Miraculous curiosities of the Hungarian language

Szeretlekmagyarorszag.hu writes that a funny looking Hungarian sentence became famous last May as a meme. But now many people started reposting it again. It got almost 14 thousand likes on Memrise’s Facebook page and almost 9 thousand people have shared it so far.

We were inspired by this tongue-twister to look for even more on the internet and we were happy to see that the Hungarian language is abound in extreme and funny words, sentences. The Hungarian language is amazingly unique and foreigners usually find it really hard to learn, so it’s no surprise that it is considered as one of the most difficult languages in the world according to many different top lists.

The Hungarian language belongs to the Uralic language family and is one of the few languages in Europe that are not part of the Indo-European family. Our language is agglutinative — which means that the way words and sentences work is completely different from the English language for example.

Related article: 9 amazing facts about the Hungarian language that most people don’t know

Let’s get back to interesting Hungarian words and sentences. Naturally, the following curiosities are not used in everyday speech, but it is still good to know that they exist. We tried to translate them into English, but in some cases it is very difficult to do so. Defining these might even cause problems for a Hungarian. But now, let’s start with the original sentence and the meme that became famous!

“Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese.”

This sentence means something like this: ‘You did this pretended action, you, the delinquent of pretended actions.’ One of the funniest comments says that this sentence sounds like the 20^th Century Fox intro and that is totally true!

“Tapasztalhatatlanabbakat” (9 ‘a’-s) means something like ‘those even more unobservable’.

“Álmárványsárkánylánynyál-látványánál” (11 ‘á’-s) doesn’t really make sense but it is grammatically correct and could be translated to something like ‘at the sight of a fake, marble dragon girl’s saliva’.

“Legeslegmegengesztelhetetlenebbeket” (13 ‘e’-s) means something like ‘those who are the most inexorable’.

“Cégrészvénynévértékméréskérés-végénél” (13 ‘é’-s) is built up of many individual words so it is quite hard to translate it, but it would be something like ‘at the end of the request for a company’s share value measurement’.

“Kórokozó-hordozó” (7 ‘o’-s and ‘ó’-s) can actually be used when talking about a disease or bacteria because it means ‘pathogen vector’.

“Örömkönny-özönötökhöz” (8 ‘ö’-s) is another example of our lovely vowels and how many we can use in one expression. This means ‘for your stream of tears of joy’.

We also have some words that are grammatically correct but are so very long that even reading them is hard. These words are usually formed with a stack of suffixes. It would be hard to use them in a sentence, because their meanings cannot be clearly defined. Translating them is kind of impossible, but we tried to capture the essence of them.

The two most commonly known word records that most Hungarians would say, if you ask them to tell the longest Hungarian words, are:

“Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért” (44 graphemes) is about desecration and “elkelkáposztástalaníthatatlanságoskodásaitokért” (47 graphemes) has to do with kale.

There are even longer words like “eltöredezettségmentesítőtleníttethetetlenségtelenítőtlenkedhetnétek” (67 graphemes), which has something to do with defragmentation and “legeslegmegszentségteleníttethetetlenebbjeiteknek” (49 graphemes), which is again about desecration.

And we haven’t mentioned compound words….

Finally – just for fun – this is the longest word in a Hungarian book title: “A sátánármányosparázsvarázspokolikőrpuncspancslódítóbódítóka” (a kids’ novel written by Michael Ende).

Photo: www.facebook.com/memrise

Copy editor: bm

Source: Daily News Hungary