I will be taking a bicycle tour from Vienna to Budapest. Most of the trip will be in hungary, somewhat alog the Danube. I know Hungarian is spoken -- just wondering if there are any other languages that are prevalent. I can squeek-by in French, and understand a smattering of German. WHat is the possibility of English along the way?

While in Budapest we found that nearly EVERYONE spoke English, even panhandlers, who could hit you up for change in about 10 languages! My husband and I know some German and French, but never had to use it in Budapest, though in Vienna, I did use some German.

I've been in Budapest, and German was the most common second lang, it seemed to me (lots of Austrians there and many shops accept Austrian shillings), then English. I wouldn't count a lot on any other lang. out in the country, though. Hungarian is a difficult lang and not similar to Czech, either, must to my dismay as I knew some Czech. It is a language not similar to much of anything, it is very bizarre, altho it's closest similarity is Turkish, I believe (don't suppose that helps). It has similar grammatical structure to Finnish but the words aren't the same. They know some German and there are some German-ish words in Hungarian, but they are not crazy about Germans or the lang, which seems to be true in a lot of Eur countries (?). Anyway, those are my impressions, but I was only there one day. I had a phrasebook, suggest you get one two -- Dover publishes a good one for Hungarian and it's only a couple dollars. <BR>

Actually the closest similarity is not to Turkish but to Finnish. Hungarian is in the Finno-Ugric language family, and may be related also to some Siberian dialects, but it is not an Indo-European language. It may have many words of Turkish origin, however, because it was part of the Ottoman empire. I don't think it's "bizarre" -- just seems that way to most of us because it's not similar to what we know.

Well, that's interesting as I didn't make that up, I study languages some as I'm very interested in linguistics, and have materials written by a Hungarian who said that although they shared roots with Finnish, the languages were not similar at all and he could not understand a word of Finnish when he went there. This author also said there were many Turkish words and sounds in Hungarian not only due to the occupation but because ancestors passed through Turkey. So, aside from linguistic history, I was wondering what words you find similar between Finnish and Hungarian, Pollyglott, as you sound like you know Hungarian pretty well?

Nope -- never said I actually KNOW Hungarian, but it's an interesting topic and I've read about it, and had a Hungarian friend who studied Turkish in grad. school for mid-eastern history. The first time I heard that Hungarian and Finnish and Lapp dialect and Siberian dialect were related, and that Hungariuan was not actually related to neighboring languages or to the languages of cultures that had dominated it, it sounded a little implausible. Ottoman connection does NOT fully explain the vocabulary similarities between Turkish and Hungarian; I forgot there were earlier contacts. But the languages themselves are not related. (English, while closely related to the Teutonic languages, probably has a lot more words that are borrowed from Romance languages and are clearly recognizable as French or as almost Latin, etc., but that doesn't mean Eng. is a Romance language.) But anyway, here's some "szokincs": <BR>we= mi(H), me(F) <BR>you= ti(H), te(F) <BR>hand= kasi(H), kez(F) <BR>alive= eleven(H),elava(F) <BR>live= el(H), ela(F) <BR>see, look= nez(H), nake(F) <BR>make, do= te(H), teke(F)

Yes, Hungarian is related in its roots to Finnish. Although a Hungarian may not understand Finnish and vice versa, this is also true in Germany. Someone from Frankfurt, Munich, Hamberg and Leibsich when speaking their local dialects will no understand each other at all. Hungarians also like Finns give their family name first followed by their given name ie Brown Bob. This is inherited from the Asian countries. <BR>

From a web page by Aaron Rubin <BR> <BR>A Hungarian Language Course <BR>Introduction <BR>Contents of the Course <BR>Hungarian Cultural Links <BR> <BR> <BR> <BR>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <BR>Interesting Hungarian Linguistic Facts <BR>Köszönöm/Thank You <BR> <BR> <BR>Introduction <BR>Magyar (pronounced /Mawdyar/), as the Hungarians call their language, is spoken by the approximately 10.3 million inhabitants of Hungary, as well as another 4 million people in neighboring countries and a million others scattered around the world. It belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family, which includes Finnish and Estonian, but its closest relatives are several obscure languages spoken in Siberia. Hungarian is not at all related to the Indo-European languages which surround it, and is very different both in vocabulary and in grammar. Hungarian is an agglutinative language, meaning that it relies heavily on suffixes and prefixes. The grammar is seemingly complex, yet there is no gender, a feature that most English speakers grapple with when learning other European languages. Hungarian does use the Roman alphabet however, and after learning a few simple rules one can easily read Hungarian. Pronunciation is also very easy, especially compared to other neighbouring languages like Czech, German, and Russian. <BR>This course was designed for beginners and no previous knowledge of Hungarian is assumed. However, the lessons may also be helpful for those people who have had previous experience and would like to improve their grammar or just simply brush up. <BR> <BR> <BR> <BR>

I doubt that there's a lot of turkish words "because ancestors passed through <BR>Turkey", since AFAIK there was no turks in Turkey when the said ancestors came in Europe. I believe the magyars came in Hungary around the IX° century, and the ottomans in turkey something like 3 centuries later. Their paths could have crossed somewhere else, tough...

