Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

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> I'd say there are some very weird things about the language. I had to wait until my second semester to be able to say "I have X". There's no such verb as "having" in hungarian, but you use possessive + being to indicate you have something. And we only learnt possessive suffixes in 2nd semester.

The same is also true for Turkish:

Bende elma var = I have an apple

Bende = Ben (me) - de (possesive), elma = apple, var = exists.

Turkish also has a lot of common words with Hungarian and no gender also like in Hungarian. Even the politics look as bad as each other, hehe. Sometimes I think there must be some more connection to these 2 societies than what you can find in Wikipedia.

I speak little to none Hungarian, and a lot of Turkish, and this broken English you can read here but I disagree, learning German wasn't that hard and for all the errors I make when speaking, nobody bats an eye.

Edit: I realize you said Berlin. Oh man, what can I tell you... There, I also had hard time speaking German, and the first mistake you make they directly switch to English to be friendly. There's something like overshooting it when you are being helpful to foreigners :) I tried to order beer and said "Bier bitte!" and the waitress asked, in English, "You want a beer?", same happened when asking for directions. This never ever happens in Hessen and I sort of like it that way.

Disclaimer: Author is a person of somewhat Turkish origin living happily in Germany who also loves the Hungarian language and culture.

> The same is also true for Turkish:

Something similar in Irish:

Tá úll agam = is (an) apple at me. In this case it's the preposition "ag" that gets conjugated differently for at me, at you, at him... instead of the subject as in Turkish or the object in the Hungarian example. Agat = at you.

Or for feelings: Tá ocras orm = is hunger on me. Ort = on you.

Children learn example sentences like these early in their mandatory Irish classes, though they don't start to memorize the lists of conjugations until a few years later. This seems like a reasonable approach, but the classes are staggeringly ineffective at actually teaching the language so we must be doing something wrong.

It's interesting how often m means me, and t or d means thou, across all kinds of European languages.

> Tá úll agam = is (an) apple at me. In this case it's the preposition "ag" that gets conjugated differently for at me, at you, at him... instead of the subject as in Turkish or the object in the Hungarian example. Agat = at you.

> Or for feelings: Tá ocras orm = is hunger on me. Ort = on you.

Same, except for spelling differences, for its very close relative, Scottish Gaelic.

> It's interesting how often m means me, and t or d means thou, across all kinds of European languages.

Most European languages are related, but it also applies to Finnish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_verb_conjugation , which is not Indoeuropean.

Also, the Etruscan (also non-Indoeuropean) first person pronoun is "mi": "mi spanti larices" = I am Larice's plate". The second person pronoun appears to be "un", though.

It's interesting you mention the relationship with Turkish. I had a colleague that would keep mentioning the similarities while I was learning it.

I feel like during Ottoman times Hungary got quite a lot of Turkish words. And also the Baths!

The Hungarian language had more contact with Turkic languages during the migratory period before settling in the current area of Hungary (so before the 9th century). Linguistic exchange was more limited during the Ottoman times.

"Bende elma var" sounds a bit odd to say "I have an apple" in Turkish, Possibly more natural is "Bir elmam var". or "Benim bir elmam var"

That's correct but depends on the context and the point still stands luckily. Two types of possesives and my example is like dative in a way.

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