Accents etc. in Hungarian
Hungarian is written using the Latin alphabet, which contains but 26 letters; as against this spoken Hungarian -- like English and most other languages -- makes use of more than twenty-six distinct sounds.
In English this is dealt with by using the same letter to stand for different sounds depending upon meaning (e.g. the i in live when used as a verb or as an adjective) or upon what letter(s) precede and/or follow it (e.g. the a in lake and lack). Whence the notorious accusation that English spelling is an incomprehensible muddle.
In Hungarian, in contrast, you will find (one minor exception apart)
consistent one : one mapping between written letters and pronounced sonds. In order to achieve this Hungarian orthography employs
-
accents on all five of the vowels, thereby representing nine distinct vowel-sounds, and short or long pronounciation as well, as shown below:
| PRONOUNCE |
as distinctly different sound |
| short |
a |
- |
e |
- |
i |
o |
ö |
u |
ü |
| long |
- |
á |
- |
é |
í |
ó |
ô* |
ú |
û* |
Owing to the parochial approach adopted by ISO the correct versions of the vowels marked * cannot be displayed on the Web: it should be ö and ü but with two acute accents in place of the two dots; in Hungarian HTML texts these are usually shown as above.
-
seven digraphs, i.e. pairs of consonants that stand for a single
sound and each of which is treated as a single letter (much as e.g. th is in English), which are:
These are never broken up when a word is hyphenated, no more than
English th is, except by insensitive computer software. (The digraph ly, incidentally, is the minor exception to the one : one letter to sound mapping, being pronounced just like j is, i.e. like the y in English you, may).
Note, that accents do matter. Different pronouncation, even just short or long, can go hand in hand with [often very] different meaning, as the following small sample demonstrates:
-
szar = shit, not to be confused with szár = stem,
stalk
-
veréb = sparrow, not to be confused with véreb
= bloodhound
-
csikós = horseherd, not to be confused with csíkos
= striped
-
kor = age, not to be confused with kór = disease
-
tok = case or box, not to be confused with tök = pumpkin
but also (vulg.) balls
-
út = road, not to be confused with üt = strike,
hit, beat
Note also that the seven digraphs apart any pair of consonants is pronounced as two, separate sounds; so, for intance, kocka (cube) is pronounced kots-ka, not kokka. All vowels are, or course, always pronounced separately, even when adjacent, e.g. leér (reaches down) must be spoken le-ér.
Perhaps more to the point for those not planning to speak Hungarian, but who might on occasion be exposed to looking up written material (e.g. Telephone Directory, dictionary):
- the digraphs and the "Umlaut"-accented vowels are considered to be and are treated as quite distinct letters, which affects the collating sequence of alphabetic listings in Hungarian.
This can induce acute to chronic despair in ignorant foreigners, who do not think of looking for, say, a new Cs section wherein to find csap (tap) after cukor (sugar), nor for, say, a new Ö section with ökör (ox) in it after ozone.
Remember this when driven to despair by the apparent impossibility of locating a term or name in an alphabetic arrangement. It is perfectly simple and logical, once you know the rules -- which nobody bothers to tell you about, because they are, after all, so obvious ... if you happen to know Hungarian, a language in which the term for explain is simply magyarázni: literally it translates as put into Hungarian.
Last updated: December 1997