Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 10.djvu/372

HUNGARIAN LANGUAGE. Turkish, and the problematic Basque in the r.vreiiees, it is to-day the onlj' European lan- guage that does not belong to the ludo-Gcriiianic group. The Ural-Altaic languages are divided into: (1) The Finno Igric and ('J) Sainnyedie, forming the L'ral branch; and (3) Turkic, (4) Alongolic, and (5) Tungusic, forming the Altaic branch. The lingui.stic position of Hungiirian was for many years the subject of a heated controversy, one school led by VYunlM'ry claiming its close alhliation with Turkish, while the other, under llunfalvv. pUieed it where it is now recog- nized to belong, in the Finno-L'gric division. Hungarian, like other L'ralAltaic tongues, is agglutinative in structure. It is built upon a basis of monosyllabic roots, through the addition of successive sull.es. which entail no inner change or structural modification in the original stem, but are merely set up in a row, one after another, like a row of bricks. The sulTixes themselves, however, are modified in obedience to a law of so-called vowel harmony, which forms the most distinctive feature of this group of lan- g:uages. The vowel sounds in Hungarian are di- vided into three classes: Open vowels, a, S, o, 6, u, ft: close vowels, e, o, 0, U. u; middle or neutral vowels, f, t, i. These neutrals may be used in- differently in words containing vowels of either of the other classes; but suffixes containing open or close vowels may stand only after a root con- taining a vowel of the same class; e.g. h6:ban, "in the house'; krrib>ii, in the garden'; viiratan- (Intm!;, 'they will be expected'; kcrclcndenek, 'they will be entreated.' Hungarian has no in- flectional endings, in the strictest sense of the term. It has no grammatical gender, or even suf- fi.xes indicative of sex; S means 'he' or 'she,' vrki, 'to him' or 'to her,' and so on. In ex- pre.ssing case relations, the bare stem is used regularly for the nominative, and to some ex- tent for the possessive; the other ca.ses are represented by means of the various postpositive particles which in Hungarian take the place of prepositions: e.g. hiii, 'house'; hiizhan. "in the house'; hazbol. 'out of the house'; hnzelott, 'in front of the house'; hiizhoz. 'toward the house'; hdzal, 'with the house'; hAzat, 'house' (accusa- tive) ; hdzalatt. 'under the house'; hazfelet, 'above the house'; etc. A noteworthy pecu- liarity is the system of possessive suffixes em- ployed with substantives, closely analogous to the personal endings of the verbs; e.g. hAznm. 'my house'; hiizaii. 'thy house'; hi'izii, 'his (her) house'; hdzunk, 'our house'; hdzotok, 'your house'; hdzok, 'their house.' In the ab.sence of the auxiliary verb 'to have.' these possessive endings are used with the verb 'to be.' to de- note ownership: nekiink van Mzunk, 'to us is house ours,' i.e. 'we have a house.' The verbal system in Hungarian is highly devel- oped, giving the language a remark.ible flexi- bility and a wide range of expression, though it offers to foreigners the chief difficulty in acquiring the language. There are two distinct forms of the verb, a definite and an indefinite form, difTering throughout in their terminations. Their respective uses are exceedingly idiomatic, but in general the distinction between them de- ptnds upon whether or not the object of the verb is a definite person or thing: lAtok, 'I see'; a kutt/At latom, 'I see the dog.' Hiingarian is espe- cially rich in derivative verbs. Xot only are there suflfi-xes which, added to the simple verbal stem, form causative, frequentative, inceptive, intensive, diminutive, reciprocate, potential, and desidcrative stems, but with the characteristic facility of agglutinative languages, two or more of these suffixes may be used in combination, re- sulting in such linguistic anomalies as reflexive- frequentative-potential, intransitive-diminutive- potential, and transitive-frequentativecausative- give some idea of the formation of derivative verbs: laini, "to sec'; lAloguIni, 'to visit'; be- szchick, 'they talk'; bvszclyliuk, "they chatter'; hmz^lkcdiivk, 'they talk with each other'; vcr, "he beats'; vcrintlut, 'he can beat gently.' Among the peculiarities of the language are: the two- person sulli.x, lak, u.sed in place of the regular ending of the first person, when the subject of the verb is '1,' and the object 'thee' or 'you'; the use of the singular numU'r with ordinal numerals, e.g. tiz liAz, 'ten house' (not 'houses') ; and the inverted order of name and surname, e.g. Arany •lAnos = .John Arany; Pilofi .Si'indor — Alciin- der Petofi. The rcquirement-s of emphasis often allow the words in a short Hun- garian sentence to be put in an order the reverse of that in English: e.g. I'lnzcmet elrcll nzolgAlom, 'money-my awaytook servant-my' ('my servant took (away) my money'). The extent to which agglutination may be carried in the Hungarian language will be illustrated by the fact that it is ])ossible to perform the fol- lowing o|Mr;ition of wordliuihliiig: Mafigar, 'Hun- garian'; ilagt/aruzni, 'to render into Hungarian,' hence 'to make clear,' 'to translate'; niriiinni/- ynruzni, 'to translate,' with the added notion of the accomplishment of the action, the syllable »ie(7 having the force of the German be and er ; mcgmagyarizhat, 'he may translate'; »ieg- mngytirAzhatallan, 'that cannot be translated,' 'iintranslatal>le'; megmagynrAzhntatlannbb, 'more untranslatable' ; Icgmcgmiigyarazhtilatlanabb, ■most untranslatable'; plural subs, h gmrgtiing- yarAzliatatlanubhak. 'the most untranslatable'; a Ugmegtnagyardzhatatlanabbakal, 'with the most untranslatable.' A large number of names of common things in the Hungarian language are borrowed from the Slavic and German. Consult Hunfalvy, Die Ungarn oder Mag- yiiren (Vienna. 1881); id., Ethnogriiphie von Vngarn (German trans, with additions by 8chwicker, Budapest, 1877); id., umbt'rys J'mprung der Magyarcn (Vienna. 1S8.3. refuting X'.lmbery's theory of a Turkish relation) ; Riedl, Magyarische Orammatik (Vienna, 1858) ; Topler, (Iranimar, in German (Budapest. 1882) ; Singer, ilrammnr. in English (l^ondon, 1882) ; Ballagi, flcriran-Miigynr ami Maqiinr-Ocrman Dirtionnri/ (,"5d ed., Budapest, 1874) ;' Bizonfy, EnglUhnun- garian Dictionary (ib., 1878) ; the Dictionary of the Uuvgnrian Academy of Sciences (ih., 1862- 74) . See Hincarv. HUNGARIAN LITERATURE. Until mod- ern times, literature in the vernacular did not flourish to any very great extent in Ifungary. Latin was the general medium of cultured expres- sion durin'j the Middle Ages, and even recently it has sometimes sought to supplant the popular tongue in oflicial and literary use. There arc, however, documents in Hungarian or Magyar that belong to the mediaeval period, most of them being translations of legends and of books of the Bible. The earliest continuous monument of Magyar is a funeral ceremonial dating from
 * iotential verbs. The following examples will