Hungarian , or Magyar ( magyar nyelv , pronounced [ˈmɒɟɒr ˈɲɛlv] ), is a Uralic language of the Ugric branch spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighboring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary, it is also spoken by Hungarian communities in southern Slovakia , western Ukraine ( Transcarpathia ), central and western Romania ( Transylvania ), northern Serbia ( Vojvodina ), northern Croatia , northeastern Slovenia ( Prekmurje ), and eastern Austria ( Burgenland ).
64-664: Ighiu ( Hungarian : Magyarigen ; German : Grabendorf ) is a commune located in Alba County , Transylvania , Romania . The commune is composed of five villages: Bucerdea Vinoasă ( Borosbocsárd ), Ighiel ( Igenpataka ), Ighiu, Șard ( Sárd ), and Țelna ( Celna ). The commune is located in the southeastern corner of the Transylvanian Plateau , about 10 km (6.2 mi) northwest of Alba Iulia and 17 km (11 mi) southwest of Teiuș . The Ighiu river passes through Ighiel and Ighiu villages before discharging into
128-601: A Turkic language continued to be a matter of impassioned political controversy throughout the 18th and into the 19th centuries. During the latter half of the 19th century, a competing hypothesis proposed a Turkic affinity of Hungarian, or, alternatively, that both the Uralic and the Turkic families formed part of a superfamily of Ural–Altaic languages . Following an academic debate known as Az ugor-török háború ("the Ugric-Turkic war"),
192-417: A circumfix , to change a word's meaning and its grammatical function. Hungarian uses vowel harmony to attach suffixes to words. That means that most suffixes have two or three different forms, and the choice between them depends on the vowels of the head word. There are some minor and unpredictable exceptions to the rule. Nouns have 18 cases , which are formed regularly with suffixes. The nominative case
256-681: A high proportion of words specific to agriculture and livestock are of Chuvash origin. A strong Chuvash influence was also apparent in Hungarian burial customs. The first written accounts of Hungarian date to the 10th century, such as mostly Hungarian personal names and place names in De Administrando Imperio , written in Greek by Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine VII . No significant texts written in Old Hungarian script have survived, because
320-399: A millennium. These include tehén 'cow' (cf. Avestan daénu ); tíz 'ten' (cf. Avestan dasa ); tej 'milk' (cf. Persian dáje 'wet nurse'); and nád 'reed' (from late Middle Iranian ; cf. Middle Persian nāy and Modern Persian ney ). Archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan confirms the existence of Hungarian settlements between
384-785: A million additional people scattered in other parts of the world. For example, there are more than one hundred thousand Hungarian speakers in the Hungarian American community and 1.5 million with Hungarian ancestry in the United States . Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the European Union. Hungarian is also one of the official languages of Serbian province of Vojvodina and an official language of three municipalities in Slovenia : Hodoš , Dobrovnik and Lendava , along with Slovene . Hungarian
448-406: A process of nyelvújítás ( language revitalization ). Some words were shortened ( győzedelem > győzelem , 'victory' or 'triumph'); a number of dialectal words spread nationally ( e.g. , cselleng 'dawdle'); extinct words were reintroduced ( dísz , 'décor'); a wide range of expressions were coined using the various derivative suffixes; and some other, less frequently used methods of expanding
512-1045: A similarly dramatic way over these three centuries. After the arrival of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin , the language came into contact with a variety of speech communities , among them Slavic , Turkic , and German . Turkic loans from this period come mainly from the Pechenegs and Cumanians , who settled in Hungary during the 12th and 13th centuries: e.g. koboz " cobza " (cf. Turkish kopuz 'lute'); komondor "mop dog" (< * kumandur < Cuman ). Hungarian borrowed 20% of words from neighbouring Slavic languages : e.g. tégla 'brick'; mák 'poppy seed'; szerda 'Wednesday'; csütörtök 'Thursday'...; karácsony 'Christmas'. These languages in turn borrowed words from Hungarian: e.g. Serbo-Croatian ašov from Hungarian ásó 'spade'. About 1.6 percent of
576-400: Is subject–verb–object (SVO). However, Hungarian is a topic-prominent language , and so has a word order that depends not only on syntax but also on the topic–comment structure of the sentence (for example, what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized). A Hungarian sentence generally has the following order: topic, comment (or focus), verb and the rest. The topic shows that
640-580: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Hungarian language It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America (particularly the United States and Canada ) and Israel . With 14 million speakers, it is the Uralic family's largest member by number of speakers. Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family . Linguistic connections between Hungarian and other Uralic languages were noticed in
