On Linguistics and Early Springtime
Maybe it’s the spring air over here or the beginning of my thirties in earnest, but there’s so much richness spilling into the word bank of my memory—riches that I drop like shining little coins into a great pile saved for our rainy day somedays back in the states. I keep collecting words and scouring flea markets for mementos of our life abroad, hoping against hope that by the time we get back to the USA, my soul (and my vocabulary) will have expanded the way they were supposed to.
Nobs at the ends and stems of tree branches are forming, greening, growing. The pansies by the train station have perked up after the long cold winter and the air smells sweet again. The trees aren’t awake yet, but any day now, I anticipate buds. The birds do too: they’re singing for all they’re worth. They’re simple creatures. It’s enough for them that the sky is blue again, and it’s enough for me too.
We’ve taken to getting off our tram a few stops early and walking home along the famed Váci Utca under the bright blue sky after Hungarian class. Today, we added a stop at the Great Market Hall to our impromptu itinerary, partly to find the fish market (it’s hidden in the basement, for any interested travelers) and partly because I thought a snack was in order. Meggyes rétes—cherry tart—and Monday was already a smashing success.
While we walk, we review the morning’s lesson, chatting back and forth with various versions of “bemegyunk a hazba.” The pidgin Hungarian that we’ve managed thus far is probably painful to the ears of the native passersby, but it’s part of the learning process. Our dear teacher hasn’t called us linguistic gutter snipes yet (at least not in English) so we’re cheerily sticking to the exercise of sounding it out, accents and all (much harder than it sounds, pun intended).
Hungarian is a difficult language. It’s ranked #5 (after Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean), but it’s not for naught that cultural immersion requires language learning. Six months in, and the gist of it—the logic and feel of the language—is taking shape. We can get by in shops and restaurants. We can have rudimentary conversations. I even gave basic directions to a woman who asked which way the train was going on the platform today—a signal success if you ask me! More than that, there are turns of phrase that Hungarians use that reveal pieces of the way that they think about the world. I wouldn’t trade that window into Hungarian culture for all the hours we’ve spent laboring over our házi feladat and maintaining a triple digit DuoLingo streak.
Hungarians communicate with a high degree of specificity about location, direction, and the “open” or “closed” nature of places that people enter and exit. Figuring out whether a place counts as open or closed depends in part on the function of the place. For instance, a train station is an open area because it sends trains and people in and out. The same goes for a post office, since letters are sent from post offices and people go to post offices to send letters. On the other hand, gardens and forests are closed areas because they are closed off—at least traditionally—by walls or by trees.
Hungarian has no gendered personal pronouns—he, she, and it are all just “ő.” Like other languages, a verb ending can reveal who the subject of a sentence is, and so in those cases, the personal pronoun frequently falls off. English doesn’t do this much. We like our personal pronouns, and we don’t think too much about the function of the locations that we visit—at least grammatically speaking.
One of the sweetest linguistic traditions I’ve noticed is the traditional greeting—kezét csókolom, or simply csókolom—that many men maintain when they greet women. Translated literally, the phrase means “I kiss your hand.” In English, that greeting sounds incredibly formal. Here, it’s so commonplace that I’ve received the greeting from ticket inspectors on the metro. The only distant American parallel I can conceive of is the John Wayne-esque “Howdy, Ma’am,”—a gentlemanly salutation that I love because I’m a deep dyed American, but one that I admit to be distinctly lacking in old world charm.
In English, we can speak of the “mother tongue” to describe a person’s first language and the phrase is quite visceral: the language that your mother spoke is your “mother tongue” since it’s fair to assume a child will learn to speak from his or her mother. In Hungarian, the tie is closer: the word “nyelv” in Hungarian means both tongue and language. Context determines the desired meaning.
Another fascinating word is “kormány”—used to refer to both the steering wheel of a car and the government. Good governments steer the ship of state well and steering wheels that are worth their salt are used to that same end. In English, the parallel is easy to draw out, but in Hungarian, there’s no need to draw the parallel at all. That close association does something to the way a person thinks about the thing. It creates something of an aura, or a perception, of the thing that’s being described. At the very least, it creates a natural association and a set of unconscious expectations. I suspect a libertarian would have to fight upstream, linguistically speaking, to convince a Hungarian that the government should not steer the ship of state but should instead leave the ship’s denizens to their own devices.
Last on this list of Hungarian linguistics is the marriage contract. In Hungarian, a marriage contract is a “házasság kötése” which, so far as I can tell, translates as a “marriage binding.” The verb used, “kötése,” also means to knit. It appears in the phrase “pulóvert kötni” which means to knit a sweater. Knitting two people together in marriage is much like knitting a sweater or the healing—knitting—of a broken bone. The two separate pieces will be stronger than they were when they were on their own, stronger still once they’ve been knit together.
These are the types of things we think about en route back home after Hungarian class: cultural discoveries, linguistic parallels, and advertisements (that we can in fact piece together!). Culture and language are very closely tied and for Americans and native English speakers, it’s an unbelievable boon—a soul expanding exercise—to live and breathe and speak inside a culture that otherwise we could only wonder at from the outside in. I’m convinced that language awakens a part of the soul that would have slept forever otherwise, and the awakening is very sweet.
With any luck, Hungarian is going to be our secret language when we’re back in the States, and it’s always going to remind me of springtime in Budapest when the language and the sleepy world started waking up and coming alive in tandem along Váci Utca.