Magyar, the language of suffixes.

English and Spanish, the two languages I know, are both Indo-European languages, along with hundreds of European and Indian languages. On the other hand, Hungarian (magyar) shares a language family with just two other major languages: Estonian and Finnish. That is, Hungarian is a really weird language.

I've been taking an intensive two-week introductory course on Hungarian which is supposed to be equivalent to a semester-long course. It's different though: with the two-week course, I don't have a whole semester to let everything sink in. I've pretty much been submerged in Hungarian for days. Fortunately, I find the language really interesting. I will now talk about it, for the benefit of my linguistics friends.

The alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet: in addition to our 26 letters, there are also ö, ü, gy, ty, ly, ny, cs, sz, zs, dz, and dzs. Most of these extra letters are pairs of characters, but in Hungarian they count as letters since they make their own distinct sounds. Also, the seven vowels all come in short and long forms; the long form is denoted by putting an accent mark over it. The hardest letters to pronounce are gy and ty, which make sounds that are not found in most other languages. Fortunately, knowing how a Hungarian word is spelled is enough to know how to pronounce it. That is, the spelling determines the pronunciation, unlike in English (cough dough rough through). A Hungarian word's stress is always on the first syllable, no exceptions.

Everything in Hungarian is a suffix. You want your noun to be a direct object? Add -t to the end. Indirect object? Add -nak or -nek to the end. You want your noun to belong to me, you, him/her? Add -m, -d, -ja respectively to the end. You want your verb to denote an action that I do to you? Add -lek to the end. A lot of nouns can be made into verbs by adding the ending -zik: for example, "piano" is "zongora", and "plays piano" is "zongorázik". A lot of prepositions are made using suffixes, too. For example, to say "in [noun]", just add the suffix -ban or -ben to the noun; to say "with [noun]", add the suffix -val or -vel to the noun. There are more suffixes that I learned about, and even more I'm sure that I haven't learned about.

Hungarian is a beautiful language, partly because of the principle of vowel harmony: each word's vowels are either all low vowels (a, o, u) or all high vowels (e, i, ö, ü). All of the suffixes come in high-vowel forms and low-vowel forms, and the one you use depends on the harmony class of the word. For instance, "in the bag" is "táskában", whereas "in the cabinet" is "szekrényben". This principle gives words a nice flow and makes Hungarian elegant and interesting.

One more thing: Hungarian does not have gendered nouns, like many languages do. In fact, Hungarian doesn't even have gendered pronouns (he or she). Take that, English.