Hungarian language

From Citizendium
Revision as of 02:18, 16 October 2008 by imported>Louise Valmoria (some detail about hungarian word order)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This article is a stub and thus not approved.
Main Article
Discussion
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
 
This editable Main Article is under development and subject to a disclaimer.

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, spoken in Hungary and by minority communites elsewhere by about 15 million people. It is not related to any Indo-European language, and is said to be very difficult to learn for speakers of unrelated tongues.

Hungarian can be recognized from its many e-s (pronounced like in the English word let) and the stress, which is always on the first syllable. The alphabet contains 44 letters: 14 vowels and 26 consonants, plus 4 "foreign letters": q, w, x and y. It also has an extensive case system.

Word order in Hungarian differs greatly from English word order. The case system of Hungarian means that it does not rely on word order to determine the grammatical function of each word. Whilst case markings allows for a freedom of sentence structure much unlike English, word order is not free; it is instead used as a means of providing background or emphasis to information.

The term used for Hungarian word order is topic-comment structure. This means that previously known or background information (the topic) begins the the sentence, and new information (the comment) follows.