TAC 2016 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU)

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-14, 1:34

Levike wrote:I met one Finnish guy and we began talking about our languages
and about the supposed "relation" between them.

Sorry for spamming your thread, but why is "relation" in quotes, and why only "supposed"? Any reliable source on the subject will tell you that Finnish and Hungarian are related.

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU)

Postby Levike » 2014-12-14, 1:43

vijayjohn wrote:
Levike wrote:I met one Finnish guy and we began talking about our languages
and about the supposed "relation" between them.

Sorry for spamming your thread, but why is "relation" in quotes, and why only "supposed"? Any reliable source on the subject will tell you that Finnish and Hungarian are related.

No problem, extra comments are always welcomed, yeah "supposed" would have been better. :silly:
I know that it's a fact, but as I said, Hungarians are still very skeptical.

There are a lot of things on the internet and even shown on TV that will say otherwise,
mystifying our origin, saying that the Finno-Urgic theory is just a hoax made up by the Habsburgs.

It's a shame that in schools you're not taught about this almost at all.
About the history of our language we learnt like maybe one or two hours once in the elementary and once in high-schools.

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-14, 1:53

Oh OK, I think I get what you're saying now. :P Yeah, I've mentioned before that there are all these crazy claims out there like how Hungarian is supposedly related to Sumerian and stuff. :lol:

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-14, 4:01

Wait, did Levike mean that the Finno-Ugric theory is considered, or should be considered, to be in the same category as Hungarian being related to Sumerian? I understood what he said to mean that, in Hungary (or among Hungarians) there's this belief that the Finno-Ugric theory is hogwash, even though outside of Hungary (and possibly Hungarian linguists) most linguists believe the theory. If so, then I would attribute that to perhaps nationalistic pride - Hungarians wanting their language to be different.
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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-14, 4:06

dEhiN wrote:Wait, did Levike mean that the Finno-Ugric theory is considered, or should be considered, to be in the same category as Hungarian being related to Sumerian?

No.
I understood what he said to mean that, in Hungary (or among Hungarians) there's this belief that the Finno-Ugric theory is hogwash,

Yep, that's what I understood, too.
even though outside of Hungary (and possibly Hungarian linguists) most linguists believe the theory.

I don't know of a single linguist who can be considered reputable at all and doesn't. :?
If so, then I would attribute that to perhaps nationalistic pride - Hungarians wanting their language to be different.

Well...maybe. It could also just be because the languages have become very different by now (and are not that closely related anyway; they belong to different branches of Uralic/Finno-Ugric).

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-14, 4:19

vijayjohn wrote:Well...maybe. It could also just be because the languages have become very different by now (and are not that closely related anyway; they belong to different branches of Uralic/Finno-Ugric).

So if they're very different by now, how did linguists determine that they are related languages and especially different branches of the same family? That is, how were they sure the similarities weren't due to past contact, or, as in the case with some of the grammar similarities used to support the Altaic theory, surface similarities?

PS. This might be dumb question, but are Uralic and Finno-Ugric synonyms? I've never known if they are synonymous names for the same family, or if there's a relationship between those terms.
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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-14, 4:34

dEhiN wrote:So if they're very different by now, how did linguists determine that they are related languages and especially different branches of the same family? That is, how were they sure the similarities weren't due to past contact, or, as in the case with some of the grammar similarities used to support the Altaic theory, surface similarities?

The same way that (historical) linguists determine whether any two languages are related: using a pretty complicated technique called comparative reconstruction.
PS. This might be dumb question, but are Uralic and Finno-Ugric synonyms? I've never known if they are synonymous names for the same family, or if there's a relationship between those terms.

Not quite (and no, it's not a dumb question at all :)). Finno-Ugric is basically all the Uralic languages except the Samoyedic ones.

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-14, 4:41

vijayjohn wrote:
dEhiN wrote:So if they're very different by now, how did linguists determine that they are related languages and especially different branches of the same family? That is, how were they sure the similarities weren't due to past contact, or, as in the case with some of the grammar similarities used to support the Altaic theory, surface similarities?

The same way that (historical) linguists determine whether any two languages are related: using a technique called "comparative reconstruction," which basically means comparing lots of words from both languages that have similar meanings, identifying sound correspondences between them./quote]
I figured that was what happened (I didn't know the name of the technique, but knew the concept of what it entailed). But I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how did linguists determine that Hungarian and Finnish are related while determining that Turkish isn't, when relatively recently the Altaic theory was believed to be true (at least I remember reading about it as if it were fact back in the late 90s / early 00s). I imagine comparative reconstruction would've been done between Turkic and Uralic as well.
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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-14, 5:34

dEhiN wrote:I figured that was what happened (I didn't know the name of the technique, but knew the concept of what it entailed). But I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how did linguists determine that Hungarian and Finnish are related while determining that Turkish isn't, when relatively recently the Altaic theory was believed to be true (at least I remember reading about it as if it were fact back in the late 90s / early 00s). I imagine comparative reconstruction would've been done between Turkic and Uralic as well.

