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
3531 Boelter Hall
Los Angeles, California 90024 // USA
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Phone: (213) 825-5683 // +1 213 825 5683
ARPANET: wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA
UUCP: ...!{cepu,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!wales
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