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Hungarian language
Alphabet, including ő ű and cs dz dzs gy ly ny sz ty zs
Phonetics and phonology
Vowel harmony
Grammar    Noun phrases    Verbs Image File history File links Question_book-3. ... Hungarian (magyar nyelv  ) is a Finno-Ugric language (more specifically an Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (1600x1200, 603 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Hungarian language Vowel harmony T-V distinction Double acute accent Hungarian alphabet Old Hungarian script List of English... The Hungarian alphabet is an extension of the Roman alphabet. ... The double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the latin script used primarily in written Hungarian. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Linguistics & Pronunciation Dz is the seventh letter of the Hungarian alphabet. ... // Linguistics & Pronunciation Dzs is the eighth letter, and only trigraph, of the Hungarian alphabet. ... Linguistics & Pronunciation Gy is the thirtheenth letter of the Hungarian alphabet. ... Linguistics & Pronunciation Ly is the twentieth letter of the Hungarian alphabet. ... Linguistics & Pronunciation Ny is the twenty-third letter of the Hungarian alphabet. ... Linguistics & Pronunciation Sz is the thirty-second letter of the Hungarian alphabet. ... Linguistics & Pronunciation Ty is the thirty-fourth letter of the Hungarian alphabet. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Vowel harmony (also metaphony) is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels. ... Hungarian grammar is the study of the rules governing the use of the Hungarian language, a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and in adjacent areas of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia (all territories lost after World War I). ... This page is about noun phrases in Hungarian grammar. ... This page is about verbs in Hungarian grammar. ...
T-V distinction
Regulatory body
Hungarian name
Language history    Sound correspondences In sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a language has second-person pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee. ... The Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Nyelvtudományi Intézete, that is, Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was founded in 1949. ... // Orthography Modern Hungarian orthography is slightly different (simpler) than that of 18th or 19th century, but many Hungarian surnames retain their historical spelling. ... The language is predominantly spoken in Central Europe. ... There are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. ...
Tongue-twisters
Hungarian pronunciation of English • Old Hungarian script • English words from Hungarian
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This article deals with the phonology and the phonetics of the Hungarian language. (Phonology studies abstract elements (phonemes) as they contrast with each other; phonetics studies the actual acoustic realizations of phonemes as speech sounds.) Phonology (Greek phonÄ“ = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound or voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Hungarian (magyar nyelv  ) is a Finno-Ugric language (more specifically an Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. ... In spoken language, a phoneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words (i. ...

Consonants

Hungarian has the following consonant system:

Almost every consonant may be geminated, written by doubling a single letter grapheme: bb, pp, ss etc., or by doubling the first letter of a grapheme cluster: ssz, nny, etc. In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. ... In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lips and the upper teeth, or viceversa. ... Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the superior teeth. ... Postalveolar (or palato-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tip of the tongue between the alveolar ridge (the place of articulation for alveolar consonants) and the palate (the place of articulation for palatal consonants). ... Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). ... Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ... Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. ... A nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ... A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or ) but release as a fricative (such as or or, in a couple of languages, into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel. ... Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. ... In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. ... Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants. ... In phonetics, consonant length is when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. ...

The phonemes /dz/ and /dʒ/ can appear on the surface as geminates: bridzs [briddʒ] ('bridge (the card game)'). (For the list of examples and exceptions, see Hungarian dz and dzs.) Linguistics & Pronunciation Dz is the seventh letter of the Hungarian alphabet. ... // Linguistics & Pronunciation Dzs is the eighth letter, and only trigraph, of the Hungarian alphabet. ...

The most important allophones are: In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. ...