Sorry if this is nitpicking (yet again...), but I was going to write a longer response to this and then realized suddenly that you specifically cited the Altaic theory. The Altaic theory does not include Uralic.

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-14, 6:31

vijayjohn wrote:Sorry if this is nitpicking (yet again...), but I was going to write a longer response to this and then realized suddenly that you specifically cited the Altaic theory. The Altaic theory does not include Uralic.

Oh really? Ok then I withdraw my initial questions :D. Und Levike, lo siento for hijacking your thread. (See, I tried to get back on track with a German and Spanish word :D).
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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby Levike » 2014-12-21, 13:33

@dEhiN: Thanks. I think that if you look at the core vocab of two languages and they are somewhat similar then it's very probable that they are also related and not just random borrowings.

For example Hungary is surrounded by Slavic speakers (Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene),
but if you look at the Slavic words in Hungarian you'll see that they are mostly used for specific fields like agriculture, which I guess Hungarians didn't practise until coming here to the Pannonian Basin and meeting all the Slavs.

Now that I'm learning Polish it was very funny that it has almost nothing to do with Hungarian, but when we got to learn the names of vegetables suddenly half of all words gave me a strong deja-vu
( egres = agrest, cseresznye = czereśnia, kukurica = kukurydza ).

But if you look at day-to-day words like "to live", "eye", "water", "fish" or the numbers maybe then you'll probably see some Finno-Ugric things.

Update:

[flag=]hu[/flag] I've been looking into its grammar a bit and I just want to point out that every verb can be conjugated in a definite and in an indefinite way, that's simply the most useless thing I ever saw in a language. Seriously how drunk does a conlanger have to be to come up with this.

Otherwise it's not so bad as the Romanian way of conjugating, which, I guess, is a nightmare.

I wish we stayed with the old spelling system, it looked cool, not packed with diacritics:
feheruuaru rea meneh hodu utu rea <=> Fehérvárra menő hadi útra

[flag=]de[/flag] I've been reading the online newspapers for a while now and it's great, I've got to the point where I'm reading it just because it's about an interesting topic.

With technical/mathematical/scientifical terms I'm still horrible, if I look at the news and they suddenly start talking about for example how a machine functions then it's a clear end.
But in these situations I get lost even in Hungarian, so I'm comforting myself with that.

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-21, 20:33

Levike wrote:@dEhiN: Thanks. I think that if you look at the core vocab of two languages and they are somewhat similar then it's very probable that they are also related and not just random borrowings.

For example Hungary is surrounded by Slavic speakers (Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene),
but if you look at the Slavic words in Hungarian you'll see that they are mostly used for specific fields like agriculture, which I guess Hungarians didn't practise until coming here to the Pannonian Basin and meeting all the Slavs.

Now that I'm learning Polish it was very funny that it has almost nothing to do with Hungarian, but when we got to learn the names of vegetables suddenly half of all words gave me a strong deja-vu
( egres = agrest, cseresznye = czereśnia, kukurica = kukurydza ).

But if you look at day-to-day words like "to live", "eye", "water", "fish" or the numbers maybe then you'll probably see some Finno-Ugric things.

Yeah, if we focus on the core vocabulary, we can establish reliable sound correspondences between Finnish and Hungarian. My understanding is that Finnish has mostly been in contact with Germanic languages whereas Hungarian has been in contact with Slavic ones, and a lot of the differences between those two languages can be attributed to that. But if we factor out language contact (including borrowing), the similarities are a lot clearer.

That example that I bolded above is interesting, by the way, because it's not a Slavic loanword in Hungarian; it's a word that both Hungarian and Polish borrowed from Ottoman Turkish (kukuruz قوقوروز), which in turn borrowed it from Albanian (kokërrëz). Neither Turkish nor Albanian has this word today; instead, they both got their modern words for 'corn' from the Ottoman Turkish word for 'Egypt'. Hungarian does have another word kukorica, though (also meaning 'corn' AFAICT), which was borrowed directly from a Slavic language - specifically, Serbo-Croatian (kukuruz), which also borrowed this word from Ottoman Turkish. :lol:
I've been looking into its grammar a bit and I just want to point out that every verb can be conjugated in a definite and in an indefinite way, that's simply the most useless thing I ever saw in a language. Seriously how drunk does a conlanger have to be to come up with this.

:lol: But the cool thing about that is that it allows objects to be dropped. In a lot of languages, you can drop subjects and objects at the same time but only if they can be inferred from discourse context. For example, in Malayalam, if I was telling a story about having to buy my dad a Christmas present, I could eventually say something that literally means "then in-the-end gave," and that would be understood to mean "and then I finally gave him his Christmas present" because I already specified earlier in the story that I was the one trying to give something to someone, my dad was the intended recipient, and his Christmas present is what was to be given. In Hungarian, that's actually written into the grammar, so the verb form already tells you both who the subject is and who the object is without requiring you to specify either of those in the sentence.

