some believe Hungarian comes from Atlantis, but the origins of the language (whatever the ancestry of the people turns out to be) are not in doubt. No credible scholar believes it is anything but Ugric, and that Ugric is anything but Finno-Ugric -- the evidence is just too compelling. kwami 05:08, 2005 August 25 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure what makes somebody 'credible scholar' but there are several other, less or well-documented competing idea about the origin of the Hungarian language, so I think we have an obligation *at least* to mention those explanations too, haven't we?

Peer review is what makes a scholar credible, just as with any science. Someone with a political or nationalist agenda publishing from his basement is not credible. Here in Wikipedia we call that "Original research" and do not allow it. I think we have an obligation to mention the Turko-Ugric War, but as a political/social event, not as a serious linguistic proposal. kwami 18:14, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Pronunciation of "Magyar"

Could someone please post the correct pronuniation for the word Magyar? A long while back someone who professed to speak the language told me that it was actually pronounced something like modger to rhyme with dodger. Is this correct or is it pronounced mag-yar like it looks? --Phil 16:46, Feb 19, 2004 (UTC)

No, but I'd have hard time to explain correct pronounciation. In SAMPA it is "mAd'Ar" (which is THE correct spelling, stress on first syllable). "A" is like arm in English or law in US English; "d'" is like duke in British or would you in US English; "r" is trilled (unlike US English or French). If you desperately need I can record it to ogg and link in. :-) --grin 17:18, 2004 Feb 23 (UTC)

Just a disambiguation in the rise of X-SAMPA (which transliterates IPA regardless of the language), the pronounciation of Magyar is /mAJ\Ar/ (or /mɑɟɑr/ in IPA). --grin ✎ 07:29, 2004 Jun 28 (UTC)

The word "magyar" is actually pronounced the way it looks...in Hungarian! The main problem in English is that people pronounce it "mag-yar", which is incorrect in the first case that "gy" is its own letter in Hungarian, not just "g" and "y", and it makes a sound that is very difficult for English speakers to duplicate. The closest example to the sound (as stated above) is "would you" in American English. The sound created with the Hungarian letters "gy" and "ty" is called a palatal stop, which doesn't exist in English. So, the non-technical way of pronouncing it would be to pronounce the "a" like the "u" in mud (American English pronounciation) and the "gy" like "would you". Also, the "r" is trilled. The most important thing is to not separate the "gy" into two sounds! --Hungarian83 02:16, 2005 Feb 15 (UTC)

Hungarian short "a" is ROUND, like in British "hot". —219.173.119.42 18:12, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I admit that the "u" in mud was a crude example of describing the Hungarian "a", but I believe that the "o" even in the British "hot" still has a distinct "o" sound to it, which is not really present in the Hungarian "a". Perhaps a better way of explaining it would be to say - Hungarian short "a" is ROUND, like in British "hot", but lacking the traditional "o" sound. Of course, I don't speak English with a British accent, and my English is affected by my Hungarian which may be complicating this. :-) --Hungarian83 08:00, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)

I'm guessing the o in "hot" is [O]. And looking at the Hungarian page on Omniglot, Hungarian short "a" is [Q], which is basically a rounded [A]. So [mQJ\'Qr]? - Dysfunktion 02:12, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Phonology

The phonology section seems too brief. Though it does contain a link to another article on Hungarian phonology, I think it probably ought to summarize that article in a paragraph or two, rather than just tersely say "There are some sounds which do not exist in English..." --Jim Henry | Talk 18:11, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Okay, maybe I'll do something, but I personally think the Vowel harmony section should belong under Phonology, because it is handled in the phonology module of grammar. --Sicboy 21:05, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)

amusing false cognates

(funny) Important words for English people to learn:

• cheese: "sajt" (pronounce "shite")
• wooden spoon: "fakanál" (pronounce "fuckin' hell" with strong Irish accent)

Don't tell them I told you. :) --grin 17:21, 2004 Feb 23 (UTC)

• ?Where's the little rabbit??: ?Hol a nyuszi?? (pronounce about ?Hole a new see?)
• The greeting ?Hi?, ?Szia!? in hungarian, should be ?See ya!? talking with a little more speed than the normal english pronunciation..

(Gubbubu 11:03, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC))

Alternative theories on the origins of Hungarian

Linguistic crazies get everywhere. Hungarian is *not* descended from Sumerian, according to any normal linguist who has training in the field. It's just not a sensible option. It can be proven quite conclusively to be a Uralic language.

While I agree that it's unlikely for Hungarian to be descended from Sumerian, I have to add that it also can be proven quite conclusively to be a Turkic language. Alensha 17:06, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hungarian is (as accepted by most linguists) an Ugric - Uralic language. The language is not Turkic, but major

portions of the VOCABULARY are, because for example hungary was occupied by the turkish empire for 150 years!

The remark -major portions of the VOCABULARY are, because for example hungary was occupied by the turkish empire for 150 years- from above is wrong and simplistic,because it is a known fact that hungarians had been in contact with people of turkic origin long before the conquest in 896. And even before the turkish ocupation hungarians had contact with people like petchenegs, cumans,and even settled them down in Hungary. Many hungarians have cuman ancestors. Even the words for denoting mother and father are of turkic origin,anya apa/atya in hungarian ana apa/ata in turkish.Thehun

If you are interested in the words from the time of turkish ocupation in Hungary check out at the Hungarian Electronic Library: TURKISH LOAN WORDS http://mek.oszk.hu/01900/01911/html/index2.html By the way hungarians fled the area occupied by the turks,which consisted one third of the country, the area depopulated.At the same time the turks,the reformation, the printing arrived in Hungary. At that time hungarians started to use their language in literature. The turkish occupation had little influence on the hungarian language in fact!!! Thehun

I can't find anything written to suggest that most linguists accept any such thing. I can find talk of a highly disputed' Ural-Altaic grouping. From what I can find, Hungarian belongs to Finno-Ugric and Turkish belongs to Altaic. Maybe just our terminology differs though. — Hippietrail 03:51, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Apart from all of these rock hard facts ("most people think so") I'd like to mention that it seems that linguistic could often not prove that a language originates from where unless they own a personal time machine, go back and find out. If a theory - let it be wild and eccentric as they just can be - have definitive supporters and cannot be proven false then it should be mentioned as a "not mainstream opinion". In Wikipedia I've met with pretty wild theories (sumerian, japanese, just to mention the two most popular ones) which have some support and they have as "rock hard facts" to prove their right as anyone else, they're just not widely supported (to put it nicely). My two cents... --grin ✎ 07:29, 2004 Jun 28 (UTC)

The question has a lot of political reference. The state that most hungarian linguists said that hungarian is finno-ugorian was a consequence of communism (and the austrian occupation before, in the age of the monarchy). F.e. most finno-ugorian nations (supposed to be the nearest relatives to hungarians) lived in Siberia, in Soviet-Union, so this conception was convenient to get hungarians across to communism and to follow their relatives "on the way of Lenin" (= into the socialism/communism ). More complex regards can be found (if my English would be better and my time would be more, I could say). Nowadays alternative speculations on the origin of hungarian language are more conventional or popular than they were years before, so the mention of them is suggested, despite of that the Academic oppinion is the truth of finno-ugorian theory. Gubbubu 11:03, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Dear Gubbubu, most theorists of Hungarian/Sumerian links show lists of words similar in Hungarian and Sumerian, with similar meanings. This is not the scientific way to discover language similarities, because it is very prone to coincidences. The proper way, that would be accepted by th academics, would be to find patterns of mutations, sound changes.

For example, see the Hungarian/Finnish words in the article: kéz/käsi and víz/vesi. Note that ending "-z" in Hungarian has the equivalent in Finnish "-si".

Actually, because former communist countries used their ancient history as propaganda, it seems that in most of them appeared "popular" fringe theories that are not really sustained by facts. Bogdan | Talk 13:43, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I'm not involved and interested in Hungaro-Sumerian theories so much, but there are theories with more probability (principally analogies with some Turkish-like languages). I think the justice is unattainable because of the distance in time, but I doubt in the correctness of a deleting process of alternative and not surely unscientific theories by someone who is convinced of one of them...Gubbubu 16:38, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Alternative theories and Hungarian politics

For the non-Hungarian people wondering what's going on with Hungarians and their theories about their own language. The origins of the Hungarian language have been debated since serious linguistic research began about in the 19th century.

In Hungary these theories have a lot of political baggage and and there is still a bitter debate going on. Claims are often made on political, rather than scientific grounds. One side (the finno-ugricist) often dismisses any questioning of their theory as "unscientific" and not worthy of debate. On the other hand, the followers of alternate theories often claim that the Hungarian Academy of Sciences pushes its "Antihungarian" agenda, trying to suppress the real truth about the origins of Hungarian. The alternate views often relate the language to that of some great empire building nation rather than the "fish-smelling" northern people. ;)

There are old and new theories relating Hungarian to Hunnic, Scythic, Turkish, Sumerian and even Egyptian and Japanese.

Anyway, this politically charged environment makes intelligent linguistic debate next to impossible in Hungary. The intensity is often close to that of the abortion debate in the US.

I hope this sheds some light on probably the most passionate argument you're ever likely to see on historical linguistics in Wikipedia. :)
Just wait for all the responses this entry will get. <ducks> :)

Cheers, Nyenyec 00:32, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanx for the circumstantial elaboration, Nyenyec; yes I think all your word are so exact. Their own language and its science are so important for most hungarians; but it's so hard to find out the truth in such an atmosphere in wich we live for two hundred years. I think there is no accordance nowadays in the question (despite the categorical oppinion of most, but not all scientists and finno-ugrists) , so we must deal with some alternative theories. A hungarian, living in Hungary: Gubbubu 09:44, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Imprecisions in the article

• Hungarians are genetically related to Germans and Slavs: is this sure? I don't believe. Resources?

Yes. Magyars came to Pannonia as a relative small group of warriors that imposed the language to the people already living there. Of course there was also a genetic influx, but that was not enough.

The people living there were probably Slavs, Germans and maybe Romanians. In fact, people of South-Eastern Hungary, Transylvania, Serbia and Albania are very close genetically. They are genetically pre-Indo-European people that were "Indo-Europeanized" (and became Dacians, Thracians, Illyrians, etc), then succesively Romanized, Slavicized and Magyarized. Bogdan | Talk 12:17, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You mean Romans, not Romanians, unless you do believe in Ceaucescu's and other nationalists funny stories.:) T2k

Can you quote any specific sources on this? Thanks. Nyenyec 15:15, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

"relative small group of warriors"?? I actually recall reading many times that the Hungarian "conquering of the homeland" (honfoglalas) actually brought 300,000 Hungarians. (counting the peasantry, women, everyone) That is supposed to be at least twice (or more--I don't recall) the population that lived on the land prior to the conquest. --70.49.165.24 04:32, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

I think that, in as of much of Europe, there were many tides of peoples that held the territory and after left, were pushed out, or intermixed. I've also read that remains Celtic settlements have been found, predating Roman conquest of Pannonia and Aquincum (I wish I could remember which book I read this in). Let's face it - most of us are mixed, in some way or another. 69.158.148.117 05:17, 8 November 2005 (UTC) Thom Molnár-Boivin

Genetic, archeologic evidence "clashing" with Finno-ugric theory

In the current text there is a paragraph (emphasis mine):

However, significant evidence in some other sciences, including genetics and mainly archeology, still clashes with this theory.

