HUNGARIAN LANGUAGE. Called by those who speak it. Map-yar: one of the Ural Altaic group of languages. and both politically and literarily the most important representative of the group. With the exception of the closely allied Finnish (including the various Finnic dia lects spoken in Russia, as well as the Lapp) and Turkish, and the problematic Basque in the l'y relict's, it is to-day the only European lan guage that does not belong to the Indo-Germanic group. The Ural-Altaic languages arc divided into: (1) The Filino-1 grit and (2) :-;aniosedie, forming the Ural branch; and (3) Turkic, (4) _Mongolic, and (5) Tungusic, forming the .11taie branch. The linguistic position of Hungarian for many years the subject of a heated controversy, one school led by VfinilOry claiming its (dose affiliation with Turkish, while the other, under Mff:dry, placed it where it is now recog nized to belong, in the Finno-l'grie division.
Hungarian, like other Cral-.11taie tongues, is agglutinative in structure. It is built upon a basis of monosyllabic roots, through the addition of successive suffixes, wide!' entail no inner eliaitge or structural modification in the original stem, hut arc merely set up in a row, one after another, like a row of bricks. The suffixes themselves, however, are modified in obedience to a la NV of so-called vowel harmony, which forms the most distinetive feature of this group of lan guages. The vow(] sounds in Hungarian are di vided into three classes: ()pen vowels, a, ti, o, ri; dose vuwek, ii. 11; mid,ptv neutral vowels, B, i, I. These neutrals may be used in di•erently in words containing vowels of either of the other classes: but suffixes containing open or (lone vowels may stand only after a root con taining a vowel of the same class; e.g. hOzban, In the hous•': kcith4 n. 'in the garden'; raratan danak, 'they will he expected': Urctenelenek, 'they will be entreated.' Hungarian has no in flectional emlings, in the strictest sense of the term. It has no grammatical gender, or even suf fixes indicative of sex: (I means 'lie' or 'she,' neki. 'to him' ti her.' and sn on. In ex pressing case relations, the bare stem is used regularly for the nominative, and to some ex tent for the possessive: the other eases are represented by means of the Varian. post positive particles which in Hungarian take the Id:tee of prepositions: e.g. /Hiz, 'house'; loizban. 'in the house': hinhml, 'out of the house': 'in front of the ]mouse'; 'toward the house'; 'with the house': heiznt, 'house' (accusa tive) : Irrizrrlaff. 'under the hulls,-'; hazfelet, `above the house': ete. A note-worthy pecu liarity is the system of possessive suffixes em ployed with substantives, closely analogous to the personal endings of the verbs: e.g. luizam, `my Louse'; /uizad, `thy hei.:ee, 'his (her) blizunk, `our house'; hti `your house': heizok, `their house.' In the absence of the auxiliary verb `to have,' these possessive endings arc used with the verb `to be,' to de note ownership; nekiink ran loizunk, 'to us is house ours.' i.e. 'we have a house.' The verbal system in Hungarian is highly devel oped. giving the language a remarkable flexi bility and a wide range of expression. though it offers 1n foreigners the chief difficulty in acquiring the language. There are two distinct
forms of the verb, a definite and an indefinite form. differing throughout in their terminations. Their respective uses are exceedingly idiomatic, but in general the distinction between them de pends upon whether or not the object of the verb is a definite person or thing: 14tok, 'I see'; a hiltyo t hitom, 'I see the dog.' Hungarian is espe cially rich in derivative verbs. Not only are there suffixes whieh, added to the simple verbal stem, form causative, frequentative, inceptive, intensive, diminutive, reciprocate, potential, and desiderative steins, but with the characteristic facility of agglutinative languages, two or more of these suffixes may be used in combination, re sulting in such linguistic anomalies as reflexive frequentative-potential, int•ansitive-diminutive potential, and transitive-frequentative•eansative potential verbs. The following examples will give sffille idea of the formation of derivative verbs: Mini, 'to see'; hitogalni, 'to visit'; be •they talk'; beszOgetne/.., 'they chatter'; b•szi'lku(Inek, 'they talk with each other'; rcr, 'lle beats'; rtrintlu t, 'he ean beat gently.' Among the peculiarities of the language are: the two person suffix, used in place of the regular neling of the first person, When the subject of the verb is 'I,' and the object 'thee' or 'you'; the use of the singular number with ordinal numerals, e.g. biz !leis, 'ten house' (not and the inverted order of name and surname, e.g. Arany nos = John A rany ; := Alexan der l'etOti, requirements of emphasis often allow the words in a short Hun garian sentence to be put in an order the leverse of that in English: e.g. l'e'nze met •lrett szolgoloni, 'money-my away-took servant-my' tiny servant took (away) my money'). The extent to which agglutination may be carried in the Hungarian language will be illustrated by the fact that it is possible to perform the fol lowing operation of word-building: .11 agyar, 'Hun garian'; Magyarrizni, 'to render into Hungarian,' hence `to make elear,"to translate'• nirgmag yar(izni, to translate,' with the added notion of the accomplishment of the action, the syllable having the force of the German be and cr; incgmagyarozhat, 'he may translate': meg magyardzhatat n, 'that cannot be translated.' megmagyanizhatallanabb, 'more untranslatable'; legmegmagya•dzhatatlanabb, 'most untranslatable'; plural subs. legmegmag yarrizha tat hinabbak, 'the most untranslatable': a li.gmcgmagyartizhatatlanabhakal, 'with the most untranslatable.' A large number of names of common things in the Hungarian language are borrowed from the Slade and German. Consult IIiinfalvy, Die Ungarn oder Mag yaren ( Vienna, I 881 ) ; id., Ethnographic l'ngarn ( German trans. with additions by Sehwicker, Budapest, 1877); id., l'einibe'rys rrsprung (ter Murmurer! (Vienna. 1883, refuting Viiinb6ry's theory of a Turkish relation) ; Riedl, ilagyarisehe Grammatik (Vienna, 1858) ; Topler, Grammar, in German ( Budapest. 1842) ; Singer, Grammar. in English (London, 1882): Ballagi, German-Magyar and .11rqyar•O'ernnan Diet ionary (3d ed., Budapest. 1874); Bizonfy. English. Hun garian Diet ionary 1878); the Dictionary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (ib., 18(12 74). See 'HUNGARY.