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It's interesting that Hungarian is one of the few Uralic languages in modern Europe, alongside Finnish and Estonian as the other 2 major representatives. Finlan

It's interesting that Hungarian is one of the few Uralic languages in modern Europe, alongside Finnish and Estonian as the other 2 major representatives. Finland and Estonian could be argued to have enjoyed outsized success in STEM fields as well. I wonder if there could be value in learning languages with divergent roots. Most Europeans learn multiple languages, but typically they have similar roots (Indo-European) and a fair amount of crossover. There is some evidence for the weak form of linguistic relativity, the idea that language can have significant impact on cognition. Perhaps taken to the extreme, with learning many varied and highly divergent languages at a young age, it can explain some of e.g. von Neumann's brilliance.

kaba0 5y ago
As far as I know, even the weak form of linguistic relativity is heavily disputed. Please see my sibling comment with a well-written article on a more likely reason.
- friendly_chap 5y ago
  Probably. But when Edward Teller himself states it, I tend to listen. Perhaps he said jokingly though.
  - growt 5y ago
    I believe it. My wife is Hungarian and I'm trying to learn the language. I'm german myself and I think german is already quite complex, but Hungarian is just nuts (or probably martian). At some points I accused my teacher that she is just making stuff up on the fly ;)
friendly_chap 5y ago
I do believe that is the case and I have my pet layman unscientific theories too about languages. For example I believe English not being phonetic and often times pronounciation not making any sense trains people to accept things "as is", make them get over illogical things way easier. I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure. Just a toy hunch I like to think about from time to time. I wish I could see English with its original alphabet before being forced into the confines of the latin one. Apparently many sounds are misrepresented due to that.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  > I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure. I doubt that as the largest country by English as a first language is the US and I wouldn't say that those folks on the whole respect authority in the same way that we do. I think the way authority is respected in the UK has more to do with our endemic class system (which still exists) and the fact that unlike most European countries we never had a revolution in the last couple of centuries (came close at points and of course there was Cromwell but that was a different kind of revolution and much earlier).
- _moof 5y ago
  Lots of languages have orthographic depth. I doubt you'll find a correlation if you look at more than one or two languages/cultures. Heck, the French only pronounce half their letters, and they killed their monarchs.
  - friendly_chap 5y ago
    Hungarian pretty much only does that to ease pronounciation, ie. when two consonants can't be pronounced after each other eg. "utca" (means street) etc.
- tome 5y ago
  > I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Whether the British are prone to respect authority because of their language is debatable. It's less debatable whether those in a larger Anglophone nation are prone to respect authority! Just look at some of the behaviours we've seen over the last 18 months.
- bserge 5y ago
  I've observed the British respect other people, society and hierarchy. Not authority per se. That's the Germans heh.
sampo 5y ago
There is a fringe theory, that agglutinative languages with consistent vocabulary are more effortless for children to learn. So children would spend less time learning and memorizing words, and could proceed faster to learn other things. English vocabulary is a patchwork with origins from several different languages, so words with related meaning can look different. Whereas for example Finnish is consistent: kirjoittaa – to write kirjailija – writer kirja – book kirje – letter kirjasto – library kirjallisuus – literature kirjasin – font In this way, you can learn the same vocabulary by learning maybe 5x smaller amount of root words. http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/ http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I learned to read and write Hungarian in a matter of weeks. It is spelled phonetically, with only a handful of special cases. It's hilariously easy. English is a random mish-mash of at least four languages, making it seem very random and ad-hoc. However, it mercifully uses the latin alphabet. Chinese is just a nightmare, with students spending most of their schooling just to become literate...
  - tigerlily 5y ago
    Which resources did you use to learn to rw Hungarian so fast?
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      I learned in the first few weeks of primary school. Most students achieved literacy in the same time frame, a few months at most for the slower kids.
e-master 5y ago
My son, to everybody’s surprise, learned my(father) native language (Hungarian) much better than his mother’s native language (Ukrainian), even though we both are the only ones talking to him exclusively on our language, as we live in an English speaking country. He speaks Ukrainian ok, but his Hungarian is just perfect, and is at par with English. It was interesting, and I didn’t know what to attribute it to. Then we got another kid, and as he is approaching 18 months now I can see already he speaks way more Hungarian words also! Indeed, my anecdotal conclusion was that it must be the language (and mind you, the Ukrainian and Hungarian languages are absolutely different) that made the difference, everything else seemed the same, especially with WFH for the past 2 years.

