Linguistic relativity, this time with 'marmalade'
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Via Leiterjakab and EngrishFunny, this evidence that it's not only the Chinese who sometimes have menu-translation difficulty:
Several online Hungarian-English dictionaries validate this translation of bukta (e.g. here), but are less clear about the core meaning of lekváros (e.g. here, , here). However, an online recipe explains that "Bukta are baked desserts which can be filled with a variety of ingredients, such as túró and ground walnuts, but the most popular filling is jam".
Meanwhile, in other news about the Hungarian language, the Economist intervened in its own language/thought debate with a 12/16/2010 article on "The marvellous Magyar microcars":
The Magyar microcar was the latest in a long line of Hungarian inventions that have shaped the modern world, including Laszlo Biro’s ballpoint pen, the telephone exchange and holography. Hungarian-born scientists such as Edward Teller and John von Neumann also played crucial roles in developing computers and atomic weapons.
Such skill at innovative thinking could well be rooted in the complexity of the Hungarian language, which has three levels of formality, direct and indirect conjugation of verbs, and also demands rhyming vowel harmony. Saying anything in Hungarian demands an instantaneous series of mental calculations before a sentence can be constructed and a clear meaning communicated. A Hungarian, the old joke goes, is someone who enters a revolving door behind you but comes out in front. This inbuilt skill at seeking solutions to complex problems, and a talent for quick lateral thinking, proved vital for the Magyars during centuries of foreign rule and was especially useful under Communism.
The same phenomenon is no doubt responsible for the disproportionate number of Athabascan physicists.
Peter Taylor said,
December 24, 2010 @ 9:29 am
Question on parallelism: how many people found the ordering in
jarring?
Dan Lufkin said,
December 24, 2010 @ 10:17 am
Maybe Hungary just has strict truth-in-labeling regulations.
wally said,
December 24, 2010 @ 10:43 am
I too have been aware of the seemingly large number of unique ("think different") inventions by Hungarians. And I also note that Hungary is the major non Indo European language speaking country in the heart of historically scientifically advanced Europe, Budapest being just a short stroll down the Danube from Vienna. So I wonder if this juxtaposition or combination ( non Indo European meets Indo European) helped produce this inventive thinking. This would be language influencing thought, but maybe at a different level than has been discussed recently here.
Yuval said,
December 24, 2010 @ 10:47 am
Surely I can't be the first one to mention this in a thread about Hungarian-to-English translation gone awry?
David L said,
December 24, 2010 @ 10:51 am
Similar reasoning no doubt explains why the Finns are so good at making cell phones, writing software, and, um, conducting orchestras. Oh, and hockey.
Paul said,
December 24, 2010 @ 10:58 am
"lekvár" means "jam."
"-s" turns a noun into an adjective.
Looking up words in a dictionary is difficult when you are just learning Hungarian, since it is agglutinative, and a beginner (like me) may not know where the stem of the word is.
I've found this dictionary to be very helpful:
http://dict.sztaki.hu/english-hungarian
bulbul said,
December 24, 2010 @ 11:04 am
Strictly speaking, "lekváros" is an adjective. Also, apparently "lekvár" is not the same as marmalade or jam ("dzsem"). "Lekvár" is thicker than marmalade, usually contains pieces of fruit and then there's something about sugar content I always forget. More to the linguistic point, there are collocation issues, so for example plum, cherries, rhubarb, raspberries and strawberries are made into lekvár, while peaches, apricots and apples are made into marmalade, even if the consistency of the final product is the same. At least where I come from.
In Slovak, the phrase "Ísť do Kambodže / na Madagaskar lekvár kosiť / kopať" (lit. "To go reap / mine lekvár to Cambodia / Madagascar",) is used as an equivalent of "To be up shit creek". In the dubbed version of the new "The Italian Job", it was spoken by Charlize Theron's as ̣"… a môžeme ísť do Jacksonu lekvár kosiť".
Boldog karácsonyt mindenkinek!
bloix said,
December 24, 2010 @ 11:28 am
Teller, Von Neumann, and Biro were Hungarians, but they were not Magyars. They were Jews.