• /n/ becomes [ŋ] if followed by a velar consonant (e.g. hang [hɒŋg] 'voice').^{[citation needed]}
• /j/ becomes [ç] if preceded by one of /p t k/ in theimperative conjugation at the end of a word (e.g. kapj [kɒpç] 'get (imp.)').^{[citation needed]}
• /h/ may become [ɦ] between two vowels (e.g. tehát [tɛɦaːt] 'so'), [ç] after front vowels , and [x] word-finally after back vowels (e.g. doh [dox] ) if it isn't deleted (which it often is; e.g. méh [meː] 'bee').^[2]
• /h/ becomes [xː] when geminated, in certain words: méhhel [meːxːɛl] ('with a bee'), peches [pɛxːɛʃ] ('unlucky')

Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ... In linguistics, many grammars have the concept of grammatical mood, which describes the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ...

Vowels

The vowel phonemes of Hungarian. From Szende (1994:92)

Hungarian has seven pairs of corresponding short and long vowels. Their phonetic value does not match exactly, especially in the /ɛ/ – /eː/ and /ɒ/ – /aː/ pairs. For the other pairs, the short vowels are slightly lower and more central, and the long vowels more peripheral. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... In linguistics, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. ... In linguistics, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. ...

The length distinction in high vowels is not consistent. Many dialects lack the phonemes /iː/, /uː/ and /yː/, and colloquial use is also very different from the orthography (e.g. unió is pronounced [uːnioː], but kórház is pronounced [korhaːz]).^{[citation needed]} A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. ... The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. ...

Although not found in Budapest, about half of all Hungarian speakers distinguish phonemic "ë" /e/ from /ɛ/ and /eː/.^{[citation needed]} An example is orthographic mentek, which in 'Regional Standard' represents four contrasting words: mëntëk [mentek] ('you all go'), mëntek [mentɛk] ('they went'), mentëk [mɛntek] ('I save'), and mentek [mɛntɛk] ('they are exempt'). In Budapest, the first three collapse to [mɛntɛk], while the latter one is unknown, having a different form in the literary language (mentesek).

Phonological processes

Vowel harmony

As in Finnish and Turkish, vowel harmony plays an important part in determining the distribution of vowels in a word. The primary division is between front and back vowels. Vowel harmony (also metaphony) is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ...

The following vowels are considered front vowels:

e [ɛ]

é [eː]

i [i]

í [iː]

ö [ø]

ő [øː]

ü [y]

ű [yː]

The following vowels are considered back vowels:

a [ɒ]

á [aː]

o [o]

ó [oː]

u [u]

ú [uː]

For the most part, words contain vowels primarily of one of the two types. Mixed category words are uncommon, but do exist, even in native words (e.g. "derekas"). Most mixed words are of foreign origin (e.g. "telefon") or consist of compound words (e.g. "pénz|tárca" [purse]). For purposes of determining the class of suffix to use (suffixes usually have two forms, one for each of the classes of vowels) compound words take the suffix corresponding to the vowel-class of the last unit of the compound, and loanwords use the vowel-class of the last vowel. Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

/i/, /e:/ and sometimes /e/, while being nominally "front" vowels, are "transparent"; i.e. if they are preceded by back vowels, the word is considered a back-vowel word.

A few words which contain /i/, /i:/ and, rarely, /eː/ are counted as back-vowel words because in Old Hungarian, the words contained the /ɨ/ phoneme in their place. This sound is the same as Polish y, Russian yery, Romanian â and î, and bears some resemblance to the sound of the "e" in "roses" in some dialects of English (in those dialects where "Rosa's" and "roses" don't sound alike). In today spoken Hungarian dialects, this vowel has merged with /i/, /iː/, and, rarely, /eː/ or even /u/. Old Hungarian script also known as Rovásírás (Hungarian: , ( ) or simply ) is a type of writing system used by the Magyars (mainly by Székely Magyars) prior to AD 1000. ... For other uses of Y, see Y (disambiguation). ... Yery (Ы, Ñ‹) is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. ... (a-circumflex) is a letter of Romanian and Vietnamese language. ... The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

Additionally, there is another set of criteria based on vowel roundedness for mid-high front vowels. Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... Vowels See also: IPA, Consonants Near‑close Close‑mid Mid Open‑mid Near‑open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ...

