Hungarian language/Alphabet

See also the corresponding artice on Wikipedia.

The alphabet

 * Digraphs:Some consonants look like two (or three) English symbols and represent a single Hungarian letter.


 * Long vs. short:The alphabet lists all the short and long vowels, but not the long consonants . Nonetheless each letter has a long variant, which alters the meaning of the word. Long vowels are indicated by acute (ˊ) or double acute (˝) -- the only diacritic in Hungarian. Long simple consonants are written doubled (fusson); long digraph consonants have only their first letter doubled (messze). Thus, long digraphs are written as followed:
 * ccs (=cs+cs), ddz (=dz+dz), ddzs (=dzs+dzs), ggy (=gy+gy), lly (=ly+ly), nny (=ny+ny), ssz (=sz+sz), tty (=ty+ty), zzs (=zs+zs)
 * unless they are cut from each other at the end of the line, in which case they are written separately (vissza &rarr; visz-sza). It may happen that two identical digraph consonants meet in a compound word on the roots' boundary, but from grammatical view that is not a long consonant and is written accordingly (lánynyak).


 * Foreign letters:Note that there are no q, w and x letters in the (official) Hungarian alphabet because they do not occur in native Hungarian words. Also there is no y letter on its own, but it occurs in digraphs gy, ly, ny and ty. In exceptional cases, unusual letters may occur in Hungarian words, such as the x in Xénia (name), or ch in pech (=hard luck) being a single letter pronounced as in German. Other similar words, such as szex (=sexuality, sexual intercourse), are widely spread and used, but they eventually have their own translation without foreign letters.


 * Sorting:When sorting words alphabetically, diacritic is not taken into account, unless it is the only difference between the two words, in which case the acute comes later. For example: kád, kar, kár, kor, kór, kos, kör are alphabetically sorted . Long consonants are treated like two short ones, and digraphs are taken into account. For example: egzotikus, egyéb, lócukor, loccsan, locsog are alphabetically sorted. Note that distinct consonants may accidentally look (and may or may not sound) like digraphs, but those are treated as separate letters when sorting.

Vowels
The pronunciation of a vs. á and e vs. é noticeably differ from each other, while the others only differ in duration.

Vowels in groups like ie, eu etc. are always pronounced independently.

Consonants
The letters j and ly are pronounced exactly the same. The latter is less common. There is no general rule by which the spelling of an unknown word containing j or ly could be deduced.

It is not unusual that a simple consonant is accidentally followed by such a digraph that it looks like a long digraph (meggyón, vasszeg). In that case the pronunciation may and may not be affected.

Stress
Primary stress is always on the first syllable of a word. Elongated vowels in non-initial syllables can also seem to be stressed to the ear of an English speaker, since length and stress correlate in English.