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December 24, 2010 @ 11:35 am
[…] Language Log » Linguistic relativity, this time with ‘marmalade’ languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2861 – view page – cached Via Leiterjakab and EngrishFunny, this evidence that it's not only the Chinese who sometimes have menu-translation difficulty: […]
Thomas Thurman said,
December 24, 2010 @ 11:39 am
Peter Taylor: I did. I thought, "Gosh. I haven't seen serious use of chiasmus for a while."
bloix: Granted the shaky premises of the writer, their ethnicity would be less important than whether they spoke Hungarian.
Gadi said,
December 24, 2010 @ 11:49 am
@bloix
Indeed, and as part of the Jewish minority of the Austro-Hungarian Empire they all already as children spoke at least Yiddish and German in addition to Hungarian. Von Neumann had a penchant for Classic Greek as well.
Nick said,
December 24, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
"Saying anything in Hungarian demands an instantaneous series of mental calculations before a sentence can be constructed and a clear meaning communicated." Are you kidding me? Do they not realize that "Saying anything in [X language] demands an instantaneous series of mental calculations before a sentence can be constructed and a clear meaning communicated"?
fred said,
December 24, 2010 @ 12:54 pm
Somewhat unrelatedly: my favourite (probably apocryphal) tale about von Neumann has he and Fermi in conversation about the possibility of aliens visiting Earth. Von Neumann is alleged to have said "Maybe they are already here, but you call them Hungarians.".
(That's right: period-endquote-period! Ugly as false virtue, but relatively functional and unambiguous.)
Thomas Thurman said,
December 24, 2010 @ 1:02 pm
Out of interest, why the quotes around "marmalade"?
[(myl) Because I wasn't sure whether that part of the translation was accurate — for all I knew, it should have been chopped liver.]
J Lee said,
December 24, 2010 @ 1:13 pm
anyone care to hazard a guess at what the writer meant by 'indirect and direct conjugation of verbs'?
michael farris said,
December 24, 2010 @ 1:20 pm
@J Lee, probably the definite and indefinite "conjugations" (a terribly misguided heuristic device that makes a simple concept much harder for me).
Basically Hungarian transitive verbs take different endings depending on whether the direct object is 'definite' or not.
látok – I see, I see something (or "a something")
látom – I see it, I see her/him (or "the something")
látlak – I see you (sg or plural)
Everything besides the first person singular has just two endings (corresponding to the first two here)
lát – s/he sees something
látja – s/he sees it, him/her
It's not maintained 100 % (some modals have only one set of endings) but it's pretty consistent throughout the language.
Atmir Ilias said,
December 24, 2010 @ 1:35 pm
Albanian:
bukë, buka(n.)
It is a food prepared by cooking a dough of flour and water and frequently additional ingredients. Salt, fat, yeast and baking soda are common ingredients.
Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods, and consenquently this noun can probably also be traced to prehistoric languages.
Dan Lufkin said,
December 24, 2010 @ 2:32 pm
Physicists are always fantasizing about recreating the German-language school system in Budapest between 1880 and 1910. It turned out a lot of Nobel laureates. These kids probably spoke Magyar as a second or third language.
Of course, German also takes a modicum of premeditation before you open your mouth.
James C. said,
December 24, 2010 @ 3:03 pm
Seeing as how nobody else is going to make a comment about Athabaskan, I’ll do so. There are probably a few Navajo and other Athabaskan physicists, but like other highly trained North American indigenes they’re uncommon because of sociopolitical circumstances.
I guess relativity would be really easy to understand when you have both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect morphologically encoded in your language? But actually it probably isn’t.
Jakob Leiter said,
December 24, 2010 @ 3:14 pm
Bukta has (at least) two meanings in Hungarian: one is the pastry described above, and the other is a slang term for failure – a fuckup, if you will, although "bukta" is not vulgar in either sense. Sztaki dictionary is (in)famous for getting these and similar double meanings wrong, or giving you misleading translations at the very least.
Interestingly, bukta is also the third person singular past tense transitive form of the verb buk(ni), which roughly translates as "(s)he failed/lost (it)"; slang but not vulgar at all; so "Joe bukta a versenyt" is "Joe lost the competition".
Also, "you lost your money" could be "ön bukta a pénzét", but only if you're not on first name terms with the other person. (Again, this is stylistically incorrect translation, since "lost" is neutral and "bukta" is slang.)
