Hungarian Studies in London
At around the same time as Europeans were colonising the Americas and decimating the native populations there, Russians were pushing eastward. Siberia was colonised during the reign of Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible, 1530-84) and, by the end of the sixteenth century, the Mansi had been pushed from ‘European Russia’ to the other side of [...]
First of all, here’s the ending to last week’s mouse story:
ań ta śuńēɣt, ań ta χūleɣt. ta ojipas.
In other (Hungarian) words, ma is élnek, ha meg nem haltak. Vége. The English would be ‘and they all lived happily ever after’, although it’s more like ‘they are still alive, if they did not die. The [...]
In the second Ob-Ugric class with Peter, and we read a folk tale in the northern dialect of Vogul, Sygva, about a mouse. Here are the first few lines of the text, and I’m using the Latin script here for ease of recognisability (Cyrillic was introduced in the late 1930s). There’s no upper case:
mātāpriś ōli. [...]
Hungarian belongs to the Uralic family of languages, which is split between Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic subfamilies (link opens in a new window). A more detailed map of the Uralic languages is available here.
The major languages of the Finno-Ugric are Finnish, Estonian (Balto-Finnic) and Hungarian (Ugric). The closest living relatives to Hungarian are Khanty (also known [...]