Lockdown Bulletin - Learning Hungarian

I read somewhere that to get through lockdown I would need a schedule. I therefore drew up a schedule so laden with tasks and duties and exercise rituals that I feel burdened before I even get out of bed.

First on each day’s agenda is learning Hungarian (one hour minimum!) This is an enterprise that I will need more than one lifetime to complete. One reason for this fact is that Hungarian is a language that bears little resemblance to any other language I’ve come across. That means trying to learn its vocabulary is rarely made easier by any resemblance between Hungarian words and words in some other language I’ve learnt. As a result, instead of thinking, "Oh yes, 'cittá' is not unlike 'cité', (or indeed good old 'city'), you have to make up elaborate methods to bash into your memory the meaningless jumbles of letters Hungarians have chosen to label things with.

Thus, in order to remember “beavatkozás” which means interference or intervention, I have had to tell myself that there was a beaver that got interfered with, ending up with an 'atkozás' on its end, in place of an 'r'. Similarly, to remember 'kiszolgálás', which means service, lacking any kind of familiar peg in my mother tongue or any other language I'm familiar with on which to hang it, I’m forced to think of a waiter whose service is so excellent that he goes round and kisses all the old girls.

And, as well as the particular difficulties this individual language presents, there is also the problem of my wandering mind. Instead of obediently learning, I ask questions, which is a disastrous strategy. If, instead of meekly accepting them, you start to question the underlying logic of grammatical rules in any language, you will soon find yourself wandering the same dangerously infinite corridors of unsolvable speculation as you do when you begin asking why anything (or indeed everything) exists.

I know this, and yet I can’t help wishing I could work out why, if so many languages feel the need for gender, Hungarian does not. Yes, that is right - the Hungarian language does not have different words for he and her (let alone sailing off into a third gender called neuter, which German then proceeds to place young females in).  Extraordinary isn't it - the media labels the Hungarian nation as right wing but actually Hungarians are among the wokest people on earth - and their wokeness is embedded in their mother (or should that be 'parental'?) tongue.

For a long time, another avenue of speculation for me was the rationale behind the complexity of the Hungarian verbal system. Using Hungarian verbs requires the kind of ingrained mental nimbleness that I suspect has been a factor in helping Hungary to its record number of Nobels per capita.

You see, when formulating a sentence, Hungarian demands that you know well in advance whether the object of your verb will be definite (‘the’) or indefinite (‘a’) and that you adapt the verb form you use accordingly. Why any group of people would choose to perpetuate this complication in their language has, as I say,  puzzled me for a long time, but no longer - a friend married to a Hungarian explained to me the other day that, as no foreigners ever perfectly master the system, it is a useful method Hungarians use for spotting who is not really truly part of the tribe.

But there remain other puzzles to consider still.  There’s the passive for example. That is to say, there isn’t, for, in Hungarian, the passive barely exists. As my grammar book explains “When the agent is expressed with the English passive, in the corresponding Hungarian construction the active voice will generally be used with the agent as subject.” This is fine by me. I approve of very minimal use of the passive, but what does get me thinking in this context is this: has the state of affairs regarding the passive and their language come about because Hungarians find it hard not to be active and take responsibility or is it their language that determines their lack of inclination to suggest something happened through no fault of their own? I imagine there may be a whole field of research, called "linguistic determinism" or something similar, in which people while away their lives trying to find answers to such questions. But how can those answers ever be definitively verified?

And finally, at least for now - I am still on a journey of discovery in the mountain ranges of Hungarian - there is the curious fact that whereas in English you have two eyes, hands, legs etc, in Hungarian a singular noun refers to each of these pairs. This leads to the curious situation that, if someone loses, say, an eye, they are said ever afterwards to be half eyed. Once again instead of trudging on through the learning process, my thoughts wander off: the concept of two things being an inseparable package although physically not conjoined is too intriguing - why do they view them that way; why don't we? Oh dear, I realise, I will never get anywhere if I keep on drifting off into pondering instead of learning, speculating instead of knuckling down.