Concerning the notion that we Hungarians are special: we keep spreading this misinformation, I'm glad some of you bought it :).
Here's a food mistranslation in Turkish (see image) for you. Apparently, they use the same word for "translate" and for "turn round", and this is why grilled chicken became chicken translate.
Peter Taylor said,
December 24, 2010 @ 4:01 pm
bulbul said
In south-east England "marmalade" contains pieces of fruit and ranges in consistency from jam to jelly (i.e. effectively solid), but I don't think collocations with any of the fruits you list would be unremarkable – in my experience, at least, they would all be jams, whatever their consistency. Without qualification "marmalade" is made from Seville oranges; lemon marmalade and lime marmalade are also recognised.
Bloix said,
December 24, 2010 @ 4:30 pm
@fred:
there's actually a book called "The Martians of Science," by Istvan Hargittai, about five Hungarian Jewish physicists, all of whom came to the US and worked for the military (mainly on the bomb) during WWI and after: Teller, Von Neumann, Szilard, Wigner, and Von Karman.
naddy said,
December 24, 2010 @ 5:23 pm
As a German, I also didn't know Buchtel but the dictionary tells me it's an Austrian term, which makes sense.
Oh, and it should be Marmeladenbuchtel, but it's excusable for non-native speakers to get the Fugenlaut wrong.
Ben said,
December 24, 2010 @ 5:54 pm
From what little I know about Hungarians and profanity, I conclude that that is an accurate translation.
pocak said,
December 24, 2010 @ 6:44 pm
My colleague, Jakab went into detail about the different meanings of "bukta", so let me just add that "lekvár" is indeed the word for jam/marmalade, "-os" being an adjectival suffix.
The word "lekvár" (well, in my dialect, anyway) refers to any syrupy stuff that is made out of some sort of fruit (traditionally apricot, sour cherry, plum, strawberry, raspberry etc.) – either with or without actual pieces of fruit.
Bukta is usually, but not necessarily filled with apricot jam, btw. Here is a bit of an appetizer: http://bit.ly/gVoAT4
pocak said,
December 24, 2010 @ 7:22 pm
On a different note: the sztaki dictionary in question has some other interesting ideas as well, I wouldn't recommend it.
Webforditas.hu ( http://www.webforditas.hu/szotar.php?show=dictTab&lang=english ) – a far better dictionary/translator available – gives the meaning of "bukta" as 1, jam-filled sweet roll; 2, (vi) fail.
Well, the second one should be (n) failure, but what the heck.
Rubrick said,
December 24, 2010 @ 8:23 pm
Such skill at fatuous, meritless speculation could well be rooted in the sloppiness of the English language.
Atmir Ilias said,
December 24, 2010 @ 10:48 pm
The underlaying meaning of "Lekvar":
/lekvar/ means something that covers something else. The concept of Paint, coat, cover,clothes, is not so different from the 'lekvar".
Bloix said,
December 25, 2010 @ 12:21 am
@ThomasThurman:
Teller and Von Neumann both grew up in bilingual German-Hungarian-speaking households. I don't know about Biro. (Pace Gadi, I doubt very much if any of them spoke Yiddish – these were middle-class, assimilated, secular Central European Jews, and Yiddish would have been the jargon of ignorant superstitious Easterners to them.)
Calaqscedoa said,
December 25, 2010 @ 5:41 am
Not so fatuous, there is a language in which "bukta" means "a glyph", in French "une bouchée" is supposed to mean a mouthful, although, just like in English, it is in fact only a "small" or a "reduced" mouthful and "boucher" in French again, ( to stuck) means "butcher". Then in German "lecker" is familiar for "delicious". When it comes to mouthfuls it seems that the linguist is staying near the entrance of the original stuff while I'm still wondering about the meaning absolute of an expression like: "tongue in cheek". "B" categories although they tend to illustrate matters of secondary importance can appropriate more of a precious attention when they direct that attention to the belly.
Bob Ladd said,
December 25, 2010 @ 5:50 am
In Italian the word pasticcio has the same two basic meanings as Hungarian bukta, namely 'pastry' and 'bungle, screwup'. Perhaps somebody at the Economist can make a nice language-and-thought story out of that.
don B said,
December 25, 2010 @ 7:57 am
@Bob Ladd: But the Hungarian bukta (in this meaning) is a funny artifact playing with the sounding of the noun bukta 'pastry' and the meaning of the verb buk(ik, -ni) 'to fall, to lose'
Jerry Friedman said,
December 25, 2010 @ 10:26 am
Speaking of parallelism, there's also a familiar problem with
And I doubt "rhyming" is the best word for what they author is talking about. With the addition of the Archie Bunker joke, have we covered everything that's wrong with that extract?
On another subject, is the disproportionate number of Athabascan physicists greater than one?
Keith M Ellis said,
December 25, 2010 @ 11:26 am
Bloix, didn't Ms. Hargittai's father have some association with those men, or am I confusing her and this book for another author and another book? I do recall when she mentioned the book on CT and I considered buying it, but never got around to it.
Incidentally, I find it almost jarring to think of Szilard and Teller as being essentially similar in some respect (as we are encouraged to do in this context). Physicists have been my intellectual heroes since childhood and, once I was older and learned more history, Teller became my most hated villain. I strongly admire Szilard both as a physicist and as man of great character.
Bob Ladd said,
December 25, 2010 @ 4:14 pm
@don B: Thanks, I hadn't appreciated that connection. It may not deter the development of a satisfying linguistic just-so story at the Economist, though.
Bloix said,
December 25, 2010 @ 6:40 pm
Keith M Ellis – as I understand it, Istvan Hargittai knew his subjects only by interviewing them for his book – he is of a younger generation, having been born in 1941, and in addition to being a chemist he has something of a second career as a historian of science. A little googling turned up this horrific memoir of his early childhood in a Nazi concentration camp,
http://www.erinnern.at/e_bibliothek/seminarbibliotheken-zentrale-seminare/verbrechen-verdrangen-leid-erinnern/752_Hargittai%20Our%20Lives%20Workshop%20Lappin%20Gmeiner.pdf
Joyce Melton said,
December 26, 2010 @ 5:07 am
Bukta and pasticcio seem to have some commonality with English cobbler. Odd that. Are there any more points on the pasty-as-screw-up distribution?
Ben Hemmens said,
December 26, 2010 @ 10:31 am
"it should be Marmeladenbuchtel, but it's excusable for non-native speakers to get the Fugenlaut wrong."
I don't think that's wrong, but I'm only in Austria. A Marmeladenbuchtel would have a plurality of jams in it. But trust a Marmeladinger to know better ;-)
Buchteln as I know them are sweet light yeasty bread cubes about the size of your fist. Very common around here (Graz & surrounding countryside). Fine fresh and warm with custard.
Ray Dillinger said,
December 26, 2010 @ 11:41 am
I think it's interesting that there is a disproportionate number of "lateral-thinking" bits of ingenuity coming from an area that is linguistically different (non-IE) from the (IE) surrounding area.
In computer science, we need a lot of technical terms. We usually "borrow" extant words, define them precisely/technically, and then use them as terms of art within the context of a paper or programming paradigm. The interesting bit here is that the same extant words and phrases are used with different but related meanings in different contexts or by different sets of people (try to get three computer scientists to agree on the meaning of "object oriented" if you want to see what I mean).
And therefore some very precise ideas, precisely expressed by a speaker or writer, can cause a hearer or reader to seek among different term-of-art definitions trying to come up with a meaning that is plausible or consistent. It is not too unusual for a good idea to originate as a poorly-expressed or misunderstood bad idea, because the "bad idea" meaning is rejected as implausible or inconsistent, and then alternate meanings for terms-of-art come into play until the hearer forms a slightly different idea that is plausible or consistent but which could have been expressed using the same sequence of words.
This is rampant speculation, but I suppose that a similar phenomenon could be happening when linguistic differences get in the way while people are learning the technology, literature, etc, of other people. The Hungarian language and its non-Indo-European structures may be forcing native speakers of Hungarian to do more "interpretation" of the ideas they're learning, with the beneficial result of a slightly different understanding not likely to be shared by those they're learning from.
Note that in this scenario it's not the language which is providing a benefit; it's the language barrier!