704-579: Is always on the first syllable of a word, as in Finnish and the neighbouring Slovak and Czech . There is a secondary stress on other syllables in compounds: viszontlátásra ("goodbye") is pronounced /ˈvisontˌlaːtaːʃrɒ/ . Elongated vowels in non-initial syllables may seem to be stressed to an English-speaker, as length and stress correlate in English. Hungarian is an agglutinative language . It uses various affixes , mainly suffixes but also some prefixes and
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#1733092477693768-519: Is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages , Old Avestan (spoken in the mid-2nd to 1st millennium BC) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BC). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scriptural language of Zoroastrianism . Both are early Eastern Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian language branch of the Indo-European language family . Its immediate ancestor
832-459: Is attested in roughly two forms, known as "Old Avestan" (or "Gathic Avestan") and "Younger Avestan". Younger Avestan did not evolve from Old Avestan; the two differ not only in time, but they are also different dialects. Every Avestan text, regardless of whether originally composed in Old or Younger Avestan, underwent several transformations. Karl Hoffmann traced the following stages for Avestan as found in
896-560: Is classified as Eastern Old Iranian. But the east–west distinction is of limited meaning for Avestan, as the linguistic developments that later distinguish Eastern from Western Iranian had not yet occurred. Avestan does not display some typical (South-)Western Iranian innovations already visible in Old Persian, and so in this sense, "eastern" only means "non-western". Old Avestan is closely related to Old Persian and largely agrees morphologically with Vedic Sanskrit . The Avestan language
960-549: Is expressed by a possessive suffix on the possessed object, rather than the possessor as in English (Peter's apple becomes Péter almája , literally 'Peter apple-his'). Noun plurals are formed with –k ( az almák 'the apples'), but after a numeral, the singular is used ( két alma 'two apples', literally 'two apple'; not *két almák ). Unlike English, Hungarian uses case suffixes and nearly always postpositions instead of prepositions. There are two types of articles in Hungarian, definite and indefinite, which roughly correspond to
1024-567: Is interpreted such that the bulk of this material, which has been produced several centuries after Zarathustra, must still predate the sixth century BC. As a result, more recent scholarship often assumes that the major parts of the Young Avestan texts mainly reflect the first half of the first millennia BC, whereas the Old Avestan texts of Zarathustra may have been composed around 1000 BC or even as early as 1500 BC. The Avestan language
1088-442: Is marked with boldface. Hungarian has a four-tiered system for expressing levels of politeness. From highest to lowest: The four-tiered system has somewhat been eroded due to the recent expansion of " tegeződés " and " önözés ". Some anomalies emerged with the arrival of multinational companies who have addressed their customers in the te (least polite) form right from the beginning of their presence in Hungary. A typical example
1152-613: Is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria , Croatia , Romania , Zakarpattia in Ukraine , and Slovakia . In Romania it is a recognized minority language used at local level in communes, towns and municipalities with an ethnic Hungarian population of over 20%. The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian. These dialects are, for
1216-601: Is only known from the Avesta and otherwise unattested. As a result, there is no external evidence on which to base the time frame during which the Avestan language was spoken and all attempts have to rely on internal evidence. Such attempts were often based on the life of Zarathustra as the most distinct event in the Avestan period . Zarathustra was traditionally based in the 6th century BC meaning that Old Avestan would have been spoken during
1280-399: Is sometimes described as having free word order, different word orders are generally not interchangeable, and the neutral order is not always correct to use. The intonation is also different with different topic-comment structures. The topic usually has a rising intonation, the focus having a falling intonation. In the following examples, the topic is marked with italics, and the focus (comment)
1344-475: Is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer , which dates to the 1190s. Although the orthography of these early texts differed considerably from that used today, contemporary Hungarians can still understand a great deal of the reconstructed spoken language, despite changes in grammar and vocabulary. A more extensive body of Hungarian literature arose after 1300. The earliest known example of Hungarian religious poetry
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#17330924776931408-693: Is the 14th-century Lamentations of Mary . The first Bible translation was the Hussite Bible in the 1430s. The standard language lost its diphthongs , and several postpositions transformed into suffixes , including reá "onto" (the phrase utu rea "onto the way" found in the 1055 text would later become út ra ). There were also changes in the system of vowel harmony . At one time, Hungarian used six verb tenses , while today only two or three are used. In 1533, Kraków printer Benedek Komjáti published Letters of St. Paul in Hungarian (modern orthography: A Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven ),
1472-523: Is the Swedish furniture shop IKEA , whose web site and other publications address the customers in te form. When a news site asked IKEA—using the te form—why they address their customers this way, IKEA's PR Manager explained in his answer—using the ön form—that their way of communication reflects IKEA's open-mindedness and the Swedish culture. However IKEA in France uses the polite ( vous ) form. Another example
1536-485: Is the communication of Yettel Hungary (earlier Telenor, a mobile network operator) towards its customers. Yettel chose to communicate towards business customers in the polite ön form while all other customers are addressed in the less polite te form. During the first early phase of Hungarian language reforms (late 18th and early 19th centuries) more than ten thousand words were coined, several thousand of which are still actively used today (see also Ferenc Kazinczy ,
1600-407: Is unmarked ( az alma 'the apple') and, for example, the accusative is marked with the suffix –t ( az almát '[I eat] the apple'). Half of the cases express a combination of the source-location-target and surface-inside-proximity ternary distinctions (three times three cases); there is a separate case ending – ból / –ből meaning a combination of source and insideness: 'from inside of'. Possession
1664-535: Is written right-to-left. Among the 53 characters are about 30 letters that are – through the addition of various loops and flourishes – variations of the 13 graphemes of the cursive Pahlavi script (i.e. "Book" Pahlavi) that is known from the post-Sassanian texts of Zoroastrian tradition. These symbols, like those of all the Pahlavi scripts, are in turn based on Aramaic script symbols. Avestan also incorporates several letters from other writing systems, most notably
1728-561: The c. 12th century texts of Neryosang Dhaval and other Parsi Sanskritist theologians of that era, which are roughly contemporary with the oldest surviving manuscripts in Avestan script. Today, Avestan is most commonly typeset in the Gujarati script ( Gujarati being the traditional language of the Indian Zoroastrians). Some Avestan letters with no corresponding symbol are synthesized with additional diacritical marks, for example,
1792-470: The /z/ in zaraθuštra is written with j with a dot below. Avestan has retained voiced sibilants, and has fricative rather than aspirate series. There are various conventions for transliteration of the Avestan alphabet , the one adopted for this article being: Vowels: Consonants: The glides y and w are often transcribed as < ii > and < uu >. The letter transcribed < t̰ > indicates an allophone of /t/ with no audible release at
1856-533: The Ampoi river in Șard. Both Șard and Ighiu have fortified churches . The latter one, the Reformed Church of Ighiu, is part of an architectural ensemble dating back to the 15th century, with the present church having been built in 1781–1783. The Hungarian theologian and historian Péter Bod was pastor there from 1749 to his death, in 1768; his tomb is in the church's courtyard. This Alba County location article
1920-576: The Avesta , a collection of Zoroastrian religious literature composed in the language, the name of which comes from Persian اوستا , avestâ and is of obscure origin, though it might come from or be cognate with the Avestan term 𐬎𐬞𐬀𐬯𐬙𐬁𐬬𐬀𐬐𐬀 , upastāvaka , 'praise'. The language was sometimes called Zend in older works, stemming from a misunderstanding of the Zend (commentaries and interpretations of Zoroastrian scripture) as synonymous with
1984-663: The Romanian lexicon is of Hungarian origin. In the 21st century, studies support an origin of the Uralic languages, including early Hungarian, in eastern or central Siberia , somewhere between the Ob and Yenisei rivers or near the Sayan mountains in the Russian – Mongolian border region. A 2019 study based on genetics, archaeology and linguistics, found that early Uralic speakers arrived in Europe from
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2048-512: The Sasanian period ". The script used for writing Avestan developed during the 3rd or 4th century AD. By then the language had been extinct for many centuries, and remained in use only as a liturgical language of the Avesta canon. As is still the case today, the liturgies were memorized by the priesthood and recited by rote. The script devised to render Avestan was natively known as Din dabireh "religion writing". It has 53 distinct characters and
2112-832: The Volga River and the Ural Mountains . The Onoğurs (and Bulgars ) later had a great influence on the language, especially between the 5th and 9th centuries. This layer of Turkic loans is large and varied (e.g. szó ' word ' , from Turkic ; and daru ' crane ' , from the related Permic languages ), and includes words borrowed from Oghur Turkic ; e.g. borjú ' calf ' (cf. Chuvash păru , părăv vs. Turkish buzağı ); dél 'noon; south' (cf. Chuvash tĕl vs. Turkish dial. düš ). Many words related to agriculture, state administration and even family relationships show evidence of such backgrounds. Hungarian syntax and grammar were not influenced in
2176-686: The 1670s, and the family itself was established in 1717. Hungarian has traditionally been assigned to the Ugric branch along with the Mansi and Khanty languages of western Siberia ( Khanty–Mansia region of North Asia ), but it is no longer clear that it is a valid group. When the Samoyed languages were determined to be part of the family, it was thought at first that Finnic and Ugric (the most divergent branches within Finno-Ugric) were closer to each other than to
2240-872: The 2011 Hungarian census, 9,896,333 people (99.6% of the total population) speak Hungarian, of whom 9,827,875 people (98.9%) speak it as a first language, while 68,458 people (0.7%) speak it as a second language . About 2.2 million speakers live in other areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon (1920). Of these, the largest group lives in Transylvania , the western half of present-day Romania , where there are approximately 1.25 million Hungarians . There are large Hungarian communities also in Slovakia , Serbia and Ukraine , and Hungarians can also be found in Austria , Croatia , and Slovenia , as well as about
2304-583: The Avesta itself, due to both often being bundled together as "Zend-Avesta". Avestan and Old Persian are the two attested languages comprising Old Iranian , and while Avestan was localized in the northeastern parts of Greater Iran according to Paul Maximilian Tedesco [ de ] (1921), other scholars have favored regarding Avestan as originating in eastern parts. Scholars traditionally classify Iranian languages as "old", "middle" and "new" according to their age, and as "eastern" or "western" according to geography, and within this framework Avestan
2368-559: The Finno-Ugric hypothesis was concluded the sounder of the two, mainly based on work by the German linguist Josef Budenz . Hungarians did, in fact, absorb some Turkic influences during several centuries of cohabitation. The influence on Hungarians was mainly from the Turkic Oghur speakers such as Sabirs , Bulgars of Atil , Kabars and Khazars . The Oghur tribes are often connected with
2432-429: The Hungarian lexemes collected from technical texts, dialects etc. would total up to 1,000,000 words. Parts of the lexicon can be organized using word-bushes (see an example on the right). The words in these bushes share a common root, are related through inflection, derivation and compounding, and are usually broadly related in meaning. Avestan Avestan ( / ə ˈ v ɛ s t ən / ə- VESS -tən )
2496-524: The Hungarian language contains 75,000 words, and the Comprehensive Dictionary of Hungarian Language (to be published in 18 volumes in the next twenty years) is planned to contain 110,000 words. The default Hungarian lexicon is usually estimated to comprise 60,000 to 100,000 words. (Independently of specific languages, speakers actively use at most 10,000 to 20,000 words, with an average intellectual using 25,000 to 30,000 words. ) However, all
2560-505: The Hungarians whose exoethnonym is usually derived from Onogurs (> (H)ungars), a Turkic tribal confederation . The similarity between customs of Hungarians and the Chuvash people , the only surviving member of the Oghur tribes, is visible. For example, the Hungarians appear to have learned animal husbandry techniques from the Oghur speaking Chuvash people (or historically Suvar people ), as
2624-671: The Samoyed branch of the family, but that is now frequently questioned. The name of Hungary could be a result of regular sound changes of Ungrian/Ugrian , and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to Hungarians as Ǫgry/Ǫgrove (sg. Ǫgrinŭ ) seemed to confirm that. Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onoğur (which means ' ten arrows ' or ' ten tribes ' ). There are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and
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2688-448: The Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular. The traditional view holds that the Hungarian language diverged from its Ugric relatives in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, in western Siberia east of the southern Urals . In Hungarian, Iranian loanwords date back to the time immediately following the breakup of Ugric and probably span well over
2752-620: The Young Avestan material. As regards Old Avestan, the Gathas show strong linguistic and cultural similarities with the Rigveda , which in turn is assumed to represent the second half of the second millennium BC. As regards Young Avestan, texts like the Yashts and the Vendidad are situated in the eastern parts of Greater Iran and lack any discernible Persian or Median influence from Western Iran. This
2816-514: The early Achaemenid period . Given that a substantial time must have passed between Old Avestan and Young Avestan, the latter would have been spoken somewhere during the Hellenistic or the Parthian period of Iranian history. However, more recent scholarship has increasingly shifted to an earlier dating. The literature presents a number of reasons for this shift, based on both the Old Avestan and
2880-461: The east, specifically from eastern Siberia. Hungarian historian and archaeologist Gyula László claims that geological data from pollen analysis seems to contradict the placing of the ancient Hungarian homeland near the Urals. Today, the consensus among linguists is that Hungarian is a member of the Uralic family of languages. The classification of Hungarian as a Uralic/Finno-Ugric rather than
2944-470: The entirety of present-day Afghanistan as well as parts of Tajikistan , Turkmenistan , and Uzbekistan . The Yaz culture of Bactria–Margiana has been regarded as a likely archaeological reflection of the early " Eastern Iranian " culture that is described in the Zoroastrian Avesta . It is not known what the original speakers of Avestan called the language. The modern term "Avestan" comes from
3008-630: The equivalents in English. Adjectives precede nouns ( a piros alma 'the red apple') and have three degrees: positive ( piros 'red'), comparative ( pirosabb 'redder') and superlative ( a legpirosabb 'the reddest'). If the noun takes the plural or a case, an attributive adjective is invariable: a piros almák 'the red apples'. However, a predicative adjective agrees with the noun: az almák piros ak 'the apples are red'. Adjectives by themselves can behave as nouns (and so can take case suffixes): Melyik almát kéred? – A piros at . 'Which apple would you like? – The red one'. The neutral word order
3072-508: The extant texts. In roughly chronological order: Many phonetic features cannot be ascribed with certainty to a particular stage since there may be more than one possibility. Every phonetic form that can be ascribed to the Sasanian archetype on the basis of critical assessment of the manuscript evidence must have gone through the stages mentioned above so that "Old Avestan" and "Young Avestan" really mean no more than "Old Avestan and Young Avestan of
3136-419: The first Hungarian-language book set in movable type . By the 17th century, the language already closely resembled its present-day form, although two of the past tenses remained in use. German, Italian and French loans also began to appear. Further Turkish words were borrowed during the period of Ottoman rule (1541 to 1699). In the 19th century, a group of writers, most notably Ferenc Kazinczy , spearheaded
3200-477: The language holds official status nationally in Hungary and regionally in Romania , Slovakia , Serbia , Austria and Slovenia . In 2014 The proportion of Transylvanian students studying Hungarian exceeded the proportion of Hungarian students, which shows that the effects of Romanianization are slowly getting reversed and regaining popularity. The Dictate of Trianon resulted in a high proportion of Hungarians in
3264-436: The language were utilized. This movement produced more than ten thousand words, most of which are used actively today. The 19th and 20th centuries saw further standardization of the language, and differences between mutually comprehensible dialects gradually diminished. In 1920, Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon , losing 71 percent of its territory and one-third of the ethnic Hungarian population along with it. Today,
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#17330924776933328-489: The leading figure of the Hungarian language reforms.) Kazinczy's chief goal was to replace existing words of German and Latin origins with newly created Hungarian words. As a result, Kazinczy and his later followers (the reformers) significantly reduced the formerly high ratio of words of Latin and German origins in the Hungarian language, which were related to social sciences, natural sciences, politics and economics, institutional names, fashion etc. Giving an accurate estimate for
3392-448: The medium of writing used at the time, wood, is perishable. The Kingdom of Hungary was founded in 1000 by Stephen I . The country became a Western -styled Christian ( Roman Catholic ) state, with Latin script replacing Hungarian runes . The earliest remaining fragments of the language are found in the establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany from 1055, intermingled with Latin text. The first extant text fully written in Hungarian
