Hungarian phonology

Phonology is the classification of the abstract elements (or precisely phonemes, whereas sounds are acoustic realisations of phonemes) in a particular language. Hungarian phonology has much in common with the English if you compare them with African or Asian languages, but you can still encounter problems with some phonological phenomena or just with pronouncing some "strange" vowels or consonants.

Vowels

Here follows the table of Hungarian vowels, with the distinctive features of the Hungarian vowel system:

As can be seen from the table, Hungarian has seven pairs of corresponding short and long vowels. But their phonetic value does not match in each case, for instance the /e/–/e:/ and /a/–/a:/ pairs. However, short-long distinction in high vowels is not consistent, many dialects lack the phonemes /i:/, /u:/ and /y:/ and colloquial use is also very different than the orthography (eg. unió is pronounced [uːnioː], but szomorú is pronounced [somoru]).

Vowel harmony

There is a very important distinction about Hungarian vowels: just like in Finnish and Turkish, it has vowel harmony: usually a word is made up either by front vowels, or back vowels. Mixtures occur mostly in exceptions (eg. derekas), loanwords (eg. telefon) or in compound words (eg. pénz|tárca "purse"). The latter words have the harmony of the last member of the compound, loanwords usually have the harmony of the last vowel, except that /i/, /e:/ and sometimes /e/ are transparent, so if there is a back vowel before them, the word remains back. Exceptional words have /i/, /i:/ or sometimes /e:/, but are regarded as back words because in Old Hungarian , there was a */ɯ/ phoneme, that is the sound found in Russian (yery), but this became /i/.

Beside this, there is also an other type of harmony: mid-high front vowels harmonize in the aspect of rounding.

Thus most suffixes (and Hungarian has a lot of them!) have several forms, and the harmony of the stem "spreads" to the suffix. Most types are:

As can be seen, the phoneme /e/ is found both in the low vowel series (/a/-/e/), and in the mid vowel series (/o/-/e/-/ö/). This odd feature is solved in the old language and in dialects: there was/is an eighth short phoneme /ë/, which is just like the /e/ but it is mid, and its pronunciation is [e]. In dialects, you can find this phoneme in the mid series, and the low /e/ in the low series.

However, many suffixes have only one form: these are usually new-born suffixes (-kor "at the time of ...": hatkor "at 6 o'clock", hétkor "at 7 o'clock", ötkor "at 5 o'clock"), or they contain /i/ or /e:/ (-i "universal noun -> adjective suffix": budai "somebody from Buda", pesti "somebody from Pest"; -ért "for ...": aranyért "for gold", ezüstért "for silver").

Consonants

Hungarian has the following consonant system (not using standard SPE-like features), with unusual graphemes marked bold:

* /s/ and /z/ are really dental although the IPA chart puts them in the alveolar slot.

Almost every consonant has a geminate counterpair, written by doubling: bb, pp, ss etc., or by doubling the first element of the grapheme cluster: ssz, nny, ddzs, etc. The phoneme /dz/ and /dʑ/usually appear on surface as geminates: bridzs [bridʥ] "bridge (the card game)".

Most important allophones are:

• /n/ becomes [ŋ] if followed by a velar consonant (eg. hang "voice" [hɒŋg])
• /j/ becomes [ç] if preceded by a /p/, /t/, /k/ in an imperative at the end of the word (eg. kapj [kɒpç] "get (imp.)")
• /h/ may become [ɦ] between two vowels (eg. tehát [tɛɦaːt] "so")
• /h/ disappears at the end of the word in some cases: méh [meː] "bee", cseh [ʧɛ] "Czech"
• /h/ becomes otherwise [x] at the end of a syllable, even possible pronounciation for the words mentioned(méh [meː], but colloquially can be [meːx]), otherwise compulsory: doh [dox], ihlet [ixlɛt], or [içlɛt].
• /h/ becomes [xː] when geminate: méhhel [meːxːɛl] "with a bee" (in literary Hungarian the form is méhvel [meːvɛl]), peches [pɛxːɛʃ] "unlucky"