UniLang

Helló mindenkinek!

It feels nice to be around again after such a long time.

Well, a recent discussion among UniLangers on Facebook about Hungarian got me interested in finally having a look at what the Finno-Ugric family had to offer, and here I am, totally in love with Hungarian!

I certainly don’t underestimate the challenge, and I definitely haven’t got as much free time as I used to, so things will be slow, particularly because I’m trying hard not to skip any steps, but I felt it could be time I created a thread for my questions, and so here I am.

My first (somewhat layered) question comes from trying to see what kind of grammatical information I may get from a certain dictionary. I got myself a copy of MoBiMouse Plus, and it comes with the ‘Akadémiai’ Comprehensive Dictionary (Országh Al.). It’s great, but I couldn’t for the sake of me find any sort of help towards figuring out all the grammar the Hungarian-English dictionary provides for each entry, and so I’m moving on my own with guesses as educated as possible. Anyway…

I was doing some exercises on the plural of nouns and adjectives the other night, and wasn’t sure whether olcsó took a linking vowel or not (now I know it doesn’t: olcsók). Since none of the online resources I know gave any clues about it, I turned to MoBiMouse, which read:

olcsó ‹-t; -n› mn

I assume mn stands for melléknév, and find it logical that -t stands for the accusative (olcsót), but I’m not sure what -n might stand for here. Anyway, the point is that neither suffix presented requires a linking vowel, and that’s where I get to the key point of my question – since the dictionary doesn’t mention -k explicitely, does that mean it should be obvious olcsó takes no linking vowel in the plural, or could the lack of such vowel for -t and -n have also indicated -k doesn’t take it either?

Üdv! :) Salve! :D

It feels nice to be around again after such a long time.

I rarely pop in here these days... Looks like everybody has disappeared.

As to your question:

• Yes, mn stands for melléknév (adjective)
• But it can also be a noun (főnév, fn)
• You're right, it doesn't need a linking vowel in plural. But don't worry if you see these days that some people would still use a linking vowel in these types of plural constructions (i.e. olcsóak) as there's no explicit "logic" or rule behind their use when the word already ends in a vowel. (You can just google both olcsók and olcsóak.
• olcsón = cheaply. For instance: Olcsón vettem. = I bought it cheap[ly]. To learn a foreign language through English can be hard when it comes to explanations. :)

If it helps, [i]olcsón[i] can be thought of as similar to the English construction "on the cheap".

It's also great to see someone learning Hungarian! It scares a lot of people off with its complexity.