Wynt Woody’s Narration Newsletter (Summer 2024)

August 13, 2024

Learning Hungarian Pronunciation

There is perhaps no more unusual language in the Western world than Hungarian. I recently wrapped on Canadian author Frank Vesely’s HUNGARIAN POETRY, a forthcoming FriesenPress audiobook (produced by Audivita), which for me was an adventure in pronunciation I greatly enjoyed working on.

Frank participated in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, only to be compelled to escape pursuit of the invading Soviet forces, landing alone in Canada without any ability in English and no money but the shirt on his back.  In this work, Frank has published his translation of hundreds of poems to English from the Hungarian, and also included his own poetry, written over many decades. The effort is a marvelously brave work of an inveterate patriot with a profound love of his home soil of Hungary.

Distantly related only to Finnish, modern Hungarian evolved over many centuries as an independent branch of an ancient tongue, separately from the Romance languages, but with loan words from Turkish and Latin, the language of state until 1844.  Suffixes in Hungarian perform the function that prepositions and adverbs do in other languages, like English and French, giving rise to rhyming opportunities English simply doesn’t offer; word order is flexible, remarkably akin to that of Mandarin Chinese, in which I possess native fluency, where context shapes meaning; and, as in Japanese (in which I was once fluent, though now rusty), the custom of naming is that of family name, followed by given name.   Frank Vesely, outside of Hungary, was born Vesely Ferenc.  All that and 44 letters, with many composite sounds.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to learn how to compose a sentence in order to prep this book: my role in this audiobook required only the proper pronunciation of Hungarian terms, and fortunately Frank himself, a poet with a keen ear and formerly a school instructor, was my dialect coach.  I hope I have been a good student.  Here’s a brief audio clip, not from the audiobook itself, but of Hungarian pronunciation as I’ve learned it.  The two names I refer to are: Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.  Note the diacritic above several of the vowels.