Does anyone actually have a good working knowledge of Hungarian plus Finnish or Hungarian plus Turkish? If so, what do you think?

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I started studying Hungarian with a tutor about 3 months ago (so I am in no way an expert). Something that I've noticed while becoming familiar with the basic grammatical rules is that there is a real consistency / almost logic to it. Hungarian is a synthetic language compared to English which is an analytic language. The length of the words can be really intimidating - but actually speaking it is fairly straight forward. I decided to try and become a bit conversant in Hungarian because I'm going back this May (just bought my tickets and that chased the February blues away). There are a couple unfamiliar sounds to an American like me - I still can't roll my r's be it spanish or hungarian. While I can't recommend that studying Hungarian will change your life I will say that studying a forgein language is a wonderful new challenge. <BR>Back to the original question / post - there are a couple small hungarian phrase books published - Eyewitness has one. It covers a broad range of things that would be helpful to any traveler. The people are very gentle, polite and kind. Biking along the Danube sounds wonderful - something I'll have to put on my to-do list.

Do you have a book you can recommend for learning Hungarian a little (without a teacher)?

I am Hungarian,speaking 5 languanges apart from Hungarian.I am very happy that you are interested in our "bizarre" languange. <BR>For the original question,if not in small villages you can allways find someone speaking English or German or both.People under 30 speak English,over 70 speak German,between is a bit difficult because we were forced to learn Russian,but usually do not speak it.You can force people to be present in a lesson,but not to learn a languange.So younger people ask in English,elderly ones in German.Very few people speak French.WE do not like the French because of historical reasons. <BR>Hungarian is a very difficult languange.I am working as a guide and interpreter in Japanese, and I think our languange is more difficult than the Jap.According to scientist the Finns are our relatives,grammer is similar and the melody of the languanges is the same.For us listening Finnish is like listening Hungarian in a low voice when you can't catch the words. <BR>There were different Turkish tribes ,the Ottomans were only one of them,so we were living near to other Turkish tribes before arriving to this territory. <BR>We learned agriculture from Slavic people living here before us ,so most of our words related to agriculture are similare to Slavic languanges.First craftsmen were Germans so these words are German.Commerce,banking words are Jewish(To be precise the East-European jiddish),law,religion are from the Latin because official languange until 1844! was Latin.,NobAnd modern words are coming from English.All these words were adapted to Hungarian pronounciation and spelling. <BR>Sorry for writing so long but being a citizen of a small country is allways an exceptional feeling that people from big countries are interestedin our affairs.

I think I may understand what 'Polly Glot' means by "bizarre" --- probably not the best choice of words, but to a native English speaker, we have linguistic roots with German and commonality with the romance languages (Italian/Spanish/French), so these languages don't sound quite as "bizarre" to our ears. Also if you've ever been to a foreign language film, then it's more likely that it will be in one of those languages and so you've heard the sounds before. <BR> <BR>Hungarian does not share in any of our lingual ancestors --- to an English speaker and "virgin ears", Hungarian does have, lets call it an unusual and certainly a different sound. <BR> <BR>When I was in Budapest this past November, I found that German was the secondly most used language & English a distant third. I picked up a phrase book, but like I said the sounds of the language were 'too foreign' for me, so it really didn't help at all having the book.

Tina, I did NOT call Hungarian bizarre!!!! Please don't blame me for that comment (which was in fact Christina's)-- not that you know me anyway. To the contrary, I'm the one who said Hungarian is NOT bizarre, just very different for most of us because not related to Indo-European langs. <BR> <BR>Eva, thanks for the info. I studied only Romance languages, but have been curious about Hungarian for 35+ years and would love to learn a little of it.

I don't know about the specific route, but my experience with bicycling is that you get into towns and villages where EVERYONE DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. Have a good tourist dictionary and you should be ok

up, very interesting

Thank you all for your replies. I have been trying to "learn" the language from a book/tape and have had very little success so far (I was able to do this quite nicely with French/German). The comments about Hungarian being a bizarre language should be take with a bit of what we might mean by bizarre - in the case of Languages almost any language of different roots will seem bizarre to the uninitiated. I'm sure there are a lot of people that think English is bizarre...French, at first, was kind of bizarre to me -- when I started to understand the language a bit better it didn't seem so bizarre anymore!

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