Human beings…are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society…the “real world” is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group.
—Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science”
Strange I
am—always been. First generation Hungarian-American,
I funny- spoke. When, at five, I started
to babble in English, my Hungarian accent was so thick that even mousy Sister
Helen Michael laughed at me. I
funny-ate. Instead of fragile peanut
butter sandwiches bleeding guess-what-it-looks-like
shapes in purple jelly, I had rough-cut rye with chicken
fat and garlicky salami (which in turn made me funny-smell). I
funny-dressed. For cold weather my
grandmother sleeved my legs in the arms of her sweater and buttoned the rest
around me in a droopy cross between long johns and a dhoti. I’m still a devotee of The Addams Family and The
Munsters because, well, They ‘R’ Me; I sit on my office floor with adult
students; I teach almost exclusively by inductive methods; I love Gertrude
Stein; and I won’t eat anything wheat.
It’s mixed—both freedom and dissonance—all that—and not knowing exactly
what makes me strange.
Perhaps I’m
suffering from the necessarily thwarted yearning of all humans to belong. Perhaps my subtle but distinct sense of
alienation is peculiar to all first-generation Americans. But it was not for
goulash-paprika-Béla-Lugosi-csárdás kitsch that I visited Hungary where centuries of my
ancestors were born and lived. I went to
understand the deeper emotional and cognitive habits of my two
countries—America, the richest country currently on earth, in counterpoint to
Hungary, a country that has had to rise, over and over, like the mythic
Phoenix, from millennia of political, geographical, cultural, and linguistic
upheavals.o it' I would explore, as Stein wrote she had in a
most relevant text—The Gradual Making of The Making of the Americans:
I
then began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I began to get
enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and
over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if
you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all
that that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or
the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly
the same and endlessly different.
I would listen for this
undercurrent—this movement of thoughts
and words endlessly the same and endlessly different. What I found lends credence to the
Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis—that our sense of reality is
determined by our linguistic habits. I
surfaced from jet lag to be astounded by the nature of the forces that conflict
in me.
What seems to
endlessly repeat in Hungary, is that—from the simplest to the most complex—it’s
all inside out, upside down, and backwards to the English-speaking world: family name precedes the given; women attach
the né to their husband’s names
instead of their maiden, even though né means
born as; cut flowers are carried head
down, and they’re sold in odd numbers instead of even. Hungarian ambulances pierce the air
with a high note and whine to a bass—school children
refer to this sound as the nay-noo of
ambulances (the rhythm being underscored by the fact that ai is a high frequency vowel and oo the lowest sound frequency)—as contrasted to the ascending weeee of American ambulances. There’s
the descending chiming in a minor
key to which metro and trolley doors close; the stomp/skip rhythms of the
csárdás as compared to slam-footed skip/stomp of American clogging; the
descending cadences and pervasive mood of the minor key of Hungarian folksongs,
which, after all, is the use of the musical flat, the half step down, as
opposed to the sharp, the half step up.
In my case, living on the east coast of the USA,
the analog clock hands are 180° different from Budapest time. And the name of one of the major bus
manufacturers in Hungary
is called Ikarusz, who, unfortunately, rose high, only to plummet into
the sea.
There’s more. In A
Country Full of Aliens, British journalist Colin Swatridge notes that
Hungarian light switches have to be flipped up to turn off; that Hungarians say
“Hello” when they’re bidding farewell; plastic sleeves receive papers from
the top with punchholes on the left in England—in Hungary they are inserted
from the bottom; the year is placed at the end of a date in England, at the
beginning in Hungary; Hungarians do long division
right to left, and multiplication from left to right—the opposite of
American/English ciphering. And so
on. Naturally, any such remarks smack of provincialism, but
it’s true that in Hungary life is organized differently, often in opposition to
countries where English is the dominant language. And Hungarians were the first to notice the
difference, themselves: Swatridge’s
title is in repartee with Hungarian George Mikes’s original tweak at British
life, How to Be an Alien.
No wonder
Hungarians are so good at inventing that which untwists, such as the Ernő Rubik’s Cube, or János Bolyai’s non-Euclidean geometry. And
how about the Hollywood of Fox, Zukor, Paul Newman, Tony Curtis, Lugosi, and
the Gabor sisters—to name a few? So talented
are Hungarians in the business of illusion—showing what isn’t as if it were—that
the MGM commissary has an ironic disclaimer posted on the wall: “Just because
you’re Hungarian doesn’t mean you’re a genius.” Genius, wrote William James,
“means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.” If you come from a country that does things
upside down and backward, that comes more naturally.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein was right, Imagine a
language and you imagine a way of life, for the Hungarian language both
embodies and drives these differences: in Géza Balázs’s words from The Story of Hungarian: A Guide to the
Language, “In the Hungarian Language everything is reversed.” As Balázs points out, “in Hungarian the
individual words are generally extended to the right, using a number of suffixes…while
the Indo-European languages work backward from a word, or are left-tending”;
there is a large number of palindromes in Hungarian (all that coming and going
from two directions, like the changing of the tides); and Hungarian often uses
the periodic sentence structure, placing verbs at ends of clauses. Syntactical constructs are fairly obvious.
What surprised me most was something more subtle than grammatical
structures—something more pervasive that would have delighted Stein—rhythm.
English gallops
happy on the tongue—ta Tum, ta Tum, ta Tum—unstressed/ stressed
syllables most often start phrases on the downbeat, end on the up. A sample of individual words will do: increase, reward, omnipotent. More importantly, English is rich with
prepositions and articles and the infinitive to that form stepping stones to the more important nouns and verbs where the stress will land as
in the tree, in fact, she left, to be. And English tends to stress verbs—words
of being and action. Verbs follow subjects,
so, again, the stronger word, the upbeat, is always coming. Claimed to mimic the heart, in poetics this
rhythm is called the iamb. A homonym
of I am, even the name of the beat is assertive, confident. Tending upward, anticipating increased
strength—the recoil before the leap—repeated iambs rev into an I am,
I am, I am exuberance.
Hungarian thrusts hard
into initial syllables and then retreats—Tum
ta, Tum ta ta, Tum ta ta ta. The language
can sound like the dissipation of a bouncing ball, losing height,
velocity—disappointing itself to a stop.
The English I am translates into
the Hungarian vagyok—the rising
emphasis of English becomes declining in Hungarian. Given the strain of having
to punch out those initial syllables, each repetition of vagyok, vagyok, vagyok becomes more plaintive, less
and less convincing. Consider what
happens if we punch the I in I am—I am, I am, I am—it dissolves into Symphisian
whininess.
What repeats, and
repeats, as Stein tells us—especially without conscious awareness—affects,
shapes, and identifies us most. So, for
example, given the same decibels, the most deleterious noises are those
repetitive ones to which we have become accustomed—the brain having been
altered to accommodate the sounds, tied up in processing them. It’s called sensory fatigue. Gone numb to such noises, we are less able
to react if necessary. According to The
Better Health Channel website, the symptoms of sensory fatigue will seem a
specific: headache, elevated blood pressure,
fatigue, irritability, digestive disorders, increased susceptibility to colds
and other minor infections. Things you
can’t prove in court. There’s a kind of despair in having so succumbed that you
don‘t hear the constant jackhammering under your window. So it is not untoward to ask whether and how
language rhythms—a most pervasive aspect of speech of which most of us are too
rarely conscious—might affect us.
Consider, for
example, the effect of the first line of “The Music of the Night” in The Phantom of the Opera: Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation. The pulse of this line is the
stressed/unstressed beat called the
trochee: Nighttime,
sharpens, heightens each sensation. Both Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music and Charles
Hart’s lyrics are brilliantly keyed, rhythmically, to the intent and dynamics
of the scenes in which the song is performed. Sung by the title character—a
denizen of the bowels of the opera house, a man whose face is yin/yanged by a
mask into darkness and light—it is fitting that his song of seduction to
Christine, the musical’s Persephone, be predominantly in a downward lilting
trochaic rhythm—the opposite of the upward tending iamb customary in English: Down,
down, down—says the music, says the rhythm of the dark (k)night.
Compare “The Music
of the Night” to the first line of “The Lusty Month of May” from Lerner and
Lowe’s musical Camelot: Tra la!
It’s May! The lusty month of May! Wrought in the traditional English iambic
pentameter—the line is rhythmically light, frolicking, gay. Tra la! It’s May! The lusty month of May! Spring has
come. Persephone’s risen! Had either composer or lyricist introduced
downward tending notes and rhythms, it would have lent an ominous note which
would have too soon introduced the note of tragedy into the musical.
Traditionally, too, the downward tending
poetic rhythm—the Tum ta ta dactyl, was used by the ancient Greeks
in their elegies, especially to commemorate children. Each poetic line would have five mournful
dactyls as the predominant rhythm in each line, followed by the very finalizing
stress/stress spondee. The affect of
these accumulating dactyls is an unbearable despair. Tum ta ta, Tum
ta ta, Tum ta ta, Tum ta ta Tum ta ta, Tum Tum is a dirging drum. The epic poem in Latin also uses the dactylic
hexameter, but more freely varies the balance of dactyls and spondees in a
line. Joshua Schuster writes that these
dactylic hexametric lines correspond to or are derived from marches and other
war rituals. John Philip Sousa’s marches
are predominantly right-foot-forward trochaic,
whereas the rhythm of a galloping horse is dactylic, as is, interestingly
enough, the dactylic rhythm of a dance most loved by Hungarians: the
waltz.
On the lighter side, limericks in
English—driven by iambic rhythms—generate very bawdy, fairly raunchy,
invariably comical, illicit texts. The
last line always comes off as a punch line.
Once you get the joke of it, you’re done. In Hungarian, on the other
hand, where the iamb is foreign, and the rhythms trochaic and dactylic,
limericks tend to be more philosophical, as English rhythms do not. They elicit reflection and rereading.
But what shift of
meaning happens between English and Hungarian?
To further explore, I compared Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 in to its
Hungarian translation. The first line is
written in iambic pentameter—five iambs:
That time, of year, thou mayst, in me, behold. The native speaker of English is most
likely to stress time, year, mayst, me, hold. The stressed syllables create their own
subliminal emphasis—time mayst me
hold—time may sustain me. But
with the added emphasis, the conditional sense of mayst—perhaps time will hold
me—is pre-empted by the directive sense, with the speaker in control—time, you may hold me.
In renowned poet Lőrinc Szabó’s Hungarian translation—Nézd, életem az az évszak, amelyben—nézd,
él..., év... are most likely to be
stressed: look, life, year. There’s a stridence here—imperative—even
vigilance—as compared to the wistful statement in English. And whereas the English line settles into
five, steady, predictable, and hence comforting iambs—the security of age and
experience—the Hungarian struggles to maintain the energy of the stressed
syllables. Tum, Tum ta ta, ta ta, Tum ta, ta ta ta. In short, the English iambic strides forward
where the Hungarian dactyl, trochee, pyrrhic limps to keep up with the
unstressed beats. Arguably, at least for
this poem, the rhythm of the Hungarian translation—halting yet directive—may be
more mimetic of the halting energy of maturity.
But that smacks of the mimetic fallacy—in another context, it would be
to argue that you have to be boring when you write about boredom. And Shakespeare’s sonnets as a whole tend to
tend toward affirmation, immortality, control.
He considers the written word to be immortality, itself.
What creates its relentless down, down,
down-going rhythm? The
socio-psychological, political and geographical answer is extremely complex and
would take us into difficult questions of national identity. For now, we can discern what creates these
rhythms grammatically. Let’s revisit
what Balázs writes about how Hungarian builds words. The difference in
predominant rhythms between the two languages is determined, in great part, by
contrasting syntactic—coordinating—structures.
The Hungarian language is agglutinative—instead
of dividing the language into discrete meaning/word units, it constantly
combines—literally glues them into new words. So, for example, into the house translates into házba
in Hungarian. Ház means house, ba is the suffix for into.
And there’s no need for the separate definite article the. It’s elegant in simple formulations. But more often than not Hungarian creates
long strings of unstressed syllables such as the 21-letter single word elkáposztalanitátotak, which translates
into the 20-letter but 5 word of the English you took the cabbage out, or the 38-letter megbecstelenithetetlenségeskedeitekért which barely translates into
the 7(or 4)-word English “because of
your-holier-than-thou attitude,” or my current favorite, the slowly
evolving, hard to bite off and chew anything-but-quick 15-letter word gyorskiszolgáló, which is what the Hungarian chapter of McDonald’s touts itself as
being: fast. Hungarians,
themselves, enjoy lampooning this tendency of the language to lard on syllables
that turns your brain into an abacus. Perhaps that is why there are so many
significant Hungarian mathematicians.
