wales@ucla-cs.UUCP (02/21/85)
Jeff Lichtman <...!rtech!jeff> mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he had been told there were two different words for "love" in Hungarian. Dave Hsu <hsu@CVL> asked what said two words were. [May I have the envelope, please! . . .] I am quite sure the two words in question are "szerelem" and "szeretet". "Szerelem" refers in general to romantic/passionate love; "szeretet", on the other hand, is more like platonic/charitable/brotherly love. These two words are pronounced approximately like "SEH-reh-lem" and "SEH-reh-tet", respectively. (Hungarian "sz" is pronounced like English "s", while Hungarian "s" is pronounced like English "sh" -- exactly the opposite of Polish, by the way, in case anyone out there knows Polish. Also, ALL Hungarian words are ALWAYS stressed on the first syllable; the accent marks you see on many Hungarian words -- though not on these two particular words -- refer to vowel length/quality, not stress.) My source for the above? Well, I took two years of Hungarian here at UCLA. A very interesting language from a grammatical point of view (like most other Finno-Ugric languages, its prominent features include agglutination and vowel harmony). Vocabulary-wise, I might as well have been studying Martian so far as any meaningful relationships to English were concerned -- which made it quite difficult to gain any real fluency from the few hours a week of exposure I got in class. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Rich Wales University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Computer Science Department 3531 Boelter Hall Los Angeles, California 90024 // USA -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Phone: (213) 825-5683 // +1 213 825 5683 ARPANET: wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA UUCP: ...!{cepu,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!wales -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-