Where do these 5 strange Hungarian expressions come from?

There has been an ongoing debate about whether Hungarian is one of the world’s most difficult languages to truly master. While language skills are very much dependent on the person learning the language, it might feel that Hungarian is trying to fight back.

In today’s article, we will introduce you to five advanced language examples that you might hear from native speakers and probably have no idea what they are talking about. Some of these expressions might come from other languages even to Hungarian, but that does not take away their strangeness. Thanks to Dívány, we can show you where these words and phrases come from.

In Hungarian hónalj means the armpit (literally put, the “underside of hón”), but there is no body part named hón. Or is there?

The English word is much better in describing that the word arm is also used separately from pit. While in Hungarian, alj means the bottom, we simply do not use hón separately, and many Hungarians have the shower-thought: What is hón?

The solution is relatively simple. Dívány says that the Hungarian dictionary just defines hónalj to hón as well. The answer lies in the Hungarian etymological dictionary. It says that it is part of Hungary’s Finno-Ugric heritage. Because hónalj and other similar words only exist in Hungarian with the -alj and -alatt additions; hón might have originally meant the shoulder joint.

In Hungarian macskajaj is the state of having a hangover, but what does it have to do with cats (macska)?

In order to crack this, you would need a little bit of German as well. According to Dívány, the macskajaj is the direct translation of the German Katzenjammer. In German, there is a saying as well: “einen Kater haben”, meaning to have a cat.

As for many similar things, this saying came into being when students used it as a euphemism. Originally, the German word translated into Hungarian comes from Katarrh, which meant catarrh, malaise, flu or illness. The pronunciation of this word in Saxony sounded more like Katers.

Are you curious about how other foreigners struggle with the Hungarian language? In this article, you can see how foreigners try to speak Hungarian for the first time. But to help you acquire the Hungarian language, here is an article that makes learning Hungarian easy.

There are many ways you can say that something fails in Hungarian, one of them is dugába dől. But what is duga?

This would literally translate to: “collapse (in)to duga”. Dívány helps us find out what could duga be. The problem lies with the fact that duga has no relation to the Hungarian verb dug, which means to “put in”, another Finno-Ugric heritage in the Hungarian language. Instead, duga comes from South-Slavic and means the many wooden pieces that make up a barrel. It becomes quite clear from here. If the cooper does not assemble a barrel properly or the pieces of a barrel do not fit tight enough, then each piece, duga, would tumble and fall over, like a house of cards.