Okay but even as a native hungarian i have to say “sz” is just insane. Polish is so much more logical with “s” making the non-shushing sound and “sz” making the shushing sound. Also “gy” is not very logical as it should be “dy” but when the italians first tried to write hungarian down they used g cause in italian g can sound like “gy” in many cases. And then lastly “ly” is just utterly useless, it used to represent a seperate sound with some words contrasting them “boj” vs “boly” was a thing from what i could find, but the dialect modern standard hungarian was based on did not have this distinction so they just used “j” everywhere but kept “ly” where there wasnt a word with “j” that was spelt the same otherwise. This means modern day hungarian speakers in for example slovakia will say all “ly” as the sound for “ly” and “j” will be a mix between the two. As for features they couldve written down but didnt, in both of the dialects i grew up with(family from szeged, but grew up in the north west) there are two “e” sounds, sometimes written as “e” and “ë” when the distinction is wanted. Szeged is an example itself with it being possible to write it as “Szëged” because in the dialect there its pronounced as “Szöged”. On the other hand where i grew up its “Szegæd” where “æ” is pronounced kind of like “a” in english “ash”. Point is hungarian spelling is very much not logical, there are even more examples like “lesz” actually being pronounced with long sz usually so “lessz” would be more accurate, “is” and “se” being clitics like “-e”, and there actually being a long and short “e” distinct from “é” in some words technically making them phonemes like in “ere”(his vein) pronounced “ere” vs erre(this way) pronounced as “eere” or more often written as “ēre”. So yeah many holes tho still a thousand times better than most european languages spelling.
Okay but even as a native hungarian i have to say “sz” is just insane. Polish is so much more logical with “s” making the non-shushing sound and “sz” making the shushing sound.
Totally agreed. Like, also, everything else that you mentioned, but especially this. I really don’t get where they got the idea from, since every (most?) language around has it the other way around, including Latin and German (and their derivatives like romance languages and such). Maybe Turkish and/or Romanian that I can think of, but AFAIK even they put diacritics on their ‘s’ when referring to the ‘sh’ sound (I don’t speak any of those, though, so I might be horribly wrong).
It’s especially annoying because most Western European speakers are more used to the Polish sz-s system (which makes more sense), completely butchering words like Szoboszlai (I’m playing E-Football and the commentator pronounces his name like three different wrong ways, about never right).
I had a relatively old teacher ~30 years ago that said ‘j’ and ‘ly’ are pronounced slightly differently, giving two examples, and I couldn’t hear any difference : ).
I used to go to uni in Szeged so it was quite eye-opening reading about the weird 'e’s. So if I got that right, that’s the reason they say stuff with ‘ö’ instead of ‘e’ in certain cases (because it’s not exactly ‘ö’, but that’s the closest regular letter we’ve got)?
And yeah, ‘bicikli’ is actually pronounced more like ‘bicigli’ (or not? Could be regional) and stuff, but what I meant by ‘consistent’ is that almost always if you see something spelled a certain way you can expect it to sound that certain way, without bullshit silent letters and completely different consonants or vowels. Not in terms of phonemes but actual letters.
And yeah, ‘bicikli’ is actually pronounced more like ‘bicigli’
(I’m still salty about ‘bicikli’ keeping the ‘k’ but the short for ‘lakodalom’ is ‘lagzi’ and not ‘lakzi’)
Yeah it works the same in every single neighbouring language, s is always the normal s(sz for us) and s+something is sh(s for us), i actually dont know where this convention comes from as the y marking for soft sounds is actually logical except for gy but thats a completely exceptable way to write it.
As for the szeged ö the sound is actually the exact same as other the other ös, but yes in the other dialects they are extra sounds that dont have their own way of writing. Also in standard hungarian this is not present so you wont hear it in budapest, northeast and from younger speakers in larger cities.
I usually pronounce bicikli with with a pretty solid k but i can easily imagine a lot of people dont, ive never actually payed attention to that specifically. The reason its bicikli but not lakzi is because of certain phonological effects having to do with “l” being much closer to a vowel than “z”. For bicikli/bicigli the voicing is just at a different point while for lakzi you would need to articulate a k, then start voicing, and then articulate a z and then transition to the i which is much harder to do. But dont worry there are thousands of examples like this that very much have stupid rules for spelling.
