Surprisingly for a language with such rich history and venerable literary traditions, the orthography of Hungarian is fairly clean and phonemic, nicely representing the modern spoken language. However, the use of the Roman alphabet is not without its problems:

• It lacks letters for vowels, and so relies on many vowel diacritics, including the signature double acute accent (used by no other language).
• It lacks letters for consonants, and so relies on many digraphs and trigraphs (cs dz dzs gy ly ny sz ty zs).
• Several Hungarian letters and digraphs have odd values. For example, y is used solely as a suffix for palatal sounds while j is a palatal semivowel (also written ly), and s represents the initial sound of English she while sz represents that of English see - the opposite of almost every other Latin orthography.
• It does not reflect assimilation: zsákból should be written zságból, színpad should be written szímpad, and nagyja should be written naggya.

Consonants

Here are the consonants of Hungarian, with the current orthography in black and IPA in green:

 m m	 n n	 ny ɳ	 (ng) ŋ
 b b	 d d	 gy ɟ    gy ʝ	 g g
 p p	 t t	 ty c    ty ç	 k k
	 dz ʣ	 dzs ʤ
	 c ʦ	 cs ʧ
 v v	 z z	 zs ʒ	 h h
 f f	 sz s	 s ʃ	 h x
 l l	 r r		 h ɦ

As you can see, gy ty and h are pronounced in different ways, depending on the context (and even on the person). In Musa, write them as you pronounce them.

Vowels

Hungarian has a very systematic vowel system. Since Hungarian displays vowel harmony, native words have either all front vowels or all back vowels. They form seven short/long pairs, with just a couple of mismatched pairs.

	----- Front -----				----- Back -----
	Spread		Round		Spread		Round
High	 i ɪ	 í iː	 ü ʏ	 ű yː			 u ʊ	 ú uː
Mid	( ë e)	 é eː	 ö ø	 ő øː			 o o	 ó oː
Low	 e ɛ					 á aː	 a ɒ

Hungarian words are stressed on the first syllable, with some small words left unstressed.

Sample

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?



Egy fecske nem csinál nyarat