In Genes, Peoples and Languages Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza writes (p.116). "As to Hungarians, about 12 percent of their genes have Uralic origin."

I'd like to know what are the sources of genetic evidence that lead to the questioning of the theory, especially since linguists do not imply direct relation between the origins of the language and the gene pool of the people speaking it.

Also what is this "significant archeological evidence" "clashing" with the Finno-ugric theory?

Thanks, Nyenyec 04:16, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Often, languages have nothing to do with genetics. Romanians are closer genetically to other Balkan/Central European people, like Serbs, than with Italians. So do Serbs, that are closer genetically with Romanians than with Russians or Poles. Does that means that Romanian is not a Romance language or that Serbian is not a Slavic language ? Of course not. You can say the same thing about English-speaking Indians and African-Americans of the USA. It's not that hard to learn a new language and then pass it on to your children. Bogdan | Talk 11:32, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Except when genetical evidences clashes a theory. But this is isputed. Gubbubu 14:49, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Exactly. Even the linguists who support the Finno-ugric theory do not claim that the origin of languages determines the genetic origin of people speaking it. Nyenyec 19:10, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Cases in Hungarian

The current text says:

Some people debate if these relations can be called cases, arguing that this usage was only introduced by the Swedish linguist B. Collinder.

Who are these people and are there any sources for this? Nyenyec 19:10, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Back when I learnt Hungarian grammar in school (in the ’90s) we never called cases “esetek”, which may be the reason why there are people who argue that Hungarian even has cases. Then again, Finnish officially has, and they get them with independent suffixes too, as far as I know. No big deal -- Ralesk 08:56, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

There are hungarian linguists (dr. József Végvári, for example) who say the terminology "case" was not correct to use when speaking about hungarian (and agglutinating) language(s), cause "case" was applicable only for inflectional(?) (flektáló - greek, koine, latin, ancient english etc.) languages. In agglutinating languegas (like magyar) we rather speak about "RAG"s (suffixes[?] - this translation is not so correct, too). That is true hungarian grammar books, written mainly for hungarians, don't use the word "case" at all, but for compatibility with the non-hungarian grammars and for ease understanding and learning hungarian language for foreigners "case" terminology is used more often. There are things make the situation more komplex: as I know, it is so hard to define in generall what is "case" (sintactists, morphologists etc. all have their own disciplines and definitions for "case" - like "race" (species) in biology. Gubbubu 14:24, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

'rag' is I think 'affix'. Suffix is 'toldalék'. -- 195.56.92.60 15:42, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC) Ralesk really who can't care to log in.

Yes. FIXme, please, If you think i RAG you, you need not to SUFFer from a guilty conscience. Gubbubu 16:17, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hahaha :D Man, you do have a weird sense of humour. -- Ralesk 11:43, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

:-)) (Weird? Yes, to rag means ugrat, bolondít - to joke, to make a bad joke with sb. - as my old english dictionary says, so don't missunderstood it :-) Gubbubu 13:00, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

See also: Talk:Uralic_languages#Cases_in_Hungarian. Nyenyec 14:30, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I expanded the sentence about the use of cases in Hungarian grammar to a full paragraph. Someone (preferably a linguist) should review it. If you speak Hungarian you might find these links useful: ZSUZSA C. VLADÁR: The ablative in early Hungarian and Finnish grammars (PDF) and hu:Vita:Esetek a magyar nyelvben. nyenyec ☎ 17:09, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I found an English abstract at the end of the paper mentioned above:

"In the European cultural community, linguistics for a long time meant grammar as established by Greek, and transmitted by Latin, authors. As long as Latin remained the chief language of scholarship and written culture in general, grammar obviously meant Latin grammar, and its categories were regarded as universal and generally valid. When vulgar languages started to be described, the authors relied on the Latin model as a matter of course, using principles, categories, and terms of Latin grammar. The authors of early vernacular grammars had to turn this ‘dead’ grammar of Latin into one that was alive, they had to make it fit languages that were living, variable, and exisiting only in varieties. [...] The issue that lies behind the use of that term is this: How did the authors try to adapt Latin grammar, having few cases, to the description of Hungarian with its numerous different cases? In parallel with Hungarian grammars, the author also discusses some Finnish grammars. Grammarians of the latter language, also having a large number of cases, appear to have faced a similar problem in the description of the case system and, as the sources suggest, they arrived at similar solutions as the Hungarian authors did, albeit quite independently from them."

I hope this helps. nyenyec ☎ 17:27, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

User:Mk270 deleted the entire paragraph:

The concept of grammatical cases was first used in the description of Latin grammar. During the centuries the terminology was also applied to describe non-Indo-European grammars, with very different grammatical structures from Latin. This couldn't be done without reinterpreting to a certain extent the notion of what a case is for agglutinating languages, such as those in the Finno-Ugric language group. Nowadays the term "case" is less widely used among Hungarian linguists to describe Hungarian grammar compared to centuries ago. Several Hungarian linguists believe that the concept doesn't fit agglutinating languages very well, and they prefer to use the term "(case) suffixes" and "endings" instead. For students, the case system for Hungarian is only taught in higher education.

...apparently, from his change comment, to get rid of the false statement in the first sentence. We need to rewrite the paragraph, not delete the whole thing. --Jim Henry | Talk 16:32, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

response below Adam78's text

Actually, I don't mind the whole paragraph has been cut out, since it's rather unscientific, especially its second half about Hungarian. If there is a case relation between two words (which can be found out from the required arguments), why not call the concerned word's suffix a case? Actually, the idea promoted in the above paragraph is mostly an unfounded, ignorant criticism of those who reject the Finnish relationship of Hungarian, although they have little idea about comparative linguistics, and they think "Hungarian is so completely different; everything is different about it", and all linguistics becomes insignificant when it comes to Hungarian... In fact, the case system is taught in every modern Hungarian serious linguistic textbook. -- Adam78 17:10, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

My change comment was slightly misleading, because I did not have enough space. I did edit it a few times before submitting it. There were more reasons for getting rid of the paragraph than just the falsehood of the first sentence. The reasons were:

(1) Latin was not the first language in which case-marking was discovered and formally described. This was almost certainly Sanskrit. See the Wikipedia entry on Panini for one of the chaps responsible.

(2) It is not true to say that applying case terminology to non-IE languages "couldn't be done without reinterpreting to a certain extent the notion of what a case is for agglutinating languages,". Case is just the role a noun is playing in a sentence. It might be marked syntactically or morphologically. It's not as though the concept of case needs to be "reinterpreted" to cope with minimally inflected languages such as English which mark noun case with syntax, or languages such as German where, notoriously, nouns are generally not case-marked but adjectives are.

(3) It is not true that the case-system is only taught in higher education institutions in Hungary. This claim smacks of the anti-intellectualism of the sort of people who wish to muddy the water about the origins of the Hungarian language.

(4) The claim that some Hungarian linguists don't think "case" (what, the English term, or some Hungarian "translation" of it?) applies well to agglutinating languages is either untrue, or to the extent that it is true, is only true insofar as the word "linguist" is not employed with its usual acceptation and is instead taken to mean "persons ignorant of contemporary linguistic theory, or persons not ignorant thereof knowingly misrepresenting the same", and thus to the extent that the claim it is true it is not sufficiently notable to merit mention in Wikipedia, or to the extent that it is sufficiently notable, it is only notable as an observation about Hungarian fringe politics or the fallibility and corruption of human thought and discourse in general, and therefore is out of place in this particular article, which is about a language too beautiful and serene to be sullied with such demeaning nonsense and untruth. Mk270 21:44, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

(the following text was lost when I was editing the above comment, as it was added to the page at roughly the same time) Mk270 22:15, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Actually, this isn't true at all. The paragraph isn't "unscientific" at all, I think the sentence "if there is a case relation two words why not call ..." is unscientific. I asked linguists on an official hungarian linguist's phorum and they said there isn't even a common and widely accepted definition for "case". So this is an open scientific problem, we mustn't decide, but must give a chance for all oppinions. I will take the paragraph back. My grammar books (e.g. Érettségi témakörök, tételek - magyar nyelvtan - written by Balázs Géza, etc.) don't say a word about case system in hungarian language. The paragraph is a result of consense. Please don't delete it any more. Gubbubu 21:29, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

The fact that it doesn't say a word about cases doesn't mean anything. It's not a comprehensive textbook, only a high-school material. However, if you look into a modern and more comprehensive linguistic book, you'll find the description of Hungarian cases. See for example Új magyar nyelvtan (ISBN 963-389-521-9) or Strukturális magyar nyelvtan / Morfológia (ISBN 963-05-7737-2). I hope you won't behave in such a way that you reject something before reading it, and discard it before proving it's false. Convince your fellow-editors of your right before reverting the page, please, will you? And if you do revert something, please take its criticism into account. It looks like there were other problems as well with that paragraph, weren't there? You should have at least re-written the paragraph, omitting or rephrasing the questioned statements. This is just forcing your view on other editors. -- Adam78 23:40, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

1. A "modern" azt jelenti, hogy szolgaian másolja a külföldi terminológiát?Mert ez a rossz szokás valóban terjedőben van, egyre színvonaltalanabb a hazai lektorszakma munkája. Ez a matematikakönyvekben és a biológiai szakirodalomban is jelen van, egyre terjednek az angol kifejezések; de ennek ürügyén ne lássunk bele a magyar nyelvbe olyan tartalmakat, melyek nincsenek benne, még ha félrevezetően és szerencsétlenül alkalmazzuk is az adott terminológiát. A "grupoid"-ot is hívhatjuk "magmá"-nak (ez az eredeti neve, a grupoid ezt kiszorítzotta, de most újra terjedőben van ehelyett az eredeti terminológia), de ettől a grupoid nem lesz vulkanikus anyaggá, megmarad matematikai struktúrának. Ugyanígy ha egy nyelvtankönyv tárgyalja is az "eset"-et a magyarban, mert kénytelen így nevezni (főképp ha politikai nyomás is van az ügyben) attól még nem biztos, hogy vannak a magyarban esetek.
2. A bekezdés azt mondja, kételyek vannak azzal kapcsolatban, hogy vannak-e esetek a magyarban. Ez forrásokkal van alátámasztva, és így semmiképp sem törölhető. Az, hogy a magyarban vannak esetek, egy másik POV vélemény, azt is meg kell jeleníteni, de az egyik POV véleményt cenzúrázni nem szabad (NPOV).
3. "If you revert something" you should say that to Mk270.
4. If you have problems with the first sentence, then look for it, don't delete the whole paragraph. Gubbubu 00:04, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

