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Of all the languages I speak, the one people are most curious/surprised by Hungarian. Sometimes I answer that I did that as a part of a campaign to study all Habsburg languages, which is in a way true; but the real reason begins with one word I heard in the Budapest metro:
I couldn't figure out what word followed the name of each station. It turned out to be következik. The dictionary taught me that it was a transitive verb követ 'to follow' made reflexive by the suffix -kezik: következik 'to follow, to result from'. A quick Google search followed:
If you add the suffix -tet, which makes a verb causative, you get következtet: "to infer" ("to make something result from"), just like keres means to search and kerestet to make someone search. Oddