Hungarian class is in!
I began class a couple of weeks ago and, as you might expect, I am a keen student with a high level of nerd quotient (ie. I get excited when we learn new verb conjugations). In fact, I’m probably the star pupil although I’m pretty sure I’m in stiff competition with my new Brazilian friend in the class….and the Skotsman has NOTHING on us 😉 ). Three hours every morning of immense, mindful engagement in class ends in a sleepy tram ride home, a late lunch, followed by a nap. Then I scurry to fit three to five hours of work in before I turn into a leisure pumpkin by 6:30 pm and I no longer have arms to type anything. I underestimated my brain capacity (most of us are delusional about ourselves, I expect) and the exhaustion that would wash over me as soon as I arrived home everyday after class. So I have been trying a new tactic of grabbing a quick lunch somewhere after class and going directly to the Corvinus Egyettem Könyvtár (University of Budapest’s library) to work.
This seems work well.
Anyways, I digress as I brag about the whimsy of my new “office space”.
Within the first week of class I was already feeling slightly more confident, trying ALWAYS to speak to people in Hungarian when asking for things and paying close attention to announcements on trains and trams, shop signs, and “reading” the Budapest metro news/gossip rag. The thrill of my life, now, is hearing or seeing a passing word or phrase I can comprehend and decipher. Also, the shift in how people respond to me has been quite palpable: from immediately switching to English when speaking with me in my first couple weeks here to now getting quite a kick out of my Hungarian requests and talking back to me in Hungarian, helping me properly ask for things.
Thus far, I have MANY thoughts on the language broadly.
However, in this post, I will tell you stories…. I will tell you stories with words about words.
In the last few weeks of learning, I have come to most enjoy hearing the stories behind Hungarian words; the romance and poetry behind the creation of words. And as I learn these stories, I begin to also think about the stories behind English words; to see my own language in a different light…I believe this is one of the well-known side-effects of embarking on learning a new language.
Let us begin, then….
First, the Hungarian word for “indian summer” (note that I am aware this is likely not a PC term to use in Canada anymore but that is how they translate this word into English)….
vénassonyok nyar (pronounced roughly: vayn-aw-ssohn-yohk nyawr)
Hungarians talk about the weather as much as any human. This August and September have been sunny and steamy and so of course this came up in conversation with one of my teachers.
Vénassonyok nyar literally translates as: summer of old women. My Hungarian teacher told me that in the olden-timey days, because harvesting was not really going on anymore come late September and October, if the weather was nice, there was time for the old ladies to leisurely sit outside and gossip. Apparently, the word vénassony (old woman) is only used now as a derogatory term.
Compare this with our long-used term in North America: indian summer. The first difference between these two phrases is that there is no clear idea of how this term came about. I like the following interpretation which holds an interesting subtle parallel with the Hungarian word: the “indian summer” is a false summer. It is simply a facsimile of summer, a more fecund and resource-rich time. In reality it is but a time of decreased strength, capabilities, and fertility… a fairly negative connotation (and it is thought that perhaps this was the way the indigneous people described their interpretation of this phenomenon to the colonisers).
In both cases, the words used to describe this particular “fake” summer now, in the modern day, come with negative connotations (“Indian” in Canada being a derogatory term for indigenous peoples..and the “old woman” in Hungarian). Furthermore, these words refer to people who have been historically viewed as “lesser humans” and who have experienced abuse and oppression; women and indigenous peoples.
Makes me wonder how it is we talk about the phenomenon of an abnormally warm fall using such negatively connotative words while luxuriously bathing in the little bit of extra warmth and sunshine that nature sometimes affords us (or that, in recent years, climate change has afforded us) and is always-welcome.
Next up, something more historical (and ladies you’ll love this)….
assonyállat (pronounced roughly: aw-sohn-ahl-awt)
Assonyállat translates literally as “woman animal”. My teacher, a Budapesti woman in her fifties, must be a feminist. We were talking about professions and how to talk about whether it is a male teacher or female teacher or male police officer or female police officer. Hungarian is not a gendered language like French and other romantic languages. She began to tell us that you ALWAYS assume that a profession is male in the word itself. If it is important that the gender of the person be made clear, for example: “I was so happy to see that it was a woman police officer who arrived at the neighbour’s house where he was beating her”…. then you would basically add nő (woman) to the end of the word rendőrség (policeman). And of course we do the same in Canada. Here she started speaking briefly about gender inequality in Hungary and she said to us: “a hundred years ago or something like that, the Hungarian men referred to women as assonyállat“.