3456-574: The most part, mutually intelligible . The Hungarian Csángó dialect, which is mentioned but not listed separately by Ethnologue, is spoken primarily in Bacău County in eastern Romania. The Csángó Hungarian group has been largely isolated from other Hungarian people , and therefore preserved features that closely resemble earlier forms of Hungarian. Hungarian has 14 vowel phonemes and 25 consonant phonemes. The vowel phonemes can be grouped as pairs of short and long vowels such as o and ó . Most of
3520-548: The name of the country, " Magyarország " (Hungary), pronounced /ˈmɒɟɒrorsaːɡ/ . It is one of three palatal consonants, the others being ⟨ty⟩ and ⟨ny⟩ . Historically a fourth palatalized consonant ʎ existed, still written ⟨ly⟩ . A single 'r' is pronounced as an alveolar tap ( akkora 'of that size'), but a double 'r' is pronounced as an alveolar trill ( akkorra 'by that time'), like in Spanish and Italian . Primary stress
3584-407: The new information for the listeners that may not have been known or that their knowledge must be corrected. For example, "Én vagyok az apád". ('I am your father'. Literally, 'It is I who am your father'.), from the movie The Empire Strikes Back , the pronoun I ( én ) is in the focus and implies that it is new information, and the listener thought that someone else is his father. Although Hungarian
3648-443: The other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /aː/ corresponds to Khanty /o/ in certain positions, and Hungarian /h/ corresponds to Khanty /x/ , while Hungarian final /z/ corresponds to Khanty final /t/ . For example, Hungarian ház [haːz] ' house ' vs. Khanty xot [xot] ' house ' , and Hungarian száz [saːz] ' hundred ' vs. Khanty sot [sot] ' hundred ' . The distance between
3712-478: The pairs have an almost similar pronunciation and vary significantly only in their duration. However, pairs a / á and e / é differ both in closedness and length. Consonant length is also distinctive in Hungarian. Most consonant phonemes can occur as geminates . The sound voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ , written ⟨gy⟩ , sounds similar to 'd' in British English 'duty'. It occurs in
3776-411: The proposition is only for that particular thing or aspect, and it implies that the proposition is not true for some others. For example, in " Az almát János látja". ('It is John who sees the apple'. Literally 'The apple John sees.'), the apple is in the topic, implying that other objects may be seen by not him but other people (the pear may be seen by Peter). The topic part may be empty. The focus shows
3840-414: The surrounding 7 countries, so it is widely spoken or understood. Although host countries are not always considerate of Hungarian language users, communities are strong. The Szeklers , for example, form their own region and have their own national museum, educational institutions, and hospitals. Hungarian has about 13 million native speakers, of whom more than 9.8 million live in Hungary. According to
3904-517: The total word count is difficult, since it is hard to define a "word" in agglutinating languages, due to the existence of affixed words and compound words. To obtain a meaningful definition of compound words, it is necessary to exclude compounds whose meaning is the mere sum of its elements. The largest dictionaries giving translations from Hungarian to another language contain 120,000 words and phrases (but this may include redundant phrases as well, because of translation issues) . The new desk lexicon of
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#17330924776933968-432: The vowels, which are mostly derived from Greek minuscules. A few letters were free inventions, as were also the symbols used for punctuation. Also, the Avestan alphabet has one letter that has no corresponding sound in the Avestan language; the character for /l/ (a sound that Avestan does not have) was added to write Pazend texts. The Avestan script is alphabetic , and the large number of letters suggests that its design
4032-458: Was due to the need to render the orally recited texts with high phonetic precision. The correct enunciation of the liturgies was (and still is) considered necessary for the prayers to be effective. The Zoroastrians of India, who represent one of the largest surviving Zoroastrian communities worldwide, also transcribe Avestan in Brahmi -based scripts. This is a relatively recent development first seen in
4096-547: Was the Proto-Iranian language , a sister language to the Proto-Indo-Aryan language , with both having developed from the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian language ; as such, Old Avestan is quite close in both grammar and lexicon to Vedic Sanskrit , the oldest preserved Indo-Aryan language . The Avestan text corpus was composed in the ancient Iranian satrapies of Arachosia , Aria , Bactria , and Margiana , corresponding to
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