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GRAMMAR
TheFocusofThisLessonIstheHungarianWritingSystem
Hungarian used to have its own writing system called Old
Hungarian script, but only a veryfew amount of text remained.
Instead, Hungarians adopted the Latin alphabet very early,
around the eleventh century. What we call the Hungarian alphabet
today, is actually the Latin
basis extended to conform to the characteristics of the
Hungarian language.
Alphabet
When learning the Hungarian alphabet, the good news is that it
is mostly phoneticthat is,
once you learn which letter corresponds to which sounds you're
pretty much done, you can
read Hungarian decently. Apart from a few traditional forms and
exceptions, this rule stands.
The alphabet has 40 or 44 letters, depending on whether you
include Q, W, X and Y, which
appear rarely and only in names and foreign words.
Using the greater alphabet here, Hungarian has 30 consonants.
Prospective students should
will be happy to know that there are no little squiggly marks or
any other weird symbols that
human imagination can conjure upbut you will have to learn what
the combination of two
consonant letters represent. Here is the list of all the
consonants in the order they appear in
the alphabet:
b,c,cs,d,dz,dzs,f,g,gy,h,j,k,l,ly,m,n,ny,p,q,r,s,sz,t,ty,v,w,x,y,z,
zs.
The vowels are a bit more challenging, what makes them easier is
that they come in pairs of
short-long sounds (or at least this is how they are taught). The
seven pairs are:
a-,e-,i-,o-,-,u-,-
Some of these might look bewildering at first, especially ,
which is the arch-enemy of all the
world processing softwares even today. But really, once you
learn the first one of the pair, the
short vowel, forming the longer version is easywith the
exception of a-and e-, where the
difference is not in length, but equally straightforward.
The layout of a Hungarian keyboard is very similar to the
English one, but instead of being
QWERTY it is QWERTZ (the German type). Other than z and y
trading places, everything is at
the same position. The specifically Hungarian vowel letters can
be found on the right side
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while like to wonder around the left side of the keyboard. Using
the Hungarian keyboard to
type English is very easy, except for the infuriating reflex of
hitting z every time you want to
write y.
If you'd like to follow along with the audio, the full alphabet
in order is:
A,,B,C,Cs,D,Dz,Dzs,E,,F,G,Gy,H,I,,J,K,L,Ly,M,N,Ny,O,,,,P,Q,R,S,Sz,T,Ty,U,,,,V,W,X,Y,Z,Zs.
