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Hungarian
Classification
Hungarian is a Uralic language, more specifically an Ugric language. Connections between the Ugric and Finnic languages were noticed in the 1670s and established, along with the entire Uralic family, in 1717, although the classification of Hungarian continued to be a matter of political controversy into the 18th and even 19th centuries. Today the Uralic family is considered one of the best demonstrated large language families, along with Indo-European and Austronesian. The name of Hungary could be a corruption of Ugrian, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to them as Ugrin (pl. Ugrove) seemed to confirm that [1]. However, current literature favors the hypothesis that the Turkic "On-ogur" ("Ten arrows" or "Ten tribes") is the origin for the word Hungarian [2] [3] [4].There are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /a:/ corresponds to Khanty /o/ in certain positions, and Hungarian /h/ corresponds to Khanty /x/, while Hungarian final /z/ corresponds to Khanty final /t/. For example, Hungarian haz (IPA: [ha:z]) "house" vs. Khanty xot (IPA: [xot]) "house", and Hungarian szaz (IPA: [sa:z]) "hundred" vs. Khanty sot (IPA: [sot]) "hundred".
The distance between the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular.
The Antiquity and the early Middle Ages
As Uralic linguists claim, Hungarian separated from its closest relatives approximately 3000 years ago, so the history of the language begins around 1000 BC. The Hungarians gradually changed their way of living from settled hunters to nomadic cattle-raising, probably as a result of early contacts with Iranian nomads. Their most important animals included sheep and cattle. There are no written resources on the era, thus only a little is known about it. However, research has revealed some extremely early loanwords, such as szo ('word'; from the Turkic languages) and daru ('crane', from the related Permic languages.)The Turkic languages later, especially between the 5th and the 9th centuries, had a great influence on the language. Several words related to agriculture, to state administration or even to family relations have such backgrounds. Interestingly, Hungarian syntax and grammar was not influenced in a similarly dramatic way.
The Hungarians migrated to the Carpathian Basin around 896 and got in contact with Slavic peoples, borrowing several words from them (for example tegla – "brick", mak – "poppy", or karacsony – "Christmas"). In exchange, the neighbouring Slavic languages also contain some words of Hungarian origin (such as Croatian cizma – "boot", or Serbian asov – "spade").The first written accounts of Hungarian, mostly personal and place names, are dated back to the 10th century. Hungarians also had their own writing system, the Old Hungarian script, but no significant texts remained from the time.
Hungarian is a member of the Finno-Urgic family of languages. It is distantly related to Finnish, but is most closely related to Khanty and Mansi (which each have a few thousand speakers). Effectively, Hungarian is an isolate in Central Europe and unrelated to the Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages spoken in neighboring states (all of which are a part of the Indo-European language family).
This make Hungarian a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. So why, you may ask (as others have) am I learning it? First, it is a very interesting language---at least to somebody who is used to languages that have SVO word order, lots of prepositions, and grammatical gender---all pretty much absent from Hungarian. Second, some of my ancestry is Hungarian, and I became interested in speaking it since finding some information, in Hungarian, about a possible relative. Finally, as I learned more Hungarian I found more I wanted to learn. An unfortunate side-effect of being a language isolate is that little gets translated, and much of that selectively.
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