Hungarian [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Hungarian is the mother tongue of about 16 million people. Of these 10.5 million live in Himgary, 3.5 million are minorities in the neighbouring states of Romania (in Transylvania), Slovakia, Serbia (in Vojvodina), Austria (in Burgenland) and the Ukraine. The rest are scattered throughout the world. Unlike most European tongues, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages, Hungarian is a Finno-Ugrian language. It is related to Finnish, Estonian and some other languages spoken by peoples hving in the northern parts of the former Soviet Union. Hungarian, therefore, is different from the majority of European languages both in its vocabulary and grammatical structure. A hungry traveller would easily find a place to eat in most European countries, since restaurant is 'restaurant' in French, 'ristorante' in Italian, 'Restaiu-ant' in German or 'restaurante' in Spanish. But in Hungary he or she might just get hungrier and hungrier searching for an étterem. The most striking feature of Hungarian grammar is that words can have one or more endings. For example, the restaurant is az étterem. To express the phrase in the restaurant Hungarian uses an ending instead of a separate word before it: az étteremben. 1