[PassedOut]

gwnn, on Jun 28 2010, 12:12 PM, said:

NickRW, on Jun 28 2010, 04:44 PM, said:

P.S. Hungarian is a weird language.

Yes:)

Like Finnish.

[OleBerg]

PassedOut, on Jun 28 2010, 07:38 PM, said:

gwnn, on Jun 28 2010, 12:12 PM, said:

NickRW, on Jun 28 2010, 04:44 PM, said:

P.S. Hungarian is a weird language.

Yes:)

Like Finnish.

Yes, quite peculiar that these two languages are related to each other, but not to any other scandinavian or european languages.

But Finnish is definitely more weird. They have this word:

Jäääärne

which desribes a property ice can have, on the border of ice/non-ice terrain. (Or something like that.)

[gwnn]

Finnish and Estonian are fairly close (but not really mutually intelligible) but they are quite far from Hungarian. However, the vowels are similar as are the logic of the languages (agglutinative and with no genders). I know the words for 'hand' and 'blood' are the same and a few others.

[shyams]

Isn't Hungarian most akin to Kazakh or some such Central Asian language?

[gwnn]

That's one theory but not the most widely accepted one. Anyway there is a marked Turkic element to it. According to conspiracy theorists, there was a conscious decision of Hungarian linguists some time in the early 19th century that from now on Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language with some Turkic elements as opposed to vice versa and they burned the books (and their authors??) that stated otherwise. I am not sure about this last part, though. It does not take a PhD in linguistics, however, to see how really weird a language it is

[junyi_zhu]

gwnn, on Jun 26 2010, 12:45 PM, said:

How do Chinese people learn to read and write at school? They have as much as 30k letters in the alphabet; it must take some time and diligence. I'm not trying to make a joke, I am really interested.

Not that difficult. First, there are about 5K to 6K daily used characters. Second, at elementary schools, kids just learn about 10 to 20 characters in each lessons. So kids can pretty much read newspaper after grade 2 or 3. Of course, there are a lot of quizes by the teacher to test whether the kids still remember the new characters. To me, Chinese characters are simpler because I can memorize the shape better, not the order of English characters to form a word.

Chinese speaking is relatively simple. Many foreigner can speak good Chinese after staying there for a few years.

[junyi_zhu]

gwnn, on Jun 28 2010, 07:14 PM, said:

That's one theory but not the most widely accepted one. Anyway there is a marked Turkic element to it. According to conspiracy theorists, there was a conscious decision of Hungarian linguists some time in the early 19th century that from now on Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language with some Turkic elements as opposed to vice versa and they burned the books (and their authors??) that stated otherwise. I am not sure about this last part, though. It does not take a PhD in linguistics, however, to see how really weird a language it is

What's the relationship between Hungarian and Hun?

[gwnn]

In current theory, none, according to legends, there were two brothers, Hunor and Magor, one of whom started the Huns and the other the Magyars.

My dad's cousin is a relatively big nationalist and he said that the relationship is evident and the languages are related. And that the Hungarian marauds in the 9th and 10th centuries were because they were trying to get back what Attila lost in the 5th century, which is supposed to be rightfully theirs and these treasures were in monasteries in France and that's why the Hungarians attacked Western Europe several times. I am skeptical about all this but he is quite convinced. Apparently there are Chinese and Korean linguists who are currently researching the Hungarian language and try to trace it to something in the Eastern Asian area. I haven't read about any of this, I know that wikipedia dismisses anything similar to this post as pseudoscience.

[Gerben42]

As a latecomer: Dutch, but after 7 years in Germany I am sometimes struggling to find words, especially for technical stuff.

[junyi_zhu]

gwnn, on Jun 28 2010, 08:51 PM, said:

In current theory, none, according to legends, there were two brothers, Hunor and Magor, one of whom started the Huns and the other the Magyars.

My dad's cousin is a relatively big nationalist and he said that the relationship is evident and the languages are related. And that the Hungarian marauds in the 9th and 10th centuries were because they were trying to get back what Attila lost in the 5th century, which is supposed to be rightfully theirs and these treasures were in monasteries in France and that's why the Hungarians attacked Western Europe several times. I am skeptical about all this but he is quite convinced. Apparently there are Chinese and Korean linguists who are currently researching the Hungarian language and try to trace it to something in the Eastern Asian area. I haven't read about any of this, I know that wikipedia dismisses anything similar to this post as pseudoscience.

That's interesting. I actually don't know whether Hun has a strong relationship with "Xiongnu" in China. They certainly sound very close. Hun was so powerful in the early Han dynasty and the Han emperors was forced to send the princess to them for peace. Later, they were defeated by Han and divided into two parts. The southern division merged into Chinese in a few hundred years. Actually Jin Dynasty was destroyed by them. Still, they actually appreciated Chinese culture and later completely merged into Chinese. Now I think some north Chinese with the family name Liu can easily have Xiongnu's blood, because many of them adopted Liu as the Han name because they also think they are descendants of Han emperor (because of the marriage of Xiongnu's King and Han princess).
The northern division ran to central Asia and later, nobody really knows where they went.

A similar story happened again in Tang dynasty. Tang defeated Turks and Turks divided into two parts. The western part also ran to central Asia and nobody really know where they went later. Nowadays, some think Turkey can have a strong relation with the Ancient Turk.

[Rossoneri]

Csaba, I find it interesting that you asked about the difficulty of Chinese. I have heard that Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world!

Although I did find one similarity Hungarians have with the Chinese - we put our surnames before our first names.