Hungarians are all proud of their complex and beautiful language. They are proud that it's a Finno-Ugric language, which is part of the Uralic language family, and not Indo-European like their Slavic, Germanic, and Romance neighbors. Another thing I've found is that many Hungarians love word play with their language. Maybe because it's an agglutinating language, but it just seems like the language lends itself more naturally for puns. Many of the ones I've been exposed to have involved English, often with someone handing me a sentence to read out loud in English. For instance, I remember back in 2005 I was staying in Budapest with a group of students who were going to be competing in a national English-language drama competition. Someone handed me a paper with the sentence "You come on, sir one" written on it. I read it out loud, and everyone started laughing, but I didn't get it. They had to explain it to me, which I'll do right now.
It's supposed to sound like the Hungarian sentence, lyukomon ször van. If you know the international phonetic alphabet (IPA), the joke should break down like this:
Hungarian is written phonetically, and besides a few spelling conventions (like "sz" making an [s] sound and "s" making a [ʃ] or "sh" sound), it is fairly straightforward to follow. So, the "you come on" part sounds like "lyukomon", which means "on my hole", and "sir" sounds kind of like an "ször" if you don't round your lips. If you pronounce "one" with a Hungarian accent (starting with a [v] sound instead of a [w]) then it sounds like "van" which is the verb "to be." So all together, to a Hungarian it sounds like "There is a hair on my hole."
As with any joke, though, the more you have to explain it, the less funny it is, so I doubt at this point that anyone reading this is rolling over with laughter (especially since I think part of the joke is having to figure it out yourself). Personally, I think having a hair on my hole sounds a lot like a serious medical condition.
Back in November, my Hungarian friend and former student Noemi shared this picture with me. I was able to figure it out much faster.
I won't overly explain this one beyond saying that in Hungarian the word for "to drink" is "isz" (though remember that the "sz" is pronounced [s]) and the word "to eat" is "esz." Look at the pictures and read the captions. Hopefully it shouldn't take you too long.
See, figuring it out yourself maybe made you chuckle. At the very least it induced an eye roll. But all joking aside, from a language learner point of view this reminds me of mnemonics that language learners might use to remember vocabulary. About a month ago, my friend and fellow linguist Erin made me aware of the website memrise.com which utilizes user-produced images to help other learners on the site. Since it's all user produced, some of the images can be hit or miss. I checked it out for several languages (Chinese, Urdu, Tagalog, and Japanese) and found some of the images to be very good, and others not so much. The UK newspaper The Guardian, for instance, has a challenge to help people learn how to read Chinese characters on a menu that is very good. As with trying to learn any language, of course, the key is consistency. If you want to use this website to help you improve your vocabulary, you'd need to set a goal to use it every day, or at the very least every other day, I suppose.
So, to my Hungarian readers, are there any other examples of word play that you enjoy and feel like sharing? And to everyone else, have you tried using memrise.com? What have your experiences been? Feel free to comment and share below.
It's supposed to sound like the Hungarian sentence, lyukomon ször van. If you know the international phonetic alphabet (IPA), the joke should break down like this:
Hungarian is written phonetically, and besides a few spelling conventions (like "sz" making an [s] sound and "s" making a [ʃ] or "sh" sound), it is fairly straightforward to follow. So, the "you come on" part sounds like "lyukomon", which means "on my hole", and "sir" sounds kind of like an "ször" if you don't round your lips. If you pronounce "one" with a Hungarian accent (starting with a [v] sound instead of a [w]) then it sounds like "van" which is the verb "to be." So all together, to a Hungarian it sounds like "There is a hair on my hole."
As with any joke, though, the more you have to explain it, the less funny it is, so I doubt at this point that anyone reading this is rolling over with laughter (especially since I think part of the joke is having to figure it out yourself). Personally, I think having a hair on my hole sounds a lot like a serious medical condition.
Back in November, my Hungarian friend and former student Noemi shared this picture with me. I was able to figure it out much faster.
I won't overly explain this one beyond saying that in Hungarian the word for "to drink" is "isz" (though remember that the "sz" is pronounced [s]) and the word "to eat" is "esz." Look at the pictures and read the captions. Hopefully it shouldn't take you too long.
See, figuring it out yourself maybe made you chuckle. At the very least it induced an eye roll. But all joking aside, from a language learner point of view this reminds me of mnemonics that language learners might use to remember vocabulary. About a month ago, my friend and fellow linguist Erin made me aware of the website memrise.com which utilizes user-produced images to help other learners on the site. Since it's all user produced, some of the images can be hit or miss. I checked it out for several languages (Chinese, Urdu, Tagalog, and Japanese) and found some of the images to be very good, and others not so much. The UK newspaper The Guardian, for instance, has a challenge to help people learn how to read Chinese characters on a menu that is very good. As with trying to learn any language, of course, the key is consistency. If you want to use this website to help you improve your vocabulary, you'd need to set a goal to use it every day, or at the very least every other day, I suppose.
So, to my Hungarian readers, are there any other examples of word play that you enjoy and feel like sharing? And to everyone else, have you tried using memrise.com? What have your experiences been? Feel free to comment and share below.
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