Hungarian: An Essential Grammar (Routledge Grammars)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent concise grammar
Review: I have to say Routledge is doing a great job with their Essential Grammar series, having previously read their books on Swedish and Danish, and I've also seen the books on Russian, Chinese, and Finnish, which I'll probably get to next.

I learned a lot about Hungarian grammar from this book. Hungarian is the most important extant member of the Ugric sub-branch of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Ural-Altaic family, and as such, it deserves to have more resources like this book to encourage its study and scholarship. Many languages preserve complicated systems of both noun classification prefixes and verb prefixes, such as Swahili, or post-fixes, as in the case of Ural-Altaic languages such as Finnish and Estonian, which have 14 and 15 cases, respectively. Hungarian has 20, and some Caucausian languages in southern Russia have over 30. Hungarian is notable for another feature common along Uralic languages like Turkish known as "vowel harmony," wherein vowels in a word are similar and require similar positions of the tongue to pronounce.

I also have to add my own comments to the two excellent ones already posted on this book. I understand what the reader from New York is saying with respect to the case endings, and I also agree with the second reviewer from New York, as they both make important points.

I have sometimes felt that the "markerese" of traditional structural linguistics gets out of hand in describing certain languages, but on the other hand, I don't see a viable alternative, either. Many languages preserve complicated systems of both noun classification prefixes and verb prefixes, such as Swahili, which has prefixes, infixes, and postfixes for noun classes, or extensive case systems, as in the Ural-Altaic languages. Finnish and Estonian have 14 and 15 cases, respectively, Hungarian has as many as 24, and some Caucausian languages in Russia have over 30. This is far more than the classical Indo-European languages like Sanskrit, which has 8, Greek, which also has 8, and Latin, which has 6. Contemporary Russian has 6, and German technically has 4. But Finnish has 14 and Estonian has 15, and Hungarian has 20 active cases and may have had 24 in the past, as I said. This makes the case system far more extensive and as a result poses a much greater learning problem for the foreign language speaker.

So some sort of structure is required to organize the grammatical material for presentation to the foreign speaker, and I just don't see an alternative, although presenting the real postpositions on equal footing with the case endings would probably help, as the reader from New York suggests. This just means that no language, even Ural-Altaic ones, subsist only on cases and that some pre or postpositions are needed.

Anyway, however this debate turns out, I found this to be an excellent, concise grammar and it is one of the few out there I have seen on Hungarian.

Rating:
Summary: Response on cases
Review: I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to use this space for a pure response, but I'm wondering what the Reader from NY suggests as an alternative of case endings. Does he or she suggest that the language be changed so that the locatives and other case-endings become separate words? Postpositions? I would caution one against thinking to change the language to make it easier for an english speaker to learn. It's not as if some loony grammarian decided that some things are attached to words and some things are not: that's all part of the language. As a student of Finnish, I am quite familiar with this sort of case-ending particle: it's just something you have to get used to. I admit to enjoying the technical terms as a part of grammar study (as well as to being a Latin student) but they do not seem in any way necessary to the study of the language if they seem confusing. Finnish has an "inessive particle" which means you add -ssa/ssä to the end of a word when you're saying that something is in it, but there's no need to memorize the fact that it is called inessive: you just have to know that when you want to say "I am in bed" or "I live in Helsinki" you have to say "Olen sängyssä" and "Asun Helsingissa." If I have your complaint misinterpreted I apologise for the mistake, but I absolutely love the Finnish Grammar from this series which gets very technical about grammar and think that that is what a grammar reference should do, whether or not the student feels it helpful to use the technical terms provided.

(NB: Finnish also has "post-positions," so that you say "sängyn alla" for "under the bed" (literally "[the] bed's under"), but I find it easier just to consider it a word meaning "under" and to remember that the other word has to be in the posessive/genitive than to start worrying about whether to call it a post-position or a case ending (although of course, the former is correct).)

