Languagle #18: Hungarian
Jobb ma egy veréb, mint holnap egy túzok
"Better a sparrow today than a great bustard tomorrow."
What it means
Take the small thing you can have now, rather than waiting for a bigger thing that might never come. The Hungarian version of 'a bird in the hand', using the great bustard, a large bird of the Hungarian plains, as the prize that stays out of reach.
How to say it
yobb mo edj VEH-rayb, mint HOL-nop edj TOO-zok
Hungarian always stresses the first syllable. A plain a sounds like the o in 'hot', and á like 'ah'. Gy is a soft d, like the d in 'during'.
Word by word
- Jobb yobb: better
- ma mo: today
- egy edj: a, one
- veréb VEH-rayb: sparrow
- mint mint: than
- holnap HOL-nop: tomorrow
- túzok TOO-zok: great bustard, a big, heavy bird of the plains
Where it was found
Hungarian calls a proverb a közmondás. This one is from Hungarian Wikiquote.
Similar sayings
- English: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush (Languagle #17)
How to recognise Hungarian
Hungarian has two letters no other language uses: ő and ű, with a double acute accent. It also writes many sounds as letter pairs: sz, zs, cs, gy, ny and ty. Long words full of k's and endings are typical too. Finnish and Estonian, its distant relatives, look completely different: they double their vowels (aa, ää) and never use sz or cs.
About the Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language with around 13 million speakers, mostly in Hungary and neighbouring countries. Unlike almost all the languages around it, it is not Indo-European: its distant relatives include Finnish and Estonian, and its closest are Khanty and Mansi in western Siberia. It is agglutinative, has vowel harmony and a large set of noun cases, and always stresses the first syllable of a word.
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