May I ask you what this "official Hungarian linguist's forum" was and who you talked with? Adam78 23:44, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

• [1]; a concrete topic I asked them in, for ex. [2]. Gubbubu 23:46, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
  • As you can read there, most of the nicks on this forum are real linguists, and most of them are far-far-far leftists. Mondhatni, csak épp Recskre nem akarják vinni a velük egyet nem értőket. Szóval nem mondhatod, hogy a saját véleményem irán elfogult forrást kérdeztem volna meg.Gubbubu 00:06, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

• Egy fontos megjegyzés Gubbubunak. KÉRLEK SZÉPEN, FELEJTSD EL A NYELVÉSZETI OLDALAKON A POLITIKÁT! ÖRÖKRE. Egyetlen nyelvészeti elméletet sem lehet megcáfolni vagy alátámasztani olyan alapon, hogy a kiötlője ilyen vagy olyan politikai nézeteket vall(ott). Ha nyelvészetileg meg lehet cáfolni, akkor az el lesz vetve, még ha maga Teréz anya találta is ki. Ha pedig nyelvészetileg nem lehet megcáfolni, akkor érvényes marad, még ha maga Sztálin találta is ki. A politika nem érv a nyelvészetben. Úgyhogy soha többé egy szót sem akarok hallani itt a politikáról, rendben? Köszönöm.
  • Nincs rendben. A kulcsszó, hogy vannak-e források. Ha nincsenek, elvethető, ha vannak, nem vethető el. Ld. Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. Read it, thanx. Gubbubu 09:40, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

• Hogy vannak-e források, az önmagában kevés. A másik kulcsszó az, hogy releváns legyél: Wikipedia:Stay on topic. Erről van most szó. Amíg nem bizonyítod, hogy a politika on-topic (releváns) a nyelvészeti kérdések taglalásához, addig az a saját POV véleményed, amit nem keverhetsz bele a cikkbe.
• The question of whether sources are available is far from enough. The other question is that you should be relevant: Wikipedia:Stay on topic. This is the issue now. Until you prove that politics is "on-topic" (relevant) for treating linguistic issues, it will remain your own POV opinion which you may not mingle into the article.

-- Adam78 14:48, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Stop. You are mixing politic with linguistics using defaming verbs and nouns ("anti-intellectualistm", "muttering" etc.) I say, regarding to the policy Wikipedia:NPOV that we should correct the paragraph and not to delete it - this isn't politics. Gubbubu 15:59, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

• An important remark for Gubbubu. PLEASE FORGET POLITICS ON LINGUISTIC PAGES. FOR EVER. No linguistic theory can be refuted or backed up on the base that its author has or had any particular political views. If it can be linguistically refuted, then it will be discarded, even if Mother Teresa thought it up herself. And if it cannot be linguistically refuted, then it remains valid, even if Stalin thought it up himself. Politics is no argument in linguistics. So let me never ever hear any more words about politics here, OK? Thank you.
• • Part 1). Sorry, I don't understand why do you say this. I haven't said that the paragraph must be taken back because it is political correct (or incorrect). I said it must be taken back because there are resources, so it can't be deleted. What I said about politics to you was just a remark.
  • Part 2) Sorry, but we can't forget politics. In Hungary linguistic has a lot to do with politics, we can't close our eyes above this. Just see the link I gave you about the linguistic forum. Those topics were full of politics ("who is Chomsky and why do we hate him", "why people of alternative linguistic theories are on the >>historical<< far right-wing" (by the admin Kalman), "who is Géza Balázs and why do we hate him" etc.). And read this sentences: It is not true that the case-system is only taught in higher education institutions in Hungary. This claim smacks of the anti-intellectualism of the sort of people who wish to muddy the water about the origins of the Hungarian language. What's this if not politics? Please tell your friend not to take over political censorship over this topic and don't delete oppinions they are not familiar with, instead of shouting with me. Gubbubu 09:38, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

No-one is shouting at you.

With regard to the sentences of mine you quote, the first has nothing to do with politics, so your argument doesn't apply. The second is probably political, yes, so I'll withdraw it; I can't justify it without more information, and it would be hypocritical for me on the one hand to say "keep politics out of the language page" and then use arguments which might be politics-related in the talk page!

You do not justify why you have introduced false information back into the page.

You reintroduced as your own the claim that cases were first used in the description of Latin grammar.

I believe that you may have done this BEFORE you were able to read my four points above in this talk page; I know there was some confusion last night, as Wikipedia was slow and you and I were editing at the same time.

I am going to remove the paragraph again. If you reintroduce it, please make sure you adequately deal with the four reasons stated as to why it should go.

Mk270 10:15, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

No one, Only Adam78. ("KÉRLEK ..." or "PLEASE FORGET 4 EVER" etc.)

Your first sentence has nothing to do with politics, it's only false. :-)) Case system is not material of maturation exams and it is not in basic and medium-level grammar books. Your second sentence is false, too (and has to do with politics, as you said).

If an informationj - only the first sentence is false, then cut that, not the whole paragraph. Gubbubu 10:58, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

(1) Latin was not the first language in which case-marking was discovered and formally described. This was almost certainly Sanskrit.

Thanx. Now, why didn't you correct then? I think because your cases for cutting weren't scientific, you were disturbed by "unintellectual" far right-wing "muttering" (The usual unintellectual muttering I can read in Magyar Narancs and other unintellectual far left-wing papers). I can't see any other reason.

(2) It is not true to say that applying case terminology to non-IE languages "couldn't be done without reinterpreting to a certain extent the notion of what a case is for agglutinating languages ...".

I can't say more: It is disputed case system was applicable to Hungarian (and we gave resources, as I remember). This is a fact, no matter what is your oppinion about it. Maybe your oppinion is that case system exists in Hungarian, and these disputes are unintellectual, but this is your POV oppinion. - I can do anything about this. See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view.

(3) It is not true that the case-system is only taught in higher education institutions in Hungary.

The fact is that it is true. Show me three medium-level hungarian grammar books talking about case system in hungarian (in abroad, case system maybe is the part of "lower" education. But why? Because is the integrated part of indo-european languages. Foreign grammar books talk about csae system in Hungarian language, but far right-wing unintellectuals says that only because they couldn't think in other paradigms, as they not know any other paradigm. Grammar books written for foreign learners of hungarian language talk about case system, but the cause of this is that want to ease learning. It's only a metaphor, in hungarian there aren't cases, or aren't cases in similar way as they are in the indo-european languages).

(4) The claim that some Hungarian linguists don't think "case" (what, the English term, or some Hungarian "translation" of it?) applies well to agglutinating languages is either untrue, or to the extent that it is true, is only true insofar as the word "linguist" is not employed with its usual acceptation and is instead taken to mean "persons ignorant of contemporary linguistic theory, or persons not ignorant thereof knowingly misrepresenting the same", and thus to the extent that the claim it is true it is not sufficiently notable to merit mention in Wikipedia, or to the extent that it is sufficiently notable, it is only notable as an observation about Hungarian fringe politics or the fallibility and corruption of human thought and discourse in general, and therefore is out of place in this particular article, which is about a language too beautiful and serene to be sullied with such demeaning nonsense and untruth. Mk270 21:44, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, but this is unintellectual left-wing muttering for me :-)), about "fringe politics" (well, Nádasdy and similar linguists who write in Magyar Narancs, a fringe left-wing gutter-press are fringe). And it's more and more obvious your motivations on cutting the paragraphs are ideological. Gubbubu 10:58, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

• Sajnálom, hogy "KIABÁLTAM" – de úgy látom, még mindig nem érted, miről beszélek. Senkit nem érdekel itt, hogy te mit tartasz ideológiai alapúnak. Amit te ideológiainak tartasz, azt én paranoiának tartom. Itt viszont sem annak nincs helye, hogy én téged paranoiásnak nevezzelek, sem annak, hogy te bármit ideológiainak nevezz. Lehet, hogy paranoiás vagy, és lehet, hogy igazad van abban, hogy ez ideológia. Lehet, hogy mindenki egyet fog érteni ebben veled, lehet, hogy senki, de ez kinek-kinek a magánvéleménye marad, amíg nem kerül elő nyelvészeti érv. Ez tehát azt jelenti, hogy a politika itt még akkor sem érv, ha igaz, és ha netán vannak is hozzá hiteles és megbízható források. (!) Talán szomorú dolog, de így van. Kívül esik a nyelvészet eszközein. Irreleváns. Matematikus vagy és logikus, ha jól tudom, tisztában kell lenned vele, hogy létezik releváns és létezik irreleváns. Tisztában kell lenned vele, hogy a kutatási és bizonyítási módszereket így vagy úgy definiálják, és ezek csakis olyanok lehetnek, amelyeneknek lényegileg köze van az adott területhez. A történelem sem foglalkozik azzal, melyik uralkodónak voltak házassági problémái, még akkor sem, ha ez döntötte el sokmillió ember sorsát. Ez lehet, hogy nagyon érdekes kérdés, de külön terület. Ha egy tudományterülettel akarsz foglalkozni, bizonyos típusú érvekre kell hivatkoznod, amelyeket érvényesnek tekintenek. Ez olyan, mint a sakk. A ló akkor is ugyanúgy léphet, ha kicsi és ócska táblán játszol, és akkor is ugyanúgy, ha nagy és gyönyörű táblán. Soha nem lesz érv az, hogy a lónak ronda a feje vagy egy gonosz ember készítette a figurát. Ha nem vagy hajlandó elismerni a játékszabályokat, az általános iskola első osztályába sem engednek be. Függetlenül attól, tetszenek-e ezek a szabályok, vagy sem. Ha nem értesz egyet, új játékot találhatsz ki vagy új tudományterületet alapíthatsz. Ez elég rossz, de meg kell barátkoznod vele, ha az élet általános iskolájába akarsz lépni és tovább.

