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> Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant Not exactly irrelevant, but very flexible. There are some rules to word order in Hungarian, but you typical
by yosito 5y ago
> Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant
Not exactly irrelevant, but very flexible. There are some rules to word order in Hungarian, but you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part by putting whatever is important in front. For example, if you ask a question, the question word that you expect an answer to always goes in front, "What should I wear?" and the answer should start with the word that answers that question, "The red dress, you should wear". Without delving into an entire Hungarian grammar lesson [because 1) I'm not qualified and 2) It would take several months], you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word order that Yoda uses. Yoda might say "Patience you must have my young Padawan." but he would never say "Must have you young Padawan patience." Why? Because he's putting emphasis on patience, so he starts the sentence with that, and then the rest of the sentence falls into an order behind that, but isn't random.
Also, while Finnish and Hungarian both have flexible word order and are both agglutinative, a language being agglutinative has little to do with word order and is about the fact that rather than using multiple words, you add prefixes and suffixes to words to add meaning. For example, "I play with my dog" is only two "words" in Hungarian: "kutyámmal játszom" which is basically "dog+my+with play+i", but because of the agglutinative nature, the boundary between what is a "word" and what is a sentence is a bit fuzzy and the words can get very long, for example: "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" which roughly translates to "because of y'all's continued behavior as if you could not be desecrated".
Because of agglutination Hungarian also has a very fun tongue twister: "Te tetted e tettetett tettet? Te tettetett tettek tettese, te!" which basically means, "Did you do this pretend deed? You doer of pretend deeds, you!"
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoSomething that has stuck with me from a writing class in college (English) was that you should try to start and end sentences with important words. The professor emphasized that you shouldn't try too hard—readability is paramount, and you don't want to mangle the sentence—but where you can manage it, it makes writing more powerful. It sounds like Hungarian effectively built this into the language, which is super interesting!
- tom_mellior 5y agoYes, Hungarian has this kind of emphasis built in. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis for examples of how varying the word order can change the emphasis and thus effectively the meaning of a sentence. Because it really affects the meaning, I also think that your parent's statement that "you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part" is not strong enough. You don't just "typically" do this. You do it because you must, because most permutations of a given set of words -- although perfectly grammatical, and referring to the same event -- are simply pragmatically incorrect in the context of the conversation or text.
- krisoft 5y ago> you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word order that Yoda uses Absolutely. So much so that in the Hungarian dub of Star Wars Yoda speaks normaly, like any other character. His vocal weirdness thing completely gets lost in the translation.
- tom_mellior 5y agoThis is misleading. The translation could trivially make him use incorrect word orders. "Lost in translation" suggests that it would be difficult to make him speak in a quirky way, but that's not the case at all. The translator just couldn't be arsed. They couldn't even be arsed to give him a non-human voice. It's just a shoddy translation/dub, not a statement about the Hungarian language.
- yosito 5y agoThe thing is, Yoda doesn't simply use an "incorrect" word order. He uses a word order which emphasizes the focus of his sentence by putting it first. Since Hungarian already does this, there is nothing different in Hungarian about the way Yoda talks.
- tom_mellior 5y ago> Since Hungarian already does this, there is nothing different in Hungarian about the way Yoda talks. Yes. My point was merely that this is bad. Yoda is supposed to talk differently. If he doesn't, then the translator didn't do their job properly.
- CRConrad 5y agoWhat a lot of different consonants! (T, d, k, s = 5.) Finnish does it with three: "Kokoo koko kokko kokoon. Koko kokkoko kokoon? Koko kokko kokoon." https://www.puhutaan-suomea.net/kokoo-koko-kokko-kokoon/ https://www.puhutaan-suomea.net/kokoo-koko-kokko-kokoon/
- CRConrad 5y ago(Yeah, well, for varying values of "5"...)