This is an old word that isn’t in use anymore in polite modern day society but it would seem to have been a means to ensure that the lower position of women was articulated everyday in the word used to refer to them. This “term of endearment” (HA!) also harkens back to the dark ages and beyond where the connection women physically manifested with earth and nature (eg. menstrual cycles in line with the moon’s cycles, creation of new life, etc) was super mysterious and not understood. This connection to nature and this mysteriousness, much like the connection between non-human animals and nature that would have also been regularly observed, placed women in this category of “wild”. Nature is wild and women were viewed as part of nature. Once the era of rationality began, which OF COURSE was beneficial for many in society, the wildness of nature (and thus wildness of women) was viewed as irrational. Men of this new mode of inquiry, SCIENCE, were rational. Rationality was viewed as a means to be a more moral human (ie closer to the divine… the Cartesian ideal of ‘I think therefore I am’) and therefore as superior to irrationality (I AM NOT because I don’t think).
Basically, this old Hungarian word, assonyállat (woman animal), was the manifestation and perpetuation of human ethos around the nature of women from at least two epochs of human history.
And lastly….
nővér (pronounced roughly: neu-vayr)
I learned this word last night. It translates in three ways: “nurse” OR “older sister” OR a “nun”. But it LITERALLY translates as “woman blood”. Talk about a gendered word for a profession!
I asked one of my Hungarian teachers, a young woman in her late 20s, what the word would be for a male nurse, then. She looked at me quizzically and said that she had never heard of a male nurse in Hungary. I doubt there aren’t any but I do not doubt that there are VERY few. I also clarified whether this is the same word used to describe breastfeeding here but no, it is not like the olden day English word for a “nurse” in the sense where noble families would bring on “a nurse” who was responsible for not only caring for children but also breast feeding them.
A number of years ago, my master’s supervisor and I prepared a paper (academic paper plug!) we published in the journal Contemporary South Asia called Forbidden exchanges and gender: implications for blood donation during a maternal health emergency in Punjab, Pakistan (Oh yes I’ll be lazy citing others’ in this blog but definitely not lazy when it comes to citing myself ;-)). While writing this paper we learned that, historically, having a woman external to the family nurse a child was done to create ties between communities. There was a belief (and it still exists to some extent) that that transfer of milk from a woman to a baby was equivalent to creating blood ties in the kinship sense…that a baby breastfed by a non-related woman would then be considered a true blood relation of that non-related woman and all of her family. Ancient royal families, in what is now the Punjab region of Pakistan, would basically pass their babies around to create these bonds of “blood” or, “milk ties” as they are referred to now, so as to ensure that people from all around the kingdom considered themselves related to that family through these milk ties and as such wouldn’t try to murder the extra special royal children.
So it seems this word does not have the same connotations of suckling here in Hungary as in English. I assume that having a non-related woman nurse your baby did occur here, though, at some point in this region’s long history of people. However, I assume it would NEVER have been the older sister breast feeding their sibling. So this word, nővér (nurse, older sister nun…literally: woman blood), really is JUST about being a woman who is a blood relative to her siblings.
In closing….
Words are but a bunch of compounded noises that have bubbled up by air passing through our weird unique human larynxes, flexible tongues, mouths and lips. These human mutterings have, since the beginning of speech, had some functional, communicative meaning attached to them. At the most fundamental level of examination, they simply just helped describe some phenomenon to another human in a very literal sense. However, in conjunction with the growth of our over-sized frontal cortexes, that have also given us the uplifting gift of the existential dilemma, we have managed to impregnate words throughout the history of human speech with such profound meaning around, for example, popular conceptualisations of women. And vice versa, words have the immense power to impregnate the values and beliefs of a society…exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