kaba0 5y ago

As far as I know, even the weak form of linguistic relativity is heavily disputed. Please see my sibling comment with a well-written article on a more likely reason.

friendly_chap 5y ago
Probably. But when Edward Teller himself states it, I tend to listen. Perhaps he said jokingly though.
- growt 5y ago
  I believe it. My wife is Hungarian and I'm trying to learn the language. I'm german myself and I think german is already quite complex, but Hungarian is just nuts (or probably martian). At some points I accused my teacher that she is just making stuff up on the fly ;)

friendly_chap 5y ago

I do believe that is the case and I have my pet layman unscientific theories too about languages. For example I believe English not being phonetic and often times pronounciation not making any sense trains people to accept things "as is", make them get over illogical things way easier. I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure. Just a toy hunch I like to think about from time to time. I wish I could see English with its original alphabet before being forced into the confines of the latin one. Apparently many sounds are misrepresented due to that.

noir_lord 5y ago
> I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure. I doubt that as the largest country by English as a first language is the US and I wouldn't say that those folks on the whole respect authority in the same way that we do. I think the way authority is respected in the UK has more to do with our endemic class system (which still exists) and the fact that unlike most European countries we never had a revolution in the last couple of centuries (came close at points and of course there was Cromwell but that was a different kind of revolution and much earlier).
_moof 5y ago
Lots of languages have orthographic depth. I doubt you'll find a correlation if you look at more than one or two languages/cultures. Heck, the French only pronounce half their letters, and they killed their monarchs.
- friendly_chap 5y ago
  Hungarian pretty much only does that to ease pronounciation, ie. when two consonants can't be pronounced after each other eg. "utca" (means street) etc.
tome 5y ago
> I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Whether the British are prone to respect authority because of their language is debatable. It's less debatable whether those in a larger Anglophone nation are prone to respect authority! Just look at some of the behaviours we've seen over the last 18 months.
bserge 5y ago
I've observed the British respect other people, society and hierarchy. Not authority per se. That's the Germans heh.

sampo 5y ago

There is a fringe theory, that agglutinative languages with consistent vocabulary are more effortless for children to learn. So children would spend less time learning and memorizing words, and could proceed faster to learn other things. English vocabulary is a patchwork with origins from several different languages, so words with related meaning can look different. Whereas for example Finnish is consistent: kirjoittaa – to write kirjailija – writer kirja – book kirje – letter kirjasto – library kirjallisuus – literature kirjasin – font In this way, you can learn the same vocabulary by learning maybe 5x smaller amount of root words. http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/ http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/

jiggawatts 5y ago
I learned to read and write Hungarian in a matter of weeks. It is spelled phonetically, with only a handful of special cases. It's hilariously easy. English is a random mish-mash of at least four languages, making it seem very random and ad-hoc. However, it mercifully uses the latin alphabet. Chinese is just a nightmare, with students spending most of their schooling just to become literate...
- tigerlily 5y ago
  Which resources did you use to learn to rw Hungarian so fast?
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    I learned in the first few weeks of primary school. Most students achieved literacy in the same time frame, a few months at most for the slower kids.

e-master 5y ago

My son, to everybody’s surprise, learned my(father) native language (Hungarian) much better than his mother’s native language (Ukrainian), even though we both are the only ones talking to him exclusively on our language, as we live in an English speaking country. He speaks Ukrainian ok, but his Hungarian is just perfect, and is at par with English. It was interesting, and I didn’t know what to attribute it to. Then we got another kid, and as he is approaching 18 months now I can see already he speaks way more Hungarian words also! Indeed, my anecdotal conclusion was that it must be the language (and mind you, the Ukrainian and Hungarian languages are absolutely different) that made the difference, everything else seemed the same, especially with WFH for the past 2 years.