• I'm sorry I "SHOUTED" like this – but it looks you still don't understand what I speak about. Nobody cares here about what you consider ideological. What you consider ideological I consider it a paranoia. Here, however, there is no place for me to call you paranoid, neither is there place for you to call anything ideological. You may be paranoid (and may not), and you may be right about this to be an ideology (and may not). Maybe everyone will agree with you, maybe no one, but it will remain everyone's private opinion until a linguistic argument comes up. Therefore, it means that politics is not an argument here even if it's true, and even if there are trustworthy and authentic sources available for it. (!) It may be sad, but that's how it works. It's outside of the means of linguistics. Irrelevant. You're a mathematician and logician, as far as I know, you must be aware that there exist relevance and irrelevance. You must be aware that sometimes the means of research and verification are defined in a way or another, and these can only be such which have something essential to do with the given field. Even history doesn't deal with whether a ruler had problems with his marriage, even if it decided the fate of several millions of people. This may be a very interesting question, but it's a separate field. If you want to deal with a field of science, you must refer to a certain type of arguments which are considered valid. It's like chess. The knight can move the same way if you play on a small and poor board, and it can move the same way if it's a big and beautiful board. It will never be an argument that the knight has an ugly head or it was made by an evil person. If are not willing to recognize the rules of a game, you won't even be admitted to the first class of a primary school. Independently of whether you like these rules or not. If you don't agree, you can make up a new game or found a new field of science. It may be pretty bad, but you must befriend yourself with it if you want to enter the primary school of Life, and further on.

-- Adam78 12:06, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Senkit nem érdekel itt, hogy te mit tartasz ideológiai alapúnak.

Akkor engem miért érdekelne, hogy te és Mk270 mit tartotok ideológiai alapúnak? szerintetek a bekezdés ideológiai alapú, szerintem nem.

Ez tehát azt jelenti, hogy a politika itt még akkor sem érv, ha igaz, és ha netán vannak is hozzá hiteles és megbízható források. (!)

Egyetértek. Ha hiteles, megbízható források vannak, akkor a politika nem érv. Most vannak. Így abba lehet hagyni az "unintellektuális" és hasonló gyalázkodó jelzők használatát. Én ezt nem használom azokra a nyelvészekre, akiket nem tisztelek, és nem törlöm az ezen iskolába tartozók véleményét, és nagyon megkérlek, hogy ti se tegyétek - öntsünk tiszta vizet: úgysem fogom engedni. Gubbubu 15:29, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Tisztában kell lenned vele, hogy a kutatási és bizonyítási módszereket így vagy úgy definiálják, és ezek csakis olyanok lehetnek, amelyeneknek lényegileg köze van az adott területhez. A történelem sem foglalkozik azzal, melyik uralkodónak voltak házassági problémái, még akkor sem, ha ez döntötte el sokmillió ember sorsát. Ez lehet, hogy nagyon érdekes kérdés, de külön terület. Ha egy tudományterülettel akarsz foglalkozni, bizonyos típusú érvekre kell hivatkoznod, amelyeket érvényesnek tekintenek. Ez olyan, mint a sakk. A ló akkor is ugyanúgy léphet, ha kicsi és ócska táblán játszol, és akkor is ugyanúgy, ha nagy és gyönyörű táblán. Soha nem lesz érv az, hogy a lónak ronda a feje vagy egy gonosz ember készítette a figurát. Ha nem vagy hajlandó elismerni a játékszabályokat, az általános iskola első osztályába sem engednek be. Függetlenül attól, tetszenek-e ezek a szabályok, vagy sem. Ha nem értesz egyet, új játékot találhatsz ki vagy új tudományterületet alapíthatsz. Ez elég rossz, de meg kell barátkoznod vele, ha az élet általános iskolájába akarsz lépni és tovább.

Akkor légyszíves maradjunk a nyelvészeti érveknél. Érvek nélkül ne töröljetek semmit - és eddig egy releváns érvet sem kaptam. Gubbubu 15:29, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

• I'm sorry I "SHOUTED" like this – but it looks you still don't understand what I speak about.
  • No problem.
• Nobody cares here about what you consider ideological. What you consider ideological I consider it a paranoia. Here, however, there is no place for me to call you paranoid, neither is there place for you to call anything ideological. You may be paranoid (and may not), and you may be right about this to be an ideology (and may not). Maybe everyone will agree with you, maybe no one, but it will remain everyone's private opinion until a linguistic argument comes up. Therefore, it means that politics is not an argument here even if it's true,
• Then why should I care what User:Mk270 considers ideological?? He considers the paragraph ideological, and you're right no one should care with this. We must correct the first sentence - that's all our work.

• and even if there are trustworthy and authentic sources available for it. (!) It may be sad, but that's how it works. It's outside of the means of linguistics. Irrelevant.
• Stop, man! If there are authentic resources we must give chances for the oppinion! I beg you, please read the policy Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. "There are no cases in hungarian" - this is an oppinion, true or false. I'm not sure whether it is the oppinion of the Academy and the majority of linguists, but this oppinion exists. So when you delete this paragraph you delete facts. I can't let it, sorry, because it hits the NPOV policy. User:Mk270 is not that man who must decide whether this oppinion is correct or not. Not you and not me: we only collect this oppinion and write it into the article.

You're a mathematician and logician, as far as I know, you must be aware that there exist relevance and irrelevance. You must be aware that sometimes the means of research and verification are defined in a way or another, and these can only be such which have something essential to do with the given field. Even history doesn't deal with whether a ruler had problems with his marriage, even if it decided the fate of several millions of people. This may be a very interesting question, but it's a separate field. If you want to deal with a field of science, you must refer to a certain type of arguments which are considered valid. It's like chess. The knight can move the same way if you play on a small and poor board, and it can move the same way if it's a big and beautiful board. It will never be an argument that the knight has an ugly head or it was made by an evil person. If are not willing to recognize the rules of a game, you won't even be admitted to the first class of a primary school. Independently of whether you like these rules or not. If you don't agree, you can make up a new game or found a new field of science. It may be pretty bad, but you must befriend yourself with it if you want to enter the primary school of Life, and further on.

I don't know what to do with these last sentences. If something is irrelevant, well they are. I agree in that we should stay on the topic. and our topic is the disputed paragraph. I think the article needs this (with a correction of its 1st sentence). Gubbubu 15:47, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Deleted resource

[3].

Dear Adam78! You deleted a resource link from the article. I don't mind what's your oppinion about "gyökelmélet", but it writes - you are right, writes a little, but writes - about the history of applying cases in Hungarian grammar. Please talk before you delete something (and would you be so kind to take it back?).

Please pay close attention - for example - for this table on the linked web page:

	LATIN	MAGYAR
Alanyeset Birtokoseset Részeseset Tárgyeset Távolítóeset Megszólítóeset	Egyes szám Többes szám populus populi populi populōrum populi populis' populum populos populo populis popule populi	Egyes szám Többes szám nép népek népé népeké (a) népnek (a) népeknek népet népeket néptől népektől Ó nép! Ó népek!

And please READ, THINK, TALK and ACT, in this order. If you mix this order, you shot the suspected person before asking him. Don't do that, in the long run I can't tolerate this style of behavior. Please learn to tolerate those oppinions what you don't like. I do that too. Thanx. Gubbubu 21:27, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

I read into the article about its key concepts, rag, rügy and so on. This part may be a witty series of association, but it has nothing to do with linguistics. If the author wants to deal with archaic relationships of language, he should use archaic words, and possibly archaic forms of them. Ruha, however, came from the Slavic languages, so it's not even an archaic Hungarian word. How can he want to prove any important feature of Hungarian with this word? The article is full of unscientific opinions, which are amusing to think about, but these are not linguistics. (Do you know the poems by Dénes Kiss? They are quite similar. Witty and amusing, but nothing more.) The article is full of personal opinions which have little to do with his own topic. This is not the way a scientific piece of work looks like. It's a kind of literature, written on occasion of the language. – I can hardly believe of you that you can take it seriously. You're too intelligent for that. How can you expect anyone to take it seriously? Let's not take each other for fools, please.

You are shadowboxing. The key concepts of the article has nothing to do with our present talk: this is irrelevant for us now. We don't have to decide whether these are scientific or unscientific, because these aren't in the "Hungarian language" article. But the Végvári article wrtites some word about case system in its first twenty-thirty paragraph. You are right the article bends then to an other topic (what is RaG), but that is not interesting for us now. Gubbubu

If you want to refer to a table, cite the table. But even citing the table isn't really worthy, because today's linguists don't use these cases for Hungarian (see what they use), and whatever cases they apply, they apply them for totally different reasons than linguists several hundred years ago (this table shows Hungarian linguistic attempts of those times). It is clear for everyone that Hungarian and Latin cases cannot be directly mapped onto one another. What you're doing is called shadowboxing in a figurative sense: refuting an argument which resembles what the other person said, but is actually different from it – and expecting the other person to believe that his own argument has been refuted.

I think you are shadowboxing. No one says modern linguists try to identify cases in Hungarian as cases in Latin. That part of the article only writes about the history and the starting of the "cases in hungarian" paradigm. But Dr. Végvári says even so the first grand mistake was here. So Végváry tried to give two simple example for an agglutining and an inflecting language, to show that there are "paradigmatical", essential and inevitable differences. E. g. inflection is a closed system, with its seven cases. The hungarian suffix system is opened: there are many variations, so that we must make difference between twenty-forty cases. Végváry says this is not elegant, and maybe there are other, more simple chances to classify semantic relations in hungarian (see Occam's Razor, too). Gubbubu

However, please remember the answer you received at Nyelvészforum [Linguists' Forum] to your question:

"Van-e különbség esetek tekintetében mondjuk az agglutináló és flektáló nyelvek tekintetében. Pl. az eset fogalma van-e valamelyik ilyen nagyobb nyelvtípushoz kötve?"

The answer was: "Nyelvtípushoz nem köthető, mindenhol van." [It (i.e., a case) cannot be connected to a language type; it exists everywhere.] (2004. november 26.)

