Most articles about the Hungarian language make sure to scare you in the first paragraph that it has 18 (or up to 35) cases so it must be the hardest language ever™. German is pretty hard and it only has 4 cases, what an impossible language must Hungarian be then?

Well what is the hardness of a language anyway? That depends not only on the language itself but also on things outside of it, such as the difference from languages you already know, the methods you use and the level of knowledge you want to achieve. But it feels like there is some “complexity” factor in the language itself. But what is it? You could probably measure it by processing huge amounts of everyday speech combined with the context, then measure the brainpower needed to express the same thought in English and Hungarian for instance. It would be a large-scale project for sure. But one thing I’m convinced wouldn’t work is to try and determine it from a grammar book by counting some rows in declension tables. Why?

For one, grammar books don’t describe the whole language. They describe an idealized version that ignores many aspects. Intonation is just one example that isn’t discussed much in standard language books, you’re just expected to pick it up. Some other things seem hard in a grammar book but are actually simple when speaking. For example, is it additional complexity to know that the plural in English is sometimes -s as in dogs but other times -es as in boxes? Not really, it feels natural to our speech-making devices (tongue, mouth etc.). The point is, grammar books may skip complex things while describing something at length that adds little complexity for our brains. Hungarian cases are not too complex at all despite their long list.

Part of the problem comes from the history of grammar books. Up to quite recently this whole business was based on the so called “classical” European languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. They thought these languages were in some sense superior, clearer, more logical, etc. Now we know that’s nonsense but it made medieval “linguists” ignore aspects of languages that didn’t fit into the Latin framework and tried to find similar features to each Latin category. This was not even some subconscious or secret thing, the first book on Hungarian grammar was even titled Grammatica Hungarolatina (entire book as pdf). Don’t get me wrong, it is a magnificent book for its time (1539) but the author did everything from a Latin perspective. He described 6 grammatical cases for Hungarian, which were basically the 7 Latin ones (he somehow skipped locative).

How did we get from 6 to 18 (or 35)? We recognized that the tools expressing these 6 things don’t form a natural group in Hungarian. There are more similar things (suffixes) that can be put to the end of words and have similar functions so some new names were invented for them and they were also put on the list of cases. But today we also see that it’s an even broader family of tools: postpositions (like a preposition, but after the word). As the linguist Andrew Spencer argues in his article Does Hungarian have a case system? (linguistic paper), what we usually call cases in Hungarian are actually better to think about as fused postpositions that evolved into suffixes. Nevertheless, most grammar books still call these suffixes cases, it’s a historical thing.

The main point is: these cases are not the sort of cases you are used to from other languages. Kids in Hungarian schools don’t even learn to call them cases (which would be eset in Hungarian) but rather adverbial suffixes (határozórag). It’s irrelevant that there are 18 of them (or up to 35, depending on how you count). If I make a post about them, I’ll just lump them together with the other postpositions because that’s the company where they feel best (despite some minor differences).

Learn them just like you would learn prepositions (for, with, on, in, at, from, etc.) in other European languages. Never learn obscure names like “inessive” or “terminative case”. You won’t need it any more than foreign learners of English need to call “with” the “instrumental preposition”.

Now that I talked about how they are not really cases, I should point out that there is one exception. I think there is one thing that’s rightly called a case in Hungarian: the accusative suffix -t. It marks the object in a sentence (I see him) and works just like the accusative in any other European language, so it’s helpful to see it as that. But the other 17 are bollocks and you should just learn them together with postpositions. Don’t consider them as rows in a table, rather as entries in your vocabulary.

This doesn’t mean that Hungarian is easy, on the contrary. It shows that it uses different concepts and categories than other European languages. The difficulties are at different parts of the language than you’d expect and they are not so easy to quantify as counting the number of cases.

I hope it won’t be possible to scare you with the number of cases again! Have a good time discovering more about Hungarian!