Monthly Archives: September 2014

Magyar

Getting back into languages. Estonia has approx 1.5 million people , Finland 5 million, but Hungary has 9 million inside Hungary with very little non speakers ( like Russians in Estonia or swedes in Finland) and a large diaspora to total 13ish million speakers. A bit off put that jobbik aka neo nazi party won 20% of the Hungarian vote last election, or over a million people… But that still means many many more sane people didn’t vote for them than exist in Finland and Estonia combined. With that in mind, aka more opportunity to speak to a Hungarian, and their lack of English, I have a better chance of finding resources to actually learn the language.

Oh, and why Hungarian? It is a Finno-Urgic or non info European language. It, Finnish Estonian and a few others inside Russia , are as different as Chinese to English despite their looks. Even Hindi from India, Farsi from Iran and Russian or Greek are closer to English than the Finno-Urgics. Those others mentioned are called indo-European, and though Bulgarian and Irish don’t seem similar, under the hood they have the same structures , like pronouns before verbs and conjugation. Finno Urgics not so similar.