News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Deconstructing Finnish by mtrn on Monday August 18, 2014 @10:37AM (#8192802)
Hungarian is regarded complicated, but in fact it is quite regular and even simple in some aspects - there is no grammatical gender and modern Hungarian has only three temporal forms, of which only one is a combined form (future).

Among the unusual things in Hungarian are agglutination (Turkish has it too and even Esperanto) and vowel harmony (mostly found in Turkic and Uralic languages).

Agglutination example: House is ház, apple is alma. Inside the house is ház[ban], inside the apple, almá[ban]. Inside [my] house is ház[am][ban], inside [my] apple almá[m][ban]. And so forth. It's kind of like postfix notation.

Re:Deconstructing Finnish by saturdayplace on Monday August 18, 2014 @11:00AM (#8192909)
I learned Hungarian as a Mormon missionary, and by far this agglutination (I'd never seen that term before) is my favorite part of the language. It's like being given a set of word legos and told "go nuts!" And it always seemed really regular to me; I was never as frustrated learning Hungarian as I was with German in high school.

We taught English classes there, which helped me realize just how capricious the language can seem to an ESL student.

Re:Deconstructing Finnish by DrJokepu on Monday August 18, 2014 @10:43AM (#8192835)
Don't forget negative concord. "I haven't eaten nothing all day" makes a lot of sense in Uralic languages.
Re:Deconstructing Finnish by BugBrother on Monday August 18, 2014 @01:08PM (#8193496)
So "Hungarian notation" is a language joke too?! Damn, so many years and I never made the connection.