[net.nlang] Hungarian words for "love"

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.
-- 

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                                                             Rich Wales
                           University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
                                            Computer Science Department
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