So, what makes you think then that the term "case" should be avoided for Hungarian? Honestly: are you going to look for a linguist who says "Yes, cases really don't exist in Hungarian / Uralic languages", and he will be The Authentic Person And The Ultimate Resource for you, because he says what you want to hear? -- Adam78 22:31, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

You haven't quoted the environment of this oppinion and other oppinions! This is so manipulating! The answer wasn't this! The complete quote:

Erre frappáns választ nagyon nehéz lenne adni. Egyértelmű definíció semmi esetre sem adható a mai állás szerint, nagyon különböző vélemények léteznek arról, mi is akar lenni az eset. Nyelvtípushoz nem köthető, mindenhol van. Más-más rendszerben (nominativus-accustaivus, esetleg ergativ-abszolutiv, netántán vegyes 'split ergative'), de ez sem nyelvtípus, hanem nyelvfüggő. Meg hát hogy egyes eseteket mire használnak, az megint nagyon különbözik. Van egy könyv, ami szerintem érdeklődő laikusnak hasznos lehet: BJ Barry: Case. A CUP-nál jelent meg, a SEAS könyvtárában megvan, de sajnos nem adják senkinek. Állítólag még akarnak beszerezni belőle. Persze ez sem örök igazságok tárháza, vannak benne nehezen védhető dolgok, van, ami rendben van, de mások máshogy látják, de isteni ptijantjatjara példákkal jön, és a különböző rendszerek működését jól le lehet szűrni belőle. Magyarul sajna nem tudok olyasmit, ami így összefoglalná a témát.

i.e.:

Hard to give exact answer to this question. An exact definition can't be given by our recent scientific knowledge, there are so-so different oppinions, what "case" wants to be. It cannot be connected to a determinate type of language, cases exist everywhere. Maybe differently in some languages (nom-acc, maybe ergative-absolutive).

and when I asked whether the Academy has a well-defined point of view, Kalman said:

Well, the Academy has a well-defined point of view about everything :-)). As I remember, they define nominal case suffixes (attention! not cases! case suffixes!!) as a grammatical instrument for sign the bővítmény-relations [i.e. ~~the "parts" of the sentence]. They don't define the idea of "case", but surely they think that is a grammatical sign of an "in-sentence-relation" [sorry for misstraslation, I'm not good at English linguistic terminology). Etc.

Let me quote a bit more from the answers you received at the above discussion forum. (Date: 2004. november 26, péntek, 23:31)

• "Védhető álláspont egyébként, hogy pl. az angol elöljárószók rokonok a magyar szemantikai esetek ragjaival." – ["By the way, it is a defensible view that e.g. the English prepositions are relatives to the suffixes of Hungarian semantic cases."] Note that the question here only concerns the status of the English prepositions, not the Hungarian cases.
• "Mindenképpen elkülöníthetőek szerkezeti esetek, amelyek egyértelműen csakis a Kálmán által említett mondattani viszonyok jelölésére szolgálnak (általában a nominantivuszt, az akkuzativuszt és a dativuszt sorolják ide ...)" – ["By all means one can separate structural cases, which unambiguously serve only to denote the syntactic relationships mentioned by Kálmán (one generally classifies nominative, accusative and dative into it)"]
• (at the end of the same paragraph): "A magyar másfelől hemzseg tőlük ugyebár." – [On the other hand, as we know, Hungarian language is swarming with them (i.e., with the structural cases)."]

But you could be informed of all these if you visited a library (as far as I know, there are more than sixty in Budapest, so you could perhaps find one). This is contemporary linguistics.

I hope your reaction will not be to these that you keep searching until you manage to find someone to support your own view. I'm not sure this method would be honest and convincing for a scientist.

-- Adam78 00:37, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

---

Gubbubu, would you kindly stop accusing me of not being on the far-right? You have insufficient information to infer my political views from what I post here, and inferences from them are irrelevant, as what I say about linguistics is true or false independently of what I think about politics. You claim my motives in cutting the paragraph are ideological, but you don't actually flesh out that argument. What's the ideology? How does it undermine the actual reasons I stated in any way? If my motive were ideological, which it was not, why would that even matter?

You are conflating factuality, NPOV and notability in your arguments.

It is true that there are people who believe that it possible for a language not to have cases. There may in fact be such languages, though I doubt it. If you really think that such a thing is possible, please give a description of how you think such a language would work.

What do you actually MEAN when you say that Hungarian has no cases?

I think it's fair to say that the notion of "case" has had to be reanalysed. That's really not a point about Hungarian, though, is it? Personally, Hungarian was the reason I reanalysed my view of the locative in Latin, but I'm pretty sure that's not why linguists in general did so in the course of the twentieth century.

I do accept that as a matter of FACT there is a dispute, but I don't accept its notability. I've already stated that and you've not answered that point in respect of notability, only in respect of fact.

I can see the POV you are trying to get into the article, and how it ought to be incorporated. Mk270 14:11, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

My answers:

1. Don't call our oppinions "unintellectual". Stop it. I've stopped talking about politics now (but you have started it :-); and my last politized comments were only jokes ("that is a far left-wing mutter for me :-))" - please pay attention for the smiley in that, it was a parody of your comment before).
2. "Notability" is a subjective expression. Please give me an exact test or metric system what decides an oppinion is notable or not. Then I can measure the notability of this linguistic dispute and give you its notability quotient. But it is "notable" very much - how the hell a dispute on paradigmatic differences of language classification could be unnotable?
3. How can I imagine there are no cases in Hungarian? How can I prove my oppinion? I don't have to. First of all, it's not my oppinion. It's not my POV. So please ask Hungarian "alternative" linguists. And no matter they are right or not. I haven't written "In Hungarian there aren't cases". This is POV. I've written "some linguists says in Hungarian there aren't cases". This is - a fact. As no matter God is the creator of the world or not: we must show the oppinion of religions and the oppinions of atheists. Wikipedia gives space for every oppinions from cited first-order, secondary, third-order etc. resources. This is our NPOV policy. And I gave a resource. That's all, folks. Gubbubu 23:47, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for responding. Just as your political comments were only jokes, mine were intended for amusement value as well. Sorry about that :).

As to "unintellectual", I think I said "anti-intellectual(ism?)". The way these discussions work is that linguistics itself comes under attack, whenever this is necessary for overcoming some claim. I'm thinking of the argument earlier about Finno-Ugric cognates; it's possible to characterise the notion of systematic sound correspondences, in practice, as being so complex as to defy immediate understanding by people who aren't historical linguists, and then to assert that it must be false or tenuos on such grounds alone. That's what I was trying to get at when I said the contentions "smacked" of anti-intellectualism (I hope I'm not misquoting myself too badly here).

I note that you're claiming that I was attacking "our" opinions, in your first paragraph, but portray some opinions as "not my" opinion in the third. I assume these aren't the same?

Mk270 18:12, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Notability and crackpot theories

So if I understand correctly it came down to whether these "alternative theories" are notable enough to go in the article.

To Gubbubu: there is a certain degree of notability a given view needs to reach before it can be mentioned in an article. Crackpot theories usually go into their own articles. You won't about Heribert Illig or Erich von Däniken in the main history articles.

So the question is whether these "alternative theories" are important enough to be discussed here, or are they crackpots who should only be mentioned in their own article (at best).

I'm not a linguist, so I won't even try to judge this. But to me it's a hint that the website you quote (kitalaltkozepkor.hu) is dedicated to Heribert Illig...

-- nyenyec ☎ 00:51, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

No, this is a site and a forum of much hungarian-related alternative theories. I don't know whether Dr. Végváry is an adherent of Illig's theories (and as I know him from his letters, he don't deals much with theories like these - and don't deals too much with middle-ages history if it is not necessary for his linguistics), but I know an other alternative scientists, Dr. Bakay wrote that it is unprobable. And what does it mean "crackpot theories"? I think the paragraph is too short to open a new article, anyway, "crackpot" is a very subjective verb (crackpot theory for me is that what I don't like). Gubbubu 09:12, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Bakay is not a linguist, he is a historian. I can't tell if Végváry's theories are notable or serious enough to be included in this article. I leave that to the linguist editors. -- nyenyec ☎ 15:04, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

No one said he is a linguist (I wrote: alternative scientist - but this is not true, he is not alternative, only antidogmatic in a special meaning of this word). I must repeat: READ, THINK & WRITE please, in this order. Thank you for leaving that. Gubbubu 17:09, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

I haven't wrote that you wrote that he was a linguist. :) Since this is an article about linguistics, I don't think his views count much here. -- nyenyec ☎ 17:21, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

What views of him? Where have his views been mentioned? Gubbubu 19:34, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Vowel harmony

I really dislike the vowel harmony examples. szirt is not composite order and is not archaic as implied, only the szirtok form of the plural is archaic (can be found in XIX century poems).

This is right. Gubbubu

I changed it to béka. The example of exceptions is incorrect: egy is quite regular and egy-kor is just using a suffix with only one form. This example has nothing to do with e being a neutral vowel, öt-kor would get just the same suffix. I did put an example with derék instead.

Thanks.

I did not, however, put in an explanation for why híd and company have behave like back words. AFAIK there used to be a back vowel like the Russian yeri. When it disappeared, the endings did not change. If somebody with more knowledge on this matter could add this info, that would be great. --Tappancsa 00:36, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I corrected originally the part "vowel harmony" mainly. The original version was much more incorrect, and I tried to give a better one, but as I couldn't correct all mistakes (and made some new), it wasn't good enough. This topic is quite hard, as i know there isn't an absolutely exact linguistic modell (without exceptions) for vowel harmony in hungarian language. Gubbubu 23:20, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Please see the page Hungarian phonology, maybe it can help you. And yes: There was a yeri-type sound sometime, that's the explanation for híd, but leaves derék etc. being a harder question... --Sicboy 00:36, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

Figures for Sweden

The 35,000 figure for Sweden seemed so unlikely that I removed it altogether. I'd be surprised if Hungarian speakers in Sweden were even in the thousands. Ethnologue mentions nothing of Hungarian speakers in Sweden, so please cite a source for this claim. - karmosin 16:42, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

complicated

I don't think hungarian is so complicated (but this is my mother tongue, so I don't count). But foreign learners really say often hungarian is so hard to learn. Gubbubu 01:16, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Every language has its complications - and in hungarian, it's the "cases"/adfixes for nouns that really tri[ up those whose mother language is non agglutinizing. By comparison, it could be easily said that English is hard to learn because of irrational spelling and irregular grammar, or that French or Portugues are difficult due to their elaborate verb tenses/moods and genderization of nouns. 69.158.148.117 05:30, 8 November 2005 (UTC) Thom Molnár-Boivin

History of the language

I'd love to see a short summary of the history of the language on this page, especially with some info on the language reform. (I'd also love to write about it but I'm afraid I'm not competent enough.) Alensha 23:14, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I am a canadian who lived in Hungary for 9 months and could barely get the basics of the language it was so complicated. In comparison, I learnt Spanish upto an intermediate level in Chile during a similar length of time. Much easier for me.142.46.72.254 19:16, 1 October 2005 (UTC)Orval

Phonology paragraph

One can read "There are some sounds which do not exist in English, such as /ɟ/."

It seems to me that duke is pronounced by some in the UK like /ɟu:k/, that is, the d is performed by pressing the tongue against the middle of the palate... I let some native speaker correct this fact if indeed needed!

/kv/ or /ø/ might be better examples of unknown sounds in English. /r/ also, except in dialectal speach.

