i am sparticus: Hungary: Languages and Stuff

Hungary: Languages and Stuff

This is Lake Balaton. It was full of snakes, mud and exceedingly nice water. The latter made up for the first things.

In case you're wondering why I went to Hungary with a bunch of young people the reason is this: Every year my former work is involved with a youth camp called rather grandly the 'international youth network' which is made up of young people from different nationalities, mostly from Eastern Europe. Every year we take young people we work with on this camp with the aim of helping them grow as Christians. This year it was in Hungary. Simple enough really.

If you're wondering how we deal with the language issues that obviously arise it that sort of environment, well it works much like the rest of the world. Everyone who doesn't have English as their native tongue is forced to speak it all week. Then the English group feel superior because they have a slightly better grasp of the language. A standard conversation goes like this:
"My English isn't that good really"
"Oh no, it's really good"
"No No, I have be learning it for four years and I should be better but I'm not"
"Really, it's not that bad"
"Thank you, it's not as good as my Russian though"
"You speak Russian as well?"
"Yes, we had to learn it in school."
"Wow, how many languages do you speak?"
"Well, my own language, Russian, some Romanian and Estonian."
"And English"
"Yes but I do not like to say I speak English because it isn't that good."
"Oh"
"How many language's do you speak"
"Well I suppose if I was to go by your standards, ummm... none."

These are some Estonians looking puzzled. Probably trying to work out where on earth Estonia actually is.

However I did make some effort in other languages. I've known Danish people for three years now and I currently know how to say "I am a...", "you are a...", "sorry", "no" and two sorts of "yes". I also know the word for Cow and Chicken. I know slightly more about the Estonian language but slightly fewer words. Here are the two things that you need to know about the Estonian language. Firstly, it's only really related to one other language and that's Finnish. It has nothing to do with English and so is very hard to learn. Secondly, and far more interestingly, it has the worst insults of any language I've ever heard insults in and that's a fair few languages. I should clarify that I don't mean worst insults in the sense of 'oh my word how could you say something so unbelievable offensive? For that I shall never speak to you again'¹ I mean worst in the 'I'm sorry was that meant to be offensive sense'. For example, in English if we want to tell someone to get lost with some severity we say 'go to hell', which is fairly harsh when you think about it. Because we find their presence offensive we're telling them to go to the place of eternal torment where they can never get any joy, peace or rest. In Estonian the equivalent phrase is 'mina metsa' which translated literally is 'go to the forest'. I don't want to take anything away from the scariness of forests late at night in a country that has bears, wolves and former communists but go to the forest? Either some country needs work through unresolved issues with conifers or they need to work on how exactly to insult people.

By this time the Estonians had realised they had no hope of finding where Estonia was. So they thought they'd just look smug and get on with life.

¹ Arabic wins that award worryingly comfortably

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