Rating:
Summary: magellan may be a little misguided but the book is excellent
Review: this book is a fairly decent descriptive grammar of the hungarian language. as a person who has studied the finnish language at length and now dabbles in some of the other uralic languages like sami and hungarian, this book is easy to use if you already have a rather clear picture of the linguistics of this language family. turkish, although in possession of vowel harmony, is not a member of the uralic language family, as magellan suggests - it is an altaic language family member. research has been done to show that these two language families are in fact one, but so far the evidence has been inconclusive.

Rating:
Summary: An Important Contribution, But Major Reservation
Review: This book lives up to the standards of the Routledge grammars both in terms of attractive presentation and substantial content. On the other hand it continues what I consider to be a severe defect in Hungarian grammar books, involving what can only be described as a grammarian's approach to case.

"Case" in most European (i.e., IE) languages involves small changes made to the end of nouns to indicate grammatical function (direct object, indirect object, etc.) With the exception of the direct object, or accusative, which is always "declined" (i.e., given the case ending), the other nouns in an ordinary European sentence are declined in four to six cases and are "governed" or preceded by prepositions (for, with, to, in, into, etc.) English is an exception since, while we continue to use prepositions, we don't decline our nouns after prepositions, indeed, we don't decline them at all, except to denote possession.

Now Hungarian is a lot like English in this respect. Nouns themselves are not changed except to indicate possession or plural, and there is a direct object marker (letter "t"). Prepositions are widely used, but they come after the noun, rather than before, hence they are in effect "postpositions." (E.g., we say "in the box", Hungarians would say "(the) box-in".) But the noun itself is not declined.

Now there are about two dozen Hungarian postpositions, about half of them having to do with location (in, out, around, through, across, about). About two thirds of these change their vowels to correspond with the vowels of the preceding noun, for the sake of euphony. Somewhere in here, someone got the idea of dividing these postpositions into two groups, half a dozen "postpositions" that are invariable and are written separate from the noun, and the rest which have been christened "cases" and which are written attached to the noun.

This is a monstrosity, with all due respect, because it creates a vast list of bizarre Latin case names (adessive, essive, etc.), which intimidate the student, and has almost nothing to do with declining nouns, except for the vowel harmony (which is largely intuitive anyway) previously mentioned.

It is also bad for three other reasons. First, most of the postpositions (now called "cases"!) have a wide conceptual reach, just like English, thus "-tol" is primarily a general preposition in post position ("from", "I came the house-from") but can also be used with certain verbs "ask s.o.-of", analogous to English. However, by learning the "case" one has to learn all the conceptual exceptions, even though the "case" in most instances is the same as an English preposition in final location.

The second problem is that, again, just like English, all the "case" markers can take personal endings, to correspond to English prepositional phrases like "for us, to me, out of it", but this again makes it difficult to grasp when it is being taught as a "case."

The third problem is that all of this "case" business -- which involves page after page of paradigms! -- distracts the learner from understanding that the main difficulty with Hungarian, aside from the separable verb prefixes with are a lot like German (and English! "drink up" "He drank it up"), is that you have to put your prepositions after the nouns and not before.

For some reason, the author here repeats the "case" approach of the grammarians, the same tools with which Arthur Whitney slew the Hungarian and Finnish languages.

However, I am giving this book five stars for the following reasons. First, it is the only real grammar out there, the Torkenczy is a bare boned reference grammar for people who just want to consult paradigms (Rounds is three times longer). Second, It is meticulous in describing the use of seperable verb prefixes (coverbs) and in rendering all the usages of the "cases" and postpositions, all with illustrative sentences. Third, I want to encourage more work in Hungarian.

This is a good book for the curious who want to know how Hungarian works, faute de mieux. If you want to learn Hungarian, skip Pontifex and the Colloquial series and spring the (dollar amount) for the FSI Hungarian set with 40-50 cassettes and drill your brains out. But this book would make an excellent side book for that set, better than any other. It will not give you any real subtleties of syntax, as with, say, Lewis' Turkish grammar, but it is a good book up through intermediate level.

Although the case business still irks me, I do think that besides that this book deserves high praise.