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To: Verginius Rufus

I lived in Budapest twice and learned the language, but I never knew that. Of course I don’t speak any Slavic languages. I do speak German however and I noticed that Hungarian has a lot of.....what I and others call mirror image translations of phrases from German. I talked to others who also speak both languages and we noticed this. For example

English = Bra or Brazier
German = Bustenhalter (”bust holder”)
Hungarian = Meltarto (bust holder)

English = train station
German = Bahnhof (train yard)
Hungarian = Palya Udvar (train yard)

and many many more. German frequently uses combinations of short words that are descriptions of things. Hungarian does the same but you notice it frequently uses the exact same descriptions. You can see the heavy German influence....makes sense given they were part of the Hapsburg Empire for centuries.


20 posted on 03/17/2025 7:43:30 AM PDT by FLT-bird
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To: FLT-bird
I spent a few hours in Budapest in 1980, not long enough to learn the language. At the train station there was one place to change money if you were from a Warsaw Pact country and another place if you had "hard" currency from a non-Communist country.

The word for 100 in Hungarian is szaz. It's sata in Finnish and sada in Estonian, which are distantly related to Hungarian. That seems to have come from one of the "satem" languages of the Indo-European family (satem is the Avestan word for 100--cf. sto in Russian and other Slavic languages). In the distant past the ancestors of the Finns and Magyars didn't have a word for hundred--if they had a lot of sheep they stopped counting before they got to 100.

The word for "plum" (szilva) must be Slavic (Russian sliva). The word for "sausage" (kolbasz) seems to come from Russian.

21 posted on 03/17/2025 8:28:27 AM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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