Régis Lachaume

Hmmm, I think /ɟ/ is used only in BBC English, and even that's not exactly the Hungarian sound. It's rather [dju:k]. /kv/=?? --Sicboy 18:49, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)

/kv/ is not a sound in Hungarian, not even in English. Of course, in English /k/ can only be followed by /w/, never by /v/, but that's simply a restriction on the occurence of phonemes, as they usually exist in languages. I think Lachaume got confused about the fact, that the latin grapheme <qu> is pronounced exclusively /kw/ in English, but exclusively /kv/ in Hungarian (be it written still as <qu> as in quadriga or already as <kv> as in kvint. About the 'duke', I think Sicboy is right, the BBC pronounciation is [dju:k], which is different from [ɟu:k] (even if 'I' do pronounce it the latter, having Hungarian as mother tongue). /ø/ is indisputably a sound English does not have. -- Szabi 15:31, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

I've just edited to give a brief summary of the phonology. I left the example of /ɟ/ (definitely not standard English) but edited the text a bit. Also changed title to "Sounds" in accordance with the Wiki language template. Gailtb 06:20, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Hungarian spoken by ... - war

It seems some people think the old (not so accurate) numbers of people speaking Hungarian in Hungary and other countries are a little exaggerated. Why, okay, but I think the new numbers are not the best as well, as in most countries (yes, in Hungary too), government always tells a smaller number about speaking of population of their minorities.

Please tell me some example yet what minority is told to be smaller in Hungary. Gubbubu

AFAIK government numbers point out that ~1-1.5% of Hungarian population is Roma, while the truth can be near 5-8%.

You have to differenciate between ethnic Roma and people speaking Roma, so, referring to the original entry (not signed) and not to Gubbubu's, your argument is not right. The Roma language is seldom spoken among Hungarian Roma. -- Szabi 15:34, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

--Sicboy 22:49, 2005 Jun 16 (UTC) But the number about 9.5mio people speaking Hungarian in Hungary is ridiculous, because I think there are no permanent Hungarian citizens not speaking Hungarian today. The title of the linked page is: "Population by mother tongue, main demographic, occupational characteristics and sex". And: "Did not wish to answer: 513 089". Of those not living in Hungary I feel it necessary to comment this: the 2001 census was the first one since the WWII when people were asked about their nationality, religion and mother tongue; but answering these questions was optional, to avoid controversies. And as you can see many people "did not wish to answer". So I think it would be better to come to a compromise about these figures, at least better than just editing them every day. --Sicboy 22:03, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

I should like v. I would like

Regarding the recent reverts,

"I should like" is rarely ever heard today, though still considered "proper English"; but "Fowler's Modern Usage" is no longer considered "Modern"! (It's actually quite old now, and terribly out of date!) Codex Sinaiticus 00:40, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

offer

If you get a copy of X-Sampa, Hungarian in here before the end of the week, I'll upload the files for the corresponding sounds/letter combinations illustrated by a word as said by a female and male speaker, recorded as .ogg files, complete with comments on peculiarities. Anyone interested? Habib 07:14, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Derékbe vs. derékba

Google fight says "derékba" is used more than 100 times as often as "derékbe" on the Web. Browsing further among the results for "derékbe", look what I got:

A derék⁽¹⁾ főnév ragozva mindig mély hangú: derékba, derekat, derekak, derekam, derekunk stb. A derék⁽²⁾ melléknév hangrendileg ingadozik: derékbe v. derékba; derekat v. deréket; derékül, derékul v. derekul; derekabb (v. derékebb). [4]

(In English: derék as a noun is always deep-ordered, while as an adjective it can be either order.)

To prove this further: does anyone (speaking Hungarian) think "derékes" is a correct alternative for "derekas"? ;)

KissL 11:25, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

No, I don't think. Gubbubu 23:45, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Hey, nobody ever thought that, but derekam, derekas are always used like that, while derékbe can (well at least I think) turn up sometime. So why use the derékba example, when derekam is just a perfect example. It is possible in Hungarian, that a word has back suffixes in some forms and front in other forms. E.g. nobody says *férfiek, *férfies; but férfiben, férfinek is common (although férfiban, férfinak is good too) --Sicboy 16:46, 2005 July 29 (UTC)

We don't use derékbe. This form is not only rarely used, but really false. Férfiben is a very unusued form, too. Gubbubu 23:45, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Lots of people say "férfiben". Moreover, Google has 68 hits for "derékbe", which means it is actually used. Language is apparently changing! In fact, the community of native speakers can be the only judge to decide what exists and what does not. Correctness, historical basis, literariness etc. are other things. -- Adam78 17:36, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Well, I suppose the article should be talking about correct forms only – and considering a word form correct when the number of its occurrences is still below 1% will make us accept virtually everything as such. For example, the patently ridiculous "2-őt" has 7,620 Google hits versus the 62,700 hits of "2-t", so "2-őt" is even over 10%. (Don't try googlefight in this case, it screws up anything with "ő" in it.)

Of course, this doesn't apply to forms predominantly used in a certain dialect or limited geographical area, but AFAIK "derékbe" is not so. It might once make its way into common usage, but IMO it clearly hasn't yet. Also, not all of those 68 hits (which, if you view all of them, turn out to be 42 :) except for duplications) use "derék" as a noun. That said, I'm always OK with an "even less ambiguous" example, so I don't want "derékba" back.

"Férfi" is again a different thing, it usually has deep-ordered suffixes because originally it was "férfiú", a deep-ordered word with two neutral vowels and a deep one at the end (but even if it were composite-ordered, it would require deep-ordered suffixes). With the rapid disappearance of the last vowel, the sound order of the word is changing accordingly, which can easily be accepted (even predicted) as a natural change of the language. Correspondingly, "férfinek" appears (on the web) in almost 20% of the cases, which is significant. KissL 09:16, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Basically I agree with you: "derékbe" is not significant and the article should speak about correct things. In connection with "derékbe", I actually replied to Gubbubu, who said it was "really false", which is nonsense. Yes, "lót" is incorrect because an adult Hungarian speaker will say "lovat" ["horse", irregular accusative]. But we see there are adult Hungarian speakers who say "derékbe", so we can't say it's not non-existential, it's just peripheric. ("Derékbe" obviously has the analogy "kerékbe", which may well affect its usage.)

By the way, I don't think "2-t" and "2-őt" are good examples since it's only the knowledge of orthography, which is very important culturally and everything, but is, in itself, not part of the language. There are/were languages which are/were spoken by nations who didn't have writing systems at all, so orthography doesn't and can't exist, yet, correct and incorrect things can be clearly decided. People who write "2-őt" will equally say "kettőt" as those who write "2-t", so it's not a linguistic difference.

Anyway, in Wikipedia, we must try to provide the most correct, most common and most widely accepted examples for those interested in Hungarian language. -- Adam78 23:50, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Agree with the last post, but I recommend not using the word correct as its usage is ambiguous. The main point in this article we try to provide the spoken standard, that is used in the media, not-too-high literary, newspapers, and in the speech of Budapest middle-class (if such exists:). I tried to argue that the word derékbe (and férfinek) might be used by some, and so, why not replace it with a much less ambiguous example. But I think, everyone has agreed with that :) --Sicboy 15:40, 2005 August 2 (UTC)

Passive voice

Okay, new topic. "The passive voice is almost extinct, but can be found in old literary texts." is the crucial point. Now, what is the passive voice in Hungarian?? I think it is not extinct, rather it has never existed! The -tatik/tetik is not a "passive voice", because this categorization is based on languages different from Hungarian (see the problem of case). Using the term "voice" you imply that it is in the inflection of the verb (such as other moods, person, number, etc.). But in Hungarian it is (was) just a derivational suffix, just like the -hat/-het, or -gat/-get suffixes, which have been never called the "possibility mood/voice" or "frequency mood/voice"...

However, the structure van + verb in gerund is used very frequently like a passive, however it has other usages as well (e.g. perfective) so it can't be called "The Passive Voice In Hungarian" as well. (oh yeah, and that's why it is not a germanism or whatever:) --Sicboy 15:52, 2005 August 2 (UTC)

Agreed on my part. I edited it out and placed an HTML comment about it to the place where I think it should be discussed. I'm not familiar with the exact terms used by linguists, so I'll let you rephrase it if necessary and move it out of the comment afterwards. KissL 16:19, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I think it is alright now. We could uncomment this sentence, when there are more (and better structured) information on the conjugation of verbs, e.g. gerund, participles and derivational suffixes. But I think when these will be added, they can be replaced to a proposed Hungarian grammar page, with many tables etc. already on this page. --Sicboy 18:29, 2005 August 3 (UTC)

The "passive voice" expression, IMHO, does not imply an inflectional structure. It rather describes a grammatical structure to express a certain relationship. Wheather the structure is inflecting or agglutinating is of no interest. Btw, it was last week that I saw -tVtik in a newspaper. It's definitely not extinct (I use it sometimes, when apt, as well). It's an other question, when it's really "passive voice" and when it's a "simple" "csináltató" mood (which is, IMHO again a difference in grammatical terms, but might have the same syntactical sign). -- Szabi 14:31, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Well I think emphasizing the "passive voice" as placing its mention to an important place is misleading. It's like stating, that Hungarian has a feminine gender by affixing -né to a noun. It is even used in some occasions but there is nothing that far from the feminine gender...

The difference between the passive suffix -tAtik and the causative suffix -tAt are

• the causative is never an "ik-verb", the passive is always
• the syntactic and semantic structure of the sentence is totally different: valami íratik valaki által "something is written by somebody" --><-- valaki írat valakivel valamit "somebody gets someone write something" (?). Thus, the two suffixes can never be confused.

(and again, it is not a "csináltató"=causative mood it is just a derivational suffix like -gAt, -kOdik etc.) --Sicboy 00:39, 2005 August 8 (UTC)

I still think we should mention it - not because the passive voice is important in Hungarian, but rather because it is important in English. We shouldn't forget that we are describing the Hungarian language for speakers of English here. KissL 08:31, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Sicboy, you claim "Using the term "voice" you imply that it is in the inflection of the verb"; this is not true. Passive voice is nothing to do with inflection. In English, it's hardly done by inflection, is it? Passive voice is where the number of arguments a verb has is reduced by one: "I(1) gave the book(2) to her(3)" becomes "The book(2) was given to her(3) / To her(3) was given the book(2)", and the thing which was the object of the verb becomes the subject.