Most of Hungarian's multitude of suffixes have multiple forms for use depending on the vowel class predominating in the stem. Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Most types are:

As can be seen, the phoneme /e/ is found both in the low vowel series (/a/ - /e/), and in the mid vowel series (/o/ - /e/ - /ö/). This odd feature is solved in the old language and in dialects: there was/is an eighth short phoneme /ë/, which is just like the /e/ but it is mid, and its pronunciation is [e], in contrast with /e/ being [ɛ]. In dialects, this phoneme is found in the mid series, and the low /e/ in the low series. An open vowel is a vowel sound of a type used in most spoken languages. ... A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ... For dialects of programming languages, see Programming language dialect. ...

The requirement of vowel harmony means that suffixes must always be of the same sound order as the word it is attached to, so a word of high order gets high suffixes (szekrénybe), and a word of deep order gets deep suffixes (házba). Therefore, suffixes containing vowels have two or three variants, one or two with a high vowel and one with a deep vowel (in: -ban, or -ben; on: -en, -ön, or -on).

Words of composite order generally get deep-ordered suffixes (békával), except some unused archaisms and some loanwords from foreign languages (farmerben = farmerban), or old but frequently used words containing neutral vowels (i,í and sometimes é) (hídon, hídra; derék ~ derekam). So for example the word kartonpapír, a compound word (karton|papír) with a composite-ordered last component (papír), gets deep suffixes (kartonpapírral, kartonpapírhoz, etc.), even though its last vowel is high.

Many suffixes have only one form. These are usually new-born suffixes (-kor "at the time of ...": hatkor "at 6 o'clock", hétkor "at 7 o'clock", ötkor "at 5 o'clock"), or they contain /i/ or /e:/ (-i "universal noun → adjective suffix": budai "somebody from Buda", pesti "somebody from Pest"; -ért "for ...": aranyért "for gold", ezüstért "for silver").

Although not part of the standard grammar and phonology of the Magyar language, it is also interesting to note the use of retroflex consonants (ones where the tongue is curled back) in the speech of some people. Certain rural (Palóc) communities in Hungary tend to speak with slight to heavy retroflexion of the /t/ and /d/ consonants. This linguistic feature is noticeable by speakers in different Hungarian dialects including Alföld, Northeast Hungarian (especially from Nógrád megye), Székely, and Jászberény, so it is not something necessarily restricted to only a certain area or county. The interesting case with users of this type of retroflexion is that they tend to pronounce virtually all of their /t/ and /d/ consonants with the retroflexed form. In the major cities of Hungary, this feature is not common and usually younger people who demonstrate this retroflexion tend to lose it by assimilation, as it is ridiculed as a sign for lack of education or backward regions origin. Nowadays, this feature is mainly found in the speech of older people from the countryside as the younger generation is using it less and less.

Assimilation

Stops, fricatives, and affricates have anticipatory assimilation of voicing, for example biztos "certain" is realised as [bistoʃ]. A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... An affricate is a consonant that begins like a stop (most often an alveovelar, such as [t] or [d]) and that doesnt have a release of its own, but opens directly into a fricative (or, in one language, into a trill). ... Assimilation is a regular and frequent sound change process by which a phoneme changes to match an adjacent phoneme in a word. ... Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ...

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Acoustic phonetics Affricate Airstream mechanism Alfred C. Gimson Allophone Alveolar approximant Alveolar consonant Alveolar ejective fricative Alveolar ejective Alveolar flap Alveolar nasal Alveolar ridge Alveolar trill Alveolo-palatal consonant Apical consonant Approximant consonant Articulatory phonetics aspiration Auditory phonetics Back vowel Bilabial click Bilabial consonant Bilabial ejective Bilabial nasal Bilabial trill...

References

Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

External links

The Hungarian alphabet (omniglot.com)

Bibliography

• Szende, Tamás (1994), "Illustrations of the IPA:Hungarian", Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet 24 (2): 91-94