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby PEMbl » 2014-12-21, 21:04

That's a very interesting challenge! I wish you the best of luck! And you know, this is the kind of text that really makes me want to go study abroad as well.
Fluent : [flag=]fr-QC[/flag][flag=]us[/flag]
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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby Levike » 2014-12-21, 21:45

PEMbI wrote:That's a very interesting challenge! I wish you the best of luck!
Thanks very much.
vijayjohn wrote:kukorica
#That moment when you get corrected by an English speaker on your mother tongue. :oops:
#Where's the closest wifiless rock, I want to go and hide under it.

But the cool thing about that is that it allows objects to be dropped.
Yeah, but the way it works in Hungarian, just looks senseless sometimes:

I'm driving a car. = Vezetek egy autót.
I'm driving the car. = Vezetem az autót.

In the 1st sentence it's using the indefinite form because the word "car" is preceded by "a", while in the 2nd one it's using the definite one because it's preceded by "the".
There was one guy who asked me why it works this way, but at that time I didn't even know that we have separate conjugations.

But yeah, in most cases maybe it's good so you can shorten the sentence.

One funny incident:
At one of the Erasmus meetings I got asked how do you say "I love you" in Hungarian and I said that it's "Szeretlek", but then they asked me where's the "I" and where's the "you" part.
They all understood that you don't need the pronoun 'cause the way it looks tells you that I'm the one doing it, but I got pretty interesting reactions once I told them that "you" is represented by the "l" letter in the middle of "Szeretlek".

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-22, 1:58

Levike wrote:I'm driving a car. = Vezetek egy autót.
I'm driving the car. = Vezetem az autót.

I don't remember now but is egy both the word for one and a? Or does it only mean one but you can use it as an indefinite article, like in English?

Levike wrote:One funny incident:
At one of the Erasmus meetings I got asked how do you say "I love you" in Hungarian and I said that it's "Szeretlek", but then they asked me where's the "I" and where's the "you" part.
They all understood that you don't need the pronoun 'cause the way it looks tells you that I'm the one doing it, but I got pretty interesting reactions once I told them that "you" is represented by the "l" letter in the middle of "Szeretlek".

Huh, interesting! Were most of these students speakers of IE languages, where (afaik) that's not possible?

Also, do you know if Finnish or any of the other Finno-Ugric languages have this ability?
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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-22, 2:59

dEhiN wrote:I don't remember now but is egy both the word for one and a?

Yes.
Also, do you know if Finnish or any of the other Finno-Ugric languages have this ability?

No, Finnish doesn't. There are similar definite vs. indefinite conjugations in a few of the other Finno-Ugric languages, though (they're all spoken in Russia, but just in case you're curious: Khanty, Mansi, Erzya, and Moksha).

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby Levike » 2015-05-05, 22:16

This thread is dusty already, time for an update.

[flag=]de[/flag]

Luckily/sadly this is the only language that i have been working on.

1. I'm reading the "Die Zeit" online newspaper almost every day, usually one or two or at most three articles.
I only read about the topics I'm interested in.

Sometimes I happen read the same thing that I read 5 minutes before on one of the Romanian newspapers "Gândul" or "Mediafax". But it's nice to see the same thing from two perspectives.

2. I've been given a summer internship at a German software company in Wolfsburg.
That will probably help my German enormously, since the whole instruction is going to be in German.

But I don't really feel prepared, so I'm really nervous about how that will go.
I've been requested to send them some papers that I had to fill and that made me realise how much my vocab sucks.
I had to look up simple words like "database" or "user-interface".

This is why I'm mostly leaving English and Spanish behind, learning them further would be an impediment.

Winter is coming.

[flag=]es[/flag]

I've made some Spanish friends while in Warsaw and we're trying to keep in touch.
But that's the only time I get to practice the language.

[flag=]en[/flag]

Same as Spanish, but since none of us are natives we probably write to each other in some sort of broken English.

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby kevin » 2015-05-06, 8:48

Levike wrote:I've been requested to send them some papers that I had to fill and that made me realise how much my vocab sucks.
I had to look up simple words like "database" or "user-interface".

Though this is the kind of words that you'd know after the first day if you're going to work on something that has a user interface and uses a database. :)

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Re: TAC 2014 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby Levike » 2015-05-10, 20:40

[flag=]de[/flag] Good news:

A lady from the company where I got my internship called me this week and asked me if I wanted free German courses. Of course I didn't refuse.

This Wednesday I'm going to have a chat with the teacher so she can find out where exactly my level is.

kevin wrote:
Levike wrote:I had to look up simple words like "database" or "user-interface".

Though this is the kind of words that you'd know after the first day if you're going to work on something that has a user interface and uses a database.

Not really, I think it's rather like going to repair cars and not knowing how to say "wheel".

I hope it's just me being too concerned.

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Re: TAC 2015 - Levi (DE, EN, ES, HU, RO)

Postby kevin » 2015-05-10, 20:53

Same thing. Someone woudl ask you to do something with a wheel, you wouldn't understand, they would point at it (or you would check a dictionary) and you would have learnt a new word that you wouldn't forget again because you would use it all the time from then on. You would definitely know the word at the end of the first day.


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