Bear
Ben Hemmens said,
December 26, 2010 @ 1:39 pm
"they were not Magyars. They were Jews."
I wouldn't be so sure that "Magyar" and "Jew" were non-overlapping identities. It all depends on how you mean them. They might refer to people's political or religious affiliation, or to their descent ("race"). As we know, the Nuremberg race laws defined many people as Jews who had never considered themselves as Jewish, including a lot of people who had made strenuous efforts to make a non-Jewish and even anti-Jewish identity for themselves. In fact, a significant number of people who identified as firmly "deutschnational" (right-wing nationalists of a German-dominated Austrian nation; not necessarily supporters of the Anschluss) or were even members of the NSDAP while it was still banned (i.e. enthusiastic Nazis) were not saved from the death camps by their political opinions.
I don't know anything about the individuals concerned but if someone had a German name, Jewish ancestry and grew up in Budapest I'd tread carefully: the person's actual linguistic, religious, political or imposed-by-the-Nazis identity could be just about any of a wide spectrum of possibilities.
Ben Hemmens said,
December 26, 2010 @ 1:48 pm
For anyone who wants to look it up: The Austrian Mind by William M. Johnston had a fair bit of material on the relationship of the Hungarian language to the conceptual tendencies of Hungarian intellectuals.
chris said,
December 27, 2010 @ 10:07 am
Incidentally, I find it almost jarring to think of Szilard and Teller as being essentially similar in some respect (as we are encouraged to do in this context). Physicists have been my intellectual heroes since childhood and, once I was older and learned more history, Teller became my most hated villain. I strongly admire Szilard both as a physicist and as man of great character.
But isn't that a fairly standard illustration of the amorality of science qua science? Both were great scientists, but used their abilities for different purposes, depending on their character in other respects.
I'm not sure Teller deserves as much vilification as he sometimes gets, but even if so, I don't see how that relates to his scientific ability.
As far as any larger point about Hungarians is concerned, though, I think it's a bunch of sloppy thinking and stereotypes. There are geniuses in every country; some just have more opportunity to show it than others. For every Ramanujan that is discovered by someone with formal education there must be dozens if not hundreds who are not, and live their lives in surroundings that make it impossible for their abilities to ever be known or preserved.
John Cowan said,
December 27, 2010 @ 5:13 pm
Joyce Melton: The cobblers in load of old cobblers is rhyming slang: cobbler's awls 'balls'. The use of cobbler for a sort of pie, on the other hand, is American, and nobody knows its origin.
v said,
December 28, 2010 @ 6:25 am
>Albanian:
>bukë, buka(n.)
>It is a food prepared by cooking a dough of flour and water and frequently additional ingredients. Salt, fat, yeast and baking soda are common ingredients.
In Bulgarian бухта (bukhta) means a puffy pastry made from a batter of flour, eggs, and yoghurt, always sprinkled with icing sugar. The batter is puffed / leavened with baking soda, and that's what the name means. Бух-ване means puffing / leavening.
v said,
December 28, 2010 @ 6:26 am
As in, the bukhta is a lot more puffed than other pastries.
v said,
December 28, 2010 @ 6:27 am
And it's also fried, not baked… Gah, I'm so sorry for the triple post.
Ben Hemmens said,
December 28, 2010 @ 7:41 am
Buchteln are yeasty and baked.
v said,
January 16, 2011 @ 8:03 am
Hm, no buchteln are notihng like бухти.
That's interesting as бух- in Bulgairan it's the general term for yeasting / leavening / puffing of batter / dough / pastry. And even beyond that, metaphorically. Can anyone enlighten as to the origin of this? Also бъх- in the sense of applying force to something in a similar way, like for cleaning rugs, or even for a physical beating of a person.
G. Narbo said,
July 30, 2011 @ 10:14 am
Scientists from Hungary?
– A result of good secondary schools the "gimázium" with solid curriculums establishing a strong basic knowledge.
von Neumann and Nobel Laureate Wigner have been educated at the Budapest Lutheran (Fasori) gimnázium, where they had a legendary math teacher.
Students arriving after the Revolution of 1956 received a year (at
least) credit at universities for their HS (gimnázium) diplomas.
Incidentally music was also a strong subject reaiizing the curious
connection between mathematics and music (Kodály method).