Prior to our arrival in Budapest, we had only been dealing with Romance languages. We know a fair amount of Spanish (far from fluent, but enough), and so figuring out what to buy in Spanish, Roman, and Parisian grocery stores was relatively easy. However, I was wayyy out of my depth in Budapest language-wise, so much so that I never really picked up anything in the twelve days we were there before we moved on to Prague.
In Prague, the language was still, let’s just say “foreign,” but unlike Hungarian, at least some (very few, but at least some) of the words line up a little bit with root words that I’m familiar with. The Czech word for “milk” is “mléko,” but it’s “tej” in Hungarian. In Kraków, I was still completely dependent on Google Translate for everything in the grocery store (does this sausage need to be cooked before eating?), but like Czech, there were a few things in Polish that were at least second cousins to Latinate words – “mleko” is Polish for “milk.”
Granted, there are a lot of similarities between Hungarian, Czech, and Polish. “Sausage” is a good example: “kolbász,” “klobása,” and “kiełbasa,” are the Hungarian, Czech, and Polish words for sausage, respectively. But it’s clear that Polish and Czech are closer to each other than either are to Hungarian. Like the milk example above, “apple,” “carrot,” “cheese,” and “bread” are good illustrations. The Czech and Polish words are almost identical but are nowhere near the Hungarian version. All this sent me down a Wikipedia hole to find out why.
| English | Czech | Polish | Hungarian |
|---|---|---|---|
| apple | jablko | jabłko | alma |
| carrot | mrkev | marchewka | sárgarépa |
| cheese | sýr | ser | sajt |
| bread | chléb | chleb | kenyér |
The answer, I found out, is that Polish and Czech belong to the Indo-European language family, while Hungarian does not. The Indo-European language family is a family of some 445 languages spoken today that includes the Latinate and German languages, as well as Hindustani, Iranian, and Balto-Slavic (the subgroup to which Czech and Polish belong).
Hungarian is in the Finno-Ugric family, which includes, yes, Finnish, but also Estonian and others. Why? Well, it’s complicated, and I haven’t finished reading the relevant Wikipedia articles. And, based on the little reading I have done, no one appears to really have a definitive answer.
Other language families include Sino-Tibetan (Mandarin and other Southeast Asian languages) and Afroasiatic, into which Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, and other languages in North Africa fall. (The Wikipedia article on language families is a fascinating read to which Meghan can attest, as I kept interrupting her nighttime reading by spouting random language facts.)
I apologize for the unsatisfactory ending. Welcome to my world. Oddly, I guess it’s one of the reasons I love traveling so much. Everyday, just walking around and looking at and hearing things usually results in falling down some Google DuckDuckGo hole that’s slowly refining my view of the world.