July 04, 2008 by Vándorló Budapest

It's the "devil's own language". As Chico Buarque noted in his (2004) novel Budapest, Hungarian is 'rumoured to be the only tongue in the world the devil respects.' The novel's opening sentence portends the general theme of despair: "

"It should be against the law to mock someone who tries his luck in a foreign language..."

I've got a lot of sympathy with that position, but no sympathy for those expats who use it as an excuse not to really try. That said, most weeks, in my never ending attempt to expand my linguistic colonisation of Hungarian (or Hungarian's colonisation of my mind), I manage to say something really stupid and embarrassing.

• Szarok meaning 'I am shitting'
• Instead of sarok meaning 'corner'

• Kézimunka literally 'hand-work', which should mean 'needlework' or 'embroidery' but practically means 'hand-job' p.s. despite my guess being technically correct, this was obviously not the right word to use. And be warned, dictionaries are very coy about this so will let you walk blindly into these social faux pas without even hinting at alternative meanings
• What I should have said was 'kézm?vesség' meaning 'handicraft' or 'handmade'
  

Funny huh? You should have been there when I said the last one, I was talking to my friend's mother at the time.

But all that aside, even taking perfect knowledge into account you can still come a cropper when trying to communicate across the language-culture divide. Unfortunately, there is yet another level of complexity that just can't be planned for. Well, there are plenty more levels of complexity, but let's just keep this discussion nice and shallow, shall we?

Even if what you are saying is perfectly respectable, correct and normal you can still manage to offend or amuse a native speaker with your efforts. That's because innocent words in one language resemble something embarrassing or appalling in another.

Linguists and anthropologists have even studied these transnational transgressions, particularly were one culture then starts avoiding saying certain words in one language because they know they sound rude in another. This avoidance behaviour has come to be known as avoiding 'intercultural taboos' (see also "Interlingual Word Taboos", American Anthropologist, 53(3) 338-344, 1951).

To cut to the chase here's a short list of some of the words that don't sound quite right to either Hungarian or English speakers:

English to Hungarian

• Church sounds like 'csöcs', which means 'breasts'
  
• Cookie sounds like 'kuki', a childish way to refer to male genitals
  
• Chalk sounds like 'csók', which means 'kiss'
  
• Bus sounds like 'basz', particularly when said by someone with an American accent, which means 'f**k'
  
• Thing sounds like 'fing', which means 'fart'
  

Hungarian to English

• Puszi = Literally 'kiss' but used as a way to say goodbye, so more like 'love and kisses'. Sounds like 'pussy'.
• Fakanál = 'wooden spoon', though pronounced something like 'f**king hell' with a Liverpool accent.
• Sajt = 'cheese', though sounds like 'shite' pronounced with an Irish accent
• Pisztráng = 'trout', though is pronounced 'piss-trang'
  

The upshot of this is that people really do avoid pronouncing these words properly even when they are desperate to sound native otherwise. Hungarians generally have a problem saying 'w' and use 'v' instead, they never aspirate their plosives enough, and really can't get a grip with sticking out their tongues enough to make a decent 'th' sound. But when it comes to saying 'thing' they wouldn't even want to try. Who in their right mind wants to practice saying something that sounds increasingly like 'fart'? Fingom sincs! (see below)

Useful Vocabulary

• Fingom sincs - 'I haven't got a clue' (literally, 'I haven't got a fart')
• Halvány lila fingom sincs - a more colourful version of the above (literally, 'I haven't a pale violet coloured fart')
• Puszipajtás - 'buddy', basically a friend you know well enough to hug (non-gender specific).