Okay but even as a native hungarian i have to say “sz” is just insane. Polish is so much more logical with “s” making the non-shushing sound and “sz” making the shushing sound. Also “gy” is not very logical as it should be “dy” but when the italians first tried to write hungarian down they used g cause in italian g can sound like “gy” in many cases. And then lastly “ly” is just utterly useless, it used to represent a seperate sound with some words contrasting them “boj” vs “boly” was a thing from what i could find, but the dialect modern standard hungarian was based on did not have this distinction so they just used “j” everywhere but kept “ly” where there wasnt a word with “j” that was spelt the same otherwise. This means modern day hungarian speakers in for example slovakia will say all “ly” as the sound for “ly” and “j” will be a mix between the two. As for features they couldve written down but didnt, in both of the dialects i grew up with(family from szeged, but grew up in the north west) there are two “e” sounds, sometimes written as “e” and “ë” when the distinction is wanted. Szeged is an example itself with it being possible to write it as “Szëged” because in the dialect there its pronounced as “Szöged”. On the other hand where i grew up its “Szegæd” where “æ” is pronounced kind of like “a” in english “ash”. Point is hungarian spelling is very much not logical, there are even more examples like “lesz” actually being pronounced with long sz usually so “lessz” would be more accurate, “is” and “se” being clitics like “-e”, and there actually being a long and short “e” distinct from “é” in some words technically making them phonemes like in “ere”(his vein) pronounced “ere” vs erre(this way) pronounced as “eere” or more often written as “ēre”. So yeah many holes tho still a thousand times better than most european languages spelling.
Totally agreed. Like, also, everything else that you mentioned, but especially this. I really don’t get where they got the idea from, since every (most?) language around has it the other way around, including Latin and German (and their derivatives like romance languages and such). Maybe Turkish and/or Romanian that I can think of, but AFAIK even they put diacritics on their ‘s’ when referring to the ‘sh’ sound (I don’t speak any of those, though, so I might be horribly wrong).
It’s especially annoying because most Western European speakers are more used to the Polish sz-s system (which makes more sense), completely butchering words like Szoboszlai (I’m playing E-Football and the commentator pronounces his name like three different wrong ways, about never right).
I had a relatively old teacher ~30 years ago that said ‘j’ and ‘ly’ are pronounced slightly differently, giving two examples, and I couldn’t hear any difference : ).
I used to go to uni in Szeged so it was quite eye-opening reading about the weird 'e’s. So if I got that right, that’s the reason they say stuff with ‘ö’ instead of ‘e’ in certain cases (because it’s not exactly ‘ö’, but that’s the closest regular letter we’ve got)?
And yeah, ‘bicikli’ is actually pronounced more like ‘bicigli’ (or not? Could be regional) and stuff, but what I meant by ‘consistent’ is that almost always if you see something spelled a certain way you can expect it to sound that certain way, without bullshit silent letters and completely different consonants or vowels. Not in terms of phonemes but actual letters.
Yeah it works the same in every single neighbouring language, s is always the normal s(sz for us) and s+something is sh(s for us), i actually dont know where this convention comes from as the y marking for soft sounds is actually logical except for gy but thats a completely exceptable way to write it.
As for the szeged ö the sound is actually the exact same as other the other ös, but yes in the other dialects they are extra sounds that dont have their own way of writing. Also in standard hungarian this is not present so you wont hear it in budapest, northeast and from younger speakers in larger cities.
I usually pronounce bicikli with with a pretty solid k but i can easily imagine a lot of people dont, ive never actually payed attention to that specifically. The reason its bicikli but not lakzi is because of certain phonological effects having to do with “l” being much closer to a vowel than “z”. For bicikli/bicigli the voicing is just at a different point while for lakzi you would need to articulate a k, then start voicing, and then articulate a z and then transition to the i which is much harder to do. But dont worry there are thousands of examples like this that very much have stupid rules for spelling.