You can be proud of anything, if you really want to be. Ostriches, I suppose, are proud of not being able to fly - this would be an embarrassment to most birds, but oh how fast an ostrich can run!

Hungarians are proud of their language, just because it is so different from all European languages, unable to express things like masculine and feminine, having no word for “to have”, but being able to express (with a separate verb conjugation!) whether the object is indefinite or definite.

Thus Látok! means “I see” (generally, or something indefinite), while Látom! means “I see it”.

Hungarian does not belong to the Indo-European family of languages: the only other languages in Europe which do not are Finnish (with which Hungarian is distantly related), Basque and Turkish.

The Hungarian language is extreme, and so (they say) is the Hungarian temperament. Attractive but unreliable.

It accompanies you like a faithful friend, then at one point you turn around and it’s gone, abandoning you to struggle with expressing yourself. Especially if you translate from or into Hungarian. Nothing is the same. “Music” is zene or muzsika, and the two have different connotations. “I have a fever” is Lázam van, that is, “Fever-my is”. The exchange “Has the doctor gone away?” - Yes“ would be Elment az orvos? - El, that is, “Away-went the doctor? - Away.”

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In 896, the Hungarians settled in their present homeland, the Carpathian Basin (later organized into the Kingdom of Hungary, which existed until 1945), but they never became numerous enough to fill it: there were large numbers of Slavs, later also Romanians and Germans living there. True, the Hungarians were the largest single group in the area, but there were always more non-Hungarians than Hungarians in historic Hungary. Many words were adopted from Slav (asztal “table”, szabad “free”), from Latin (templom “church”, pásztor “shepherd”, sors “destiny”), and even Italian (piac “market” from piazza, pojáca/ “clown” from pagliaccio).

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After the First World War new borders were drawn and present-day Hungary was formed, where for the first time Hungarian was an absolute majority language (Hungary is now about 98 per cent Hungarian-speaking). In the newly formed neighbour states, on the other hand, Hungarians found themselves in a very pronouncedly minority situation. There are altogether roughly 13 million Hungarian speakers, about 75 per cent living in Hungary and 25 per cent in the neighbouring countries. This should explain why the language is such an important, even hallowed, symbol of cultural and national identity. When speaking of “Hungarian literature”, for example, one constantly hovers between meaning literature in Hungary or literature written in the Hungarian language. Incidentally, the language itself has always shown little variation: there are only negligible dialectal differences. Hungarian speakers - and literature (or literatures?) produced by them - display few differences from Bratislava (Slovakia) through Budapest (Hungary) to Brassov (Romania).

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Hungarian is not only different because of its word-stock. Its structure, as the standard technical term goes, is agglutinative. This means that endings are attached to words in a neat and prescribed order, and words can grow to stunning lengths. There are no prepositions, and very few auxiliary verbs. For example, hajthatatlanságunktól means “from our inflexibility”, and is structured hajt-hat-atlan-ság-unk-tól, each element in turn expressing the verb, the possibility, the negativity, the possession, the preposition (“bend-can-not-ness-our-from”). And all this happens very regularly, indeed mechanically. Every noun has to have -k as its plural, without exception, even if it is new or foreign, thus les Tuileries becomes a Tuileriák. Even verbs end in -k in the plural (in the “we-you-they” forms). However, the vowels of the endings will change (“harmonize”) in accordance with the stem. If, in the above long example, the stem is sért “to hurt”, the word will be sérthetetlenségünktől “from our invulnerability”, with all the vowels harmonically changing to suit the stem. (This is a phenomenon also found in Turkish.)

As we have said, there is no grammatical gender, thus no difference between “he” and “she”, “his eyes” and “her eyes”. This makes it possible for writers (and especially poets) to express things in a more abstract or more unspecified way, while in translation it often becomes a problem since in other languages the gender has to be specified, and it is the translator’s responsibility to decide how and when to do so.

There is only one past tense, thus no difference between “learnt, has learnt, had learnt”. On the other hand, a single word expresses whether the possession or the owner is singular or plural: háza “his (or her!) house”, házuk “their house”, házai “his/her houses”, házaik “their houses”.

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Hungarian has become a full-fledged European language, with science, law, business, leisure, crime and literature all being conducted in Hungarian. Open (perhaps too open, some would say) to foreign influence, it shows no signs of decay or destabilization. But when Hungarians cross the border to Vienna, Paris, London, or the non-Hungarian-speaking areas of the neighboring countries, they are lost, unless with years of hard work they learn a foreign language, by definition very different from theirs. The knowledge of foreign languages is pathetically low, compared to Holland, Portugal, Greece, or Finland. The Irish have eaten their cake; the Hungarians have it.

(retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/learnhungarianlanguage/abouthunglanguage)