Here's the tale of a language that can build impressively long words
and why it ended up alone in Europe, surrounded by languages that work so differently.
Central Europe - a patchwork of nations with jagged borders.
Let me switch to a language map though.
What do you see?
Probably still patches.
A patch of German, a Romance language, some Slavic languages.
And this patch here, Hungarian.
Now look again at this map of language families.
That Hungarian patch is a language island surrounded on all sides by Indo-Europeans!
After I learned about this isolation and then calculated out how long Hungarian words are,
I just had to try out a magyar nyelv, the Hungarian language, for myself.
I am not Hungarian though.
Practice along and correct me, but this tale is too good not to share.
Go back 1122 years, to a time when the Carpathian basin, flat, landlocked and
surrounded by mountains, was being squabbled over.
And who better to settle squabbles than tribes of nomadic horsemen known to Europeans as
Ungri but to themselves by the name of their foremost tribe: Magyar.
Led by Árpád, the Magyars conquered the basin in the homeland-taking of 894:
a honfoglalás.
Yes, "lash". Ess is "sh" and this is how you write "sss",
but don't flip it or you get a "zh". Heh, Hungarian!
For decades after, these masters of the bow and the stirrup consolidated their rule, drove
a wedge between South Slavic and the rest of Slavic and rattled nerves all the way to
Italy, France and Spain.
It's said they had Westerners on their knees praying, "de sagittis Hungarorum
libera nos, Domine!"
Árpád's descendants did manage to settle and warm up to the West.
Right at the turn of the millennium, Stephen I established a European kingdom, a surprising
bastion of Christendom.
But success left Hungarian isolated.
And by the end of this tale, this language with its oddly long words will reveal just
how alone Hungarian is... and is not.
Do you remember my longest word adventure?
Those languages stretched words by taking a base
word and compounding it with another base.
Like, say you have two towns Buda and Pest, and you smash them together into one name!
But that's not the reason Hungarian pops out long words left and right.
Its base words add a bunch of grammatical slots, mostly at the end.
Slots for everything, I swear!
The verb jelent means "notify" or "report".
It's already itself built from smaller pieces, but whatever.
Let's keep it simple.
Put a be- in front and the action goes inwards or into: bejelent.
Add the reflexive -kezik and you're reporting yourself into, logging in!
While you're at it, change the subject to bejelentkezek.
Oh, and don't forget slots for tenses and moods, like the conditional -ne- "would" in
bejelentkeznék.
Nouns have hordes of forms that put Latin to shame.
Take ember.
Say you wanted to give something to that human.
You'll need the dative case: ember-nek.
If there are multiple humans, they're ember-ek.
And if there's something for all of them: ember-ek-nek!
Hhh, look at all those intimidating-sounding cases down the list.
These are just forms for, say, "up to", "being on top of", "going into", "going out of"
and so on.
Same for adjectives.
Nagy is "great", but let's step this up a bit: nagy-szerű, "great-like", means "wonderful"!
Using the same endings, you can have plural wonderful things and save them for a wonderful
one, nagyszerűnek, or for many wonderful ones, nagyszerűeknek.
Oh, there's more!
How about a slot for comparing wonderful things to find out which one's... wonderfuller: nagyszerű-bb.
And a superlative prefix slot for the most wonderful of all: leg-nagyszerű-bb.
Wait, before you take a breath, bring in our endings once more: leg-nagy-szerű-bb-ek-nek.
Whew!
Now do you see why Hungarian words get so tough?
These clumps of roots and affixes look glued together, so linguists named this kind of
word building "agglutination", with the Latin root "glue".
Some have grown skeptical of the concept, but it's been resilient.
Part of the glue holding Hungarian together is its vowel harmony.
Did you happen to notice all the e, e, e's?
Those e's in the suffix are there to match the vowel in the base.
So the plural of ember is ember-ek but mouths are száj-ak.
Ember-ek, száj-ak, otthon-ok.
That's basic Hungarian grammar, but it's so foreign to all its neighbors.
Why though?
We know where it ended up, but where did it come from?
The clue to its origins is right there in its words.
Historical linguists traced a trail of related words back to languages akin to Hungarian.
Nowhere near Hungary.
Way, way, way off... in West Siberia.
Together with Hungarian, these languages are part of a broader Uralic family.
Hungarian's ancestors migrated from Siberia out to the southwest, bringing their long
words to the doorstep of the Carpathian basin, where our story started.
See Hungarian, in the end you're not completely alone.
You just have a long-distance kind of linguistic relationship.
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