In comparison, contemporary
English is scantily inflected—an s here
and there to indicate plurals, possessives, or to manage noun/verb consistency;
an –ing tacked on to a verb such as swim to create the noun swimming. Word order, more than pre- or suf-fixes
determine connections between ideas, and therefore meaning. The
woman also ate the fish means something vastly different from the more
evocative, albeit ordinarily nonsensical The
fish also ate the woman, or worse Ate
fish the woman also. Hungarian, on the other hand allows for
greater flexibility in word order. A
nő halat is evet is as
logical as Halat t is evet a nő, Evet halat is a nő, or the less idiomatic Halat, is, a nő evet. This
flexibility engenders all sorts of interesting ways of organizing and creating
experience that just don’t occur in English.
But if we deleted the inflections of the first line of the Hungarian
translation of Sonnet 73, we’re reduced to the survival level of intent—and no
connections, nothing to connect. In
English, other words and their order will help us understand.
Agglutination is a constant murmur in
Hungarian—even telephone numbers are spoken as
agglutinations—seventy-six instead of
the American seven six. Although Hungarian is uniquely
musical because of its vowel patterns, it has often been considered by
foreigners to be a language of monotones—hence the dissipating snare drum of unstressed
syllables in the Shakespearean translation Nézd, életem
az az évszak amelyben: Tum, Tum ta ta, ta ta, Tum
ta, ta ta ta. Where English loses
flexibility in word order Hungarian gains.
Where English gains rhythmic strength, Hungarian struggles against the
drag of agglutination. English can focus
on root words and their content; Hungarian is freighted with inflections. It’s the difference between saying into the house and housetheinto.
My mother tongue is Hungarian, and I’m still
fluent. But I rarely speak it in America. In Hungary, I spoke it
constantly. What I noticed is that,
especially in the beginning of my three-month tour, I was constantly out of
breath, literally, and/or mentally. The
expression coefficient of drag took on new meaning for me. Those long agglutinated words were words,
nonetheless, and had to be delivered in single units. I was always having to stretch the amount of
breath I have—rhythms I had developed from speaking in English. The overall feel of it was that I was
tripping after myself. At the end of
each day, the literal oxygen depletion created, metaphorically, a spiritual,
energetic, psychological depletion.
Because English is not heavily inflected, the
words are relatively stable and lend themselves to sight-recognition. Hungarian is constantly creating new words
and formulations—and so there is the constant
shiftings of possibilities. Where
English is relatively more secure and stable, Hungarian is freer if
unpredictable. But because of this, Hungarian
requires compensatory reading strategies that English doesn’t. I often felt as though I was committing an
act of worship when navigating street and commerce signs in Hungary: my eyes lifted, fairly admiring
the letters before me, keeping myself focused, as if in prayer, that I might be
granted some light. In the beginning was the word—but where, with all those pre and
suffixes, was it? As linguist Judith Hajnal pointed out to me, when learning to
read in English, I was learning to identify whole words on sight. I am used to identifying English words as
discrete units—as well as in French, in which I am vastly less proficient that
Hungarian. But Hungarian words are like
mini-sentences. To read Hungarian as I
do English would be like identifying whole English sentences on sight. While I was reading signs in Hungary
I performed acts of back-and-forth recursive negotiations of the meanings of
previous word chunks before the aha
of oh-that’s-what-it-means. Meanwhile, the trolley would have left,
the light changed, and I’d have to wait to get—the next word or the next
trolley. Of course, I was acclimating,
and much of the drag might have been just that.
But I asked some native Hungarian readers how they read. One friend said that, yes, she, too, finds
it a challenge. Her strategy is to read backwards from the end, identifying the
core noun or verb and thenre.ample,
mentally. reading backwards. There it was again, the
having to go backwards before or instead of forwards.
Stein says, Repeating
then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way
of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. If Stein is correct, and I believe she is—that
what repeats is what endures—then surely the differences in the metronomes that
drive American English and Hungarian would have significant effects. And this
is Stein’s brilliant insight—consider how this experience, repeated within and
between individuals a googol number of times will affect every aspect,
conscious and unconscious of the people swimming in the soup of that
language. Studies have shown that
fetuses exposed to one language rhythm inside their mothers have more
difficulty learning a different language.
Also, suckling infants will change their sucking rhythms with a shift in
language rhythms—say from French to Russian.
It is no surprise, then, that there’s a
distinction between a familiar and a formal voice in which a one-up ascendant
one-downs an inferior. That the legal
system is top down Roman instead of case-informed Common Law. That the country is filled with massive
statues that force the living to look up at the dead. That there is a thrust of overcompensation
in the perennial brass bands and ceremonies and adoration of honorifics and
titles. That education tends to be Prussian—memorize,
memorize, memorize what is handed down to you.
That there is in the charm of the Hungarian the residue of top-down
noblesse oblige marking centuries of aristocracies and patriarchies. And that,
predictably, the gender-splitting in Hungary is so embedded that women,
themselves, believe feminism is a campaign to destroy men.
One communications specialist remarked in response
to my observations: “Americans are
optimistic.” No wonder: English is the universal language, the colonizer, the
forward and upward of the lance. On the
other hand, Hungary
has been, over its 1,100-history, the colonized, the ball dropped and dribbling
to a stop. Hungary, with the highest suicide rate in the
world—four times that of the U.S.—is
not “optimistic.” As Hungarian psychologist
Margot Honti characterizes it, “We know what it is to be losers. We have all been losers for centuries.” No wonder János
Selye, a Hungarian, first formulated the concept of “stress” (losers are
stressed) or that the Woman’s World Chess Champion—a master at navigating
complexities (the lost have to be)—is Hungarian Zsuzsa Polgár. No wonder that Hungarians run to the two
extremes of despair or overachievement.
Naturally, I have not exhausted
how these rhythms and directional oppositions generate and are generated by
what we might call a national identity—and certainly not why. These patterns are too complex even for
fractal analysis—that wonderful mathematical systematization of complex
patterns that drove John Forbes Nash, Jr. But the
counterpoints between my cultures have stranged and estranged me—in America and in Hungary, both. Although I’ve done nearly all of my
schooling, professional, and creative work in English, I’m starting to notice
that I write, and probably speak, in Hungarian rhythms: an inordinately large
percentage of the titles of my poems are written in Hungarian dactyls and
trochees. This essay, in a much earlier draft, started with the sentence—English gallops happy on the tongue—written
in three Hungarian trochees, but followed by a characteristic, up-skipping
American ta ta Tum anapest.
Readers and editors consistently remark that my syntax is
quirky—subjects and verbs in unusual configurations—and that I tend to write
periodic sentences—waiting for the end of a clause to place my verb. In Hungarian, I often construct sentences
like an American. But, as a creative
writer, I’m not sure I mind.
Still: so-what? What about the deeper effects of the
counterpoint between my nationalities—my sense of myself as a woman, a member
of a family, an author, a physical being; how I solve problems, experience, win
or lose, love or hate?
Belonging—unstranging—is not so much a process of reducing experience to
a system to which I can commit. Nor is
it lopping off roots and grafting onto other stems. The so
what is that taking my cues from rhythms—what repeats—helps me to frame
questions: Where are the oppositions? How am I this rather than that? How do I drift now here, now there? How do I rebel and resist?
Before I noticed the
rhythmic counterpoints, I asked these questions. But they were abstractions, applicable to
most anyone. Rhythm took me back to the
body, to preverbal effects—and below all that rhetoric muddles. The questions,
so rooted, are more compelling. I can
ask: What does
it mean to live in a language whose rhythms tend downward, as compared to
living in a language whose rhythms tend upward?
What has it meant to be wired originally in the down rhythms of
Hungarian and then to have my switches switched predominantly to the up of
English?
It also makes sense to ask seemingly unrelated, biological
questions: Might my wheat gluten sensitivity, as journalist
Bill Bridges suggested, be read as
a cellular American struggle against Hungarian agglutination. It even makes sense to ask—English rhythm or
Hungarian—“Am I strange?”
If you speak another language, notice the rhythmic patterns in your speech, conversations, music, dance, and other aspects of your culture. What do the rhythmic patters in your other language mean? If you do not speak another language, notice the rhythmic patters in the speech of another culture in a YouTube video. What do you notice?
Works Cited:
Balázs, Géza. The
Story of Hungarian. Trans. Thomas J. DeKornfield. Budapest:
Corvina, 1997.
Hart, Charles, Richard Stilgoe, and Andrew Lloyd
Webber. Songbook of the Broadway
Musical, Phantom
of the Opera. New York: Hal Leonard. (HL 360830)
Rich, Susanna. “Hungarian
is Hungarian is: The Backward and Inside Out.” Budapest:
Pilvax. 11-18. The above post was originally published in Issue
5: Winter 2008.
Shakespeare, William.
Dalok és Szonettek. Budapest: Sziget, 2003.
---. Sonnets.
New York: Avon, 1969.
Stein, Gertrude. Selected
Writings of Gertrude Stein. New York:
Vintage, 1990.
Swatridge, Colin. A
Country Full of Aliens. Budapest:
Corvina, 2005.