Too often in discussions of Hungarian, people have claimed that since a particular feature is achieved differently in Hungarian, it does not exist in Hungarian. This is often nonsense, and should cease. 09:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Well, sure, maybe it was a mistake. Anyway I tried to imply that the usage and importance of the Hungarian -tAtik suffix is different from the English passive, and should not be mentioned on that place. However, Kissl's argument is considerable, but I still think that the place of this sentence is rather in a more developed, independent grammar page. That could make this article clearer as well. --Sicboy 14:40, 2005 August 13 (UTC)

Sumerian

you seriously have to cut down on the "Sumerian" stuff in this article, if it is to be any good. Do a Ugro-Sumerian hypothesis article or something if these claims really must be discussed. They are, of course, pseudoscience, and an article about the Hungarian language should be based on facts, not on kooky root etyomlogies. dab (ᛏ) 15:00, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Yes, this should at most be mentioned as mythology, or as a passing fancy historically, like the idea that all languages descend from Hebrew. kwami 23:01, 2005 August 22 (UTC)

There is plenty of evidence to allow for some speculation on the part. I would hardly qualify it as a "myth". It can go as an unproven theory. --64.164.69.221 01:32, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

No, there isn't, because it doesn't show such regular sound correspondences as Italian and Spanish and French etc., or English and German etc., or Russian and Czech etc., or Hungarian and Finnish etc. etc. etc. All the vocabulary similarities between Hungarian and Sumerian are by chance and without any kind of regularity (whether form or meaning), which occurs between any two selected languages of the world. Besides, such words are compared from Hungarian which didn't even exist at the supposed time of the shared time of the two nations, since many of the words involved in this research are loanwords in Hungarian, from a much later time than it could be possible within the Sumerian theoretical framework. -- Adam78 12:12, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

First of all, the phrase "unproven theory" is tautological. All theories are unproven. You can't "prove" that the world even existed yesterday. You only get proofs in mathematics.

Secondly, a theory requires the testing of predictions. You can do this with Uralic: you can make predictions that, for example, regular sound changes from Ugric words would lead you to expect certain forms if any of the Fennic languages had cognates; you look, and voilà, there they are. This was most famously demonstrated with the laryngeal theory in Indo-European: de Saussure hypothesized, based on comparitive evidence from the Indo-European languages, that the proto-language must have had certain weak consonants in some words that have disapeared completely from all known languages. Some years later Hittite was discovered (through the decipherment of its texts); lo and behold, Hittite had /h/ just where de Saussure predicted it would be. Now that's a theory (albeit an "unproven theory"). Uralic is similar. Ugro-Sumerian is nothing of the kind; it's a hypothesis that never went anywhere, and which now seems less likely than when it was proposed. kwami 18:28, 2005 August 23 (UTC)

>:) I was told and have read that the connection between the languages is that both of their grammars are agglutinative... that words used in a sophisticated city society in Iraq more than 2000 years ago should not sound the same as words used a thousand years later in the Crimea by their supposed descendents who were primarily horseman and whose only concept of a "permanent structure" was the pole that held up the tent of the lead cheif wouldn't surprise me a bit. (but hey, one person's speculation is another's deductive reasoning)

Phonetic correspondences are the only way to establish genetic relationships. That two languages are both agglutinative doesn't mean anything, a good many (even most?) of the world's languages are agglutinative. Often languages can be related without having similar grammar. English, nearly an isolating language, is related to Russian, a synthetic language. Estonian is related to the other Uralic languages even though it has some striking grammatical innovations. CRCulver 00:18, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Not really adjacent

"The Hungarian language is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and in adjacent areas of Romania[...]"

In Romania, the language is spoken mostly in the counties of Covasna and Harghita, both situated in the center of the country and pretty far away from the hungarian border.Of course you'll find speakers in most of Transilvania, but those two counties are by far the most representative.

Case again

Just a comment on case. Case does not mean the form of a morpheme, as agglutinative or inflectional, it refers to its behavior. (Though, granted, the two are related.) Some of the Hungarian cases behave like core cases in other languages (such as I me my in English), whereas others seem to correspond more closely to English prepositions. Because all languages are rather fuzzy in their behavior, we end up with a continuum of core case - non-core case - adposition. Each morpheme will have to be argued separately, and for some no agreement will be possible, because things don't always fall into clear-cut categories. (And Hungarian is certainly not likely to match Latin or Greek, whether it has case or no.)

Also, Hungarian "case" involves verbal aspect. We have something very similar with English prepositions: he ate the cake vs. he ate up the cake, where "up" indicates the aktionsart of the verb rather than the case relation of the noun. The Slavic languages of course are famous for this kind of thing. As far as I know, no linguist, Hungarian or otherwise, has ever worked out the aspectual ramifications of the Hungarian "case" system. We can argue about it all we want, but this can only be resolved with additional research. kwami 02:28, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Can you give me an example where aktionsart has (or may have) anything to do in Hungarian with cases or case suffixes? To be frank, I've got no idea what you're speaking about. Adam78 12:21, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I can't say much, as I don't know the language myself. This is just what I've picked up from listening to people who do study Hungarian: How the case system is actually used in conversation, as opposed to what the grammar books say.

Do you get the idea in English? I could say "I ate my dinner", or I could say "I ate it all up". That's the form used in Little Red Riding Hood: the Big Bad Wolf ate the grandma "all up". The "up" does not behave as a preposition here, or even a directional adverb, as in 'look up'; rather, it may be more illuminating to say that it qualifies the aspect of the verb, making it perfective, perhaps. It gives the idea that the eating was done to completion (even when the word 'all' is not used). The claim is that the Hungarian 'case' system is put to similar uses. The sublative -ra, -re is supposedly used like a perfective, like "up" in English, for example. Supposedly in actual conversation, as well as in written texts, many suffixes behave very little like a case system, and more like aktionsart. That's really all I know. It's quite possible that others behave more like case (accusative, genitive, dative are frequently rather basic, and not just because of Greco-Latin tradition), and that others function more like prepositions. It's also likely that they have dual roles, just as "up" is often a true preposition (or at least a directional adverb) in English. Anyway, it's likely to be a complex story, and each suffix is probably idiosyncratic, just as each "preposition" (many of which aren't actually prepositions much of the time) is idiosyncratic in English. kwami 18:31, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I can imagine two things:

• either some verbal prefix require some case suffixes (which does occur) – but in these cases it's the verbal prefixes that semantically carry the aktionsart, not the case suffixes;
• or there are a few words which have this -ra/-re suffix, which words happen to carry this meaning (or rather, the "really much", "extremely", "like hell" meaning), like marhára, baromira, kurvára in slang – but these are individual, isolated cases (in my opinion) and your acquaintances might have overgeneralized its significance.

These are my hints. To say anything more, I should know the exact cases your acquaintances encountered...

Adam78 18:44, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't know the details, but my impression was that it was neither of the above. Rather, it was when the suffixes were used in conversation with regular nouns that didn't require them lexically. Also, -ra/-re was simply one example I was given when I asked about this; it was not the only suffix to behave this way. What she thought she was finding was that most of them behaved this way. But as far as I know nothing like this has been published, so it's nothing we can use directly. kwami 19:10, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

sond correspondances

Added some Ugric and Fenno-Ugric sound correspondances. Yes, I know these would normally go in the articles about the families, but since the relationships of Hungarian remain contentious outside linguistic circles, I thought it would be prudent to give some evidence for the classification here in this article. kwami 20:22, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

not NPOV?

Hi!

I do believe, that now the article is of a NPOV, at most unsignivicant un-NPOVs remain. It seems to be the remains of old (sumerian etc, etc...) versions of the article. Therefore I suggest removing the somewhat disturbing and unpleasant NPOV-template from the top.

I will do so, if you don't object or don't have good arguments against it. -- Szabi 21:45, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I object. The artile still has a tainted POV. Now I am not a linguist but I think that a POV is inherent in this article. As was pointed out before it has to do with Hugarian and greater European politics. In particular the debate between weather Hungarian is a Turkic language or not. This is also related to questions of the genetic origin of the Hungarians. The POV I see can be summed up thusly: Hungarians are genetically, linguistically, and cultually "as european" as frenchmen or germans. They are european because they are not linguistically or culturally at all like those Turkish people living to the south. The POV in the article is posed as the opposite to the POV. This while eveyr primary source I have read on the Huns, OnOgurs,Avars, Magyars, then Hugarians tells me that they and their language are as turkic as Suleman and the sublime Porte.

That and I am a physicist by trade and linguistics seems based on POV and simply convincing a majority that you POV is correct based on logic. Without experiment all you have pseudoscience anyway. --Hfarmer 06:09, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Hungarian is not Turkic, although there were theories that it was Turkic. It is Uralic. According to scientists. Daydreamers say it is Sumer, or Parthus, or even from the Sirius. Well these may be right :) but the main point is that Hungarians are, as you say, genetically and culturally very much like its neighbours, Western Slavs and Germans (and all Europeans). However, its language is not Indo-European. Neither Turkic. Linguistics is not based on POV however, historical linguistics have methods to show if a language and another language are related. These are exact methods. Using these you get that Hungarian is Uralic, and French is Romance. You can say you have better methods: show them. If you say these linguistic methods are not right: okay, then Hungarian is not Uralic, French is not Romance, and Cockney is not English. Did you win anything? --Sicboy 21:54, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Here is a good experiment. Take native speakers of a Uralic language and native speakers of a Turkic languge, and put them in a room with a native speaker of Hungarian. Pick people who are simmilar in appearance, so as to filter out the effects of racism on anyones part. Take every precaution to make sure the only variable is language. Run the test with Hungarian and different combinations of uralic and turkic languages. Observe who can understand whom. Repeat this many many times to get statistically firm results and damp out errors or biases. If the majority of the time the Hungarian speaker and the Uralic speaker can understand eachother then Hungarian would be closely related to Uralic. If the majority of the time the Hungarian speaker and the Turkic speaker can understand eachother then Hungarian is more closely related to Turkic. This is what a scientist would do(short of a team of physicist building a time machiene). The whole experiment would be analogous to mating two annimals to see if they produce offspring and weather or not those offspring are fertile, hence they are related.

What linguist do is sit around and philosophise about how they feel about a language. :-|:-\ :-/ :-( are the faces of Physicist who look at that and have to put up with such people calling themselves scientist.

That said, I can cite current authoratiative linguistic sources that say that Hungarian is a Turkic language, or at least a Turkic language influenced by Urlaic. About the Hungarian language, University of Texas.Hungary blocks Hun minority bid. or this [http://www.filolog.com/languageStrangeCake.html Hungarian Language School].Read the balace of these articles and you see that linguist are at best split on the matter of where to put Hungarian . I am inclined to think that linguist are heavily influenced by politics, fasion, and racism. Right now it is more in vouge to be related to Slavs than to Turks. --Hfarmer 22:54, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Hi Hfarmer, I'd like to point you to Finno-ugric languages, Uralic languages and their talk pages to learn more about this debate. -- nyenyec ☎ 23:49, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

So, Hfarmer, if you wanted to know whether cats were more closely related to dogs or to parakeets, you wouldn't sit around and philosophise about comparative anatomy and genetics, but instead would put a representative sampling of cats, dogs, and parakeets into a room to see if they could breed?

It might be a good idea to read up on a subject before a claiming to know the answer. Would you take me seriously if I were to propose an experiment to measure the mass of the neutrino, if I had never heard of Newton or Maxwell?

I suggest that you read up on comparitive or historical linguistics.

As for your "authoritative" sources, you're not serious, are you? The first is a student web page. The second is a BBC news article that says nothing about Hungarian linguistic relations (and in any case it's a news article! Would you expect the BBC to get physics right?), and the third completely contradicts you. Here's a quote:

Actually, the Hungarians themselves had lost all memory of their Finno-Ugric origins. They thought they were a far-off branch of the Turks and/or Mongolians, and that ultimately they derived from the Huns. For many centuries this was the accepted theory taught in schools and, even after being ousted from serious scholarship by the Finno-Ugric discovery, it survived as a neo-romantic and neo-nationalist legend, so much so that Attila is now one of the most frequent Christian names among Hungarian men.

kwami 00:54, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

(By the way, everybody, his [third ref is a well written short article, and a nice read. I recommend it. kwami)

Kwami ask...

"So, Hfarmer, if you wanted to know whether cats were more closely related to dogs or to parakeets, you wouldn't sit around and philosophise about comparative anatomy and genetics, but instead would put a representative sampling of cats, dogs, and parakeets into a room to see if they could breed?"

Yes, or I would take samples of their tissue to a genetics lab and ask them to classify to what species these animals belong and how these animals are related. The way you set up your question takes what I propose to a absurd length but it is the basic idea. A better example would be taking several animals of the same type such as two or three allegedly different species of Crocodile and seeing if they can breed. Such an experiment is crude but the results are ultimately the same as what expensive DNA testing would tell you about related ness.

In the case of language families what we would need is three large samples. At least 1000 native speakers of Hungarian who know no other language. A random sampleing of persons who speak a random sampling of Turkic languages. Last a random sampling of persons who speak a random sampling of Uralic languages. Instead of putting the people together physically we could just take audio recordings of the speaker's of Urlaic and Turkic languages saying certain phrases in their languages. Then see how well Hungarian speakers can interpret the phrases. Large samples at least 1000 people saying a large number of different phrases would be necessary to give a statistically significant result.

If the Hungarians after hearing these samples can on average interpret the phrases from language family A better than those from language family B it would indicate a deep connection to language family A.

Including a sampling of the many other Turkic languages other than Turkish would remove the bias that Turkish loan words would put into the results. As a matter of fact we would have to leave Turkish out of the sampling of Turkic languages to ensure that the results were not skewed.

Furthermore biological decent and language relatedness are not correlated. As a matter of fact I can cite recent DNA evidence which concludes the following. Hungarians, specifically Magyars, are of Turkoman origin with recent admixture of German and Slavic haplotypes.

• "Probable ancestors of Hungarian ethnic groups: an admixture analysis"

C. R. GUGLIELMINO1, A. DE SILVESTRI2 and J. BERES

• MtDNA and Y chromosome polymorphisms in Hungary: inferences from the palaeolithic, neolithic and Uralic influences on the modern Hungarian gene pool

I will admit on the issue of language you may have an argument but in the face of DNA you cannot argue. In science the experiment is the final arbiter of disputes. Kwami you should not resist what I propose. With experiments like what I have described Historical Comparative Linguisticscan be elevated to the noble realm of laboratory sciences and gain much enlightenment and credibility.

Note the matter of fact and unemotional tone of my response. I just want Wikipedia to be as accurate up to date and non Idealogical as possible. That means being complete. The people that come here trust us to provide them with all the facts that are pertinent and to back them with Authoratative links. I provide such links whenever I write on something on which I am not an expert myself. One also has to take the whole context of the link in to account. For example the line kwami cited is preceded by

"Their names (e.g. Árpád, Gyula for men, Emese, Sarolta for women) were also Turkish, as were their clothes, weapons, kitchen

utensils and burial rites. Thus it is not surprising that the Byzantine chronicles which first mention the Hungarians (around 950 AD), call them "Turks",Hungarian Language School"

Dont take our words for what the article says see for yourselves. THINK critically!

--Hfarmer 06:35, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

What you propose is so basic to linguistics that it isn't even mentioned most of the time. You only come across it in, say, debates about how many languages Mixtec is, or German. Of course, if two forms of speech are mutually intelligible, they're considered dialects of the same language (they might be distinct ethnolinguistically, but that's a separate point). However, applying this to Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish isn't going to tell us anything more than trying to breed cats, dogs, and parakeets. (You say you're willing to go to a geneticist for answers, but not to a linguist? This strikes me as a bit bizarre.) If two forms of speech have no intelligibility, intelligibility tests will only tell you they aren't closely related. They will tell you nothing about more distant genealogical relationships. It really would be easier to discuss this if you had some idea of what you were talking about -- read up on it, okay? kwami 06:49, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Nature versus nurture and languages

Hfarmer, you're speaking about two different things: genetic testing is one, and experimenting with people understand each other is another. Don't confuse them! The first is about derivation, origins, the second is about neighbourhood, environs, setting. Imagine a child who was born to parents of one culture and who is adopted and brought up by parents of an entirely different culture (say, a Pakistani child by Canadian parents). Who will he more resemble, his natural or his adopting parents? He'll retain some characteristics from his birth and natural parents, but he'll also show several characteristics from his upbringing parents -- that is, both factors will be visible to some extent. – The case is similar with Hungarian language: it is genetically related to Uralic languages, but its Uralic features don't show up obviously since Hungarian lived in a Turkic environment for centuries. (You'll also equally see Canadian and Pakistani traces in the child.)

If you only analyse people's speech, you'll only analyse their nurture, their upbringing, their adopted parents and you will not know anything about the genetics of the language. Decide which you're more interested in: genetics or outer appearance. They are sometimes different. Languages are usually so much exposed to other languages during thousands of years as if children were brought up by alien parents. Genetics and outer appearance often say different things. It's your choice to select which you listen to. Even if the child will act as a perfect Canadian (with Canadian habits, customs, speech, manners, style, interests, clothes, hobbies, education, language, way of living and everything), his genes will remain Pakistani until his death. Hungarian could be a thousand times more like Turkish, and it would still remain Uralic in origins. Because classification deals with origins, rather than appearence. Just like genetics does. -- Adam78 14:22, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Along those lines, here's what Lyovin says about Hungarian, which he classifies (surprise!) as Ugric:

The ancestors of modern Hungarians arrived into present-day Hungary around A.D. 896 after a series of migrations from a region just west of the Urals as a part of a military coalition of Magyar and various Turkic tribes.

and, of Uralic languages is general, about "labial" harmony (vowel harmony in rounded vs. unrounded vowels),

labial harmony occurs in Hungarian, Eastern Cheremis, and Selkup, all languages which have been under Turkic influence.

kwami 00:09, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Hfarmer, your experiment about taking a speaker of Hungarian, another of a Turkic language, and another of a different Uralic language would be invalid scientifically. You would need control groups. What were to happen if you put together speakers from known related langauges, like Spanish, Farsi, and Armenian? Or what about two sets of speakers of Hungarian, Turkic, and a different Uralic language and you tell one set that their languages are related and you tell the other set that their languages are not related? The only thing you may prove is that the feature of mutual intelligability is not a requirement for language relatedness. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 03:14, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Mistakes?

I noted two items from the beginning of the article that appear wrong somehow.

"The Hungarian name for the language is magyar [ˈmɒɟɒr̪]."

Isn't the name for the language magyarul?

"The largest diaspora concentration is in the now Romanian counties of Transylvania ..."

Is it inappropriate to use the term diaspora in this context? The presence of the Hungarian (Székely) population of Transylvania is not a result of a large movement of refugees who were driven from their homeland. Perhaps a better term would be 'minority'? IIRC, the Csángo population could be considered a diaspora.

--Stacey Doljack Borsody 18:56, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

• The Hungarian name of the language is "magyar". "magyarul" means something like "in Hungarian".
  • ("magyarul" means exactly "in Hungarian". Gubbubu)
• I agree that diaspora is not a good description! Gailtb 19:52, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
  • • Agree, should be erased the term diaspora. Diaspora is maybe likely in US,...Still, Csángo population could not be considered a diaspora.-- Bonaparte talk 18:00, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Two Quotations?

Why are there those two quotations at the bottom of the article? The Sir John Bowring one discloses information now widely accepted as being false, and neither is particularly notable. Mk270 17:26, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Alinei's theory?

Perhaps Alinei's theory about the origin of the Hungarian language could also be of interest. In a book published in 2003 Alinei makes a case for Etruscan being an archaic form of Hungarian. Aside from similarities in magistrature names, there is an extensive list of grammatical and syntactical similarities, some appear to be rather fundamental: agglutination, vowel harmony, how prepositions are used in conjunction with indicative pronouns, etc. Also, the theory has generated testable hypotheses, and sensible interpretations of inscriptions on some Etruscan pottery. Balazs 18:25, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Nearly all reputable linguists consider Mario Alinei to be a crackpot. Mentioning him in an article on the Hungarian language is like mentioning flat-earth theory in an article on cosmology. All the similarities between Hungarian and Etruscan that you mention are typological similiarities, and they prove nothing at all. The only criterion that can decide a genetic relationship between two languages is regular phonological correspondence. CRCulver 18:52, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

I would not have claimed that Alinei's theory is proven. I am sure that the theory has more solid basis than the Sumerian hypothesis that is on the page though. Your metaphor is an interesting one in this case, since Galileo himself did not receive the best possible treatment during his time. Moreover the PCT workgroup does include a number of linguists. But in any case a short paragraph of pros and cons would not hurt. Balazs 10:06, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Would anyone confirm?

When I add up the number of persons speaking the Hungarian language, I got appr. 12.1 million + the additional one million in other parts of the world. However, at the start of the article one can read about 14.5 million Hungarian speakers, and the summary table states a total of 15 million speakers. (In my oppinion, 13.1 is the correct value.)

And: I don't speek Finnish so I don't know which side of an example is broken. Nonetheless, Hungarian "forr" (boils) is clearly not "snow flurry" (hófúvás).

Dialects Question

In the article, it states "The Hungarian Csángó dialect, not listed by Ethnologue, is spoken mostly in Bacău conty, Romania. This minority group in Moldavia has been largely isolated from other Hungarians, thus they preserved a dialect closely resembling medieval Hungarian."

What does "this minority group" refer to? The Hungarians in the Romanian county (meaning the 'Moldavia' reference is incorrect), or is the word 'this' incorrect (maybe a leftover from a previous edit)? Can anyone clear that up?

Istvan 22:16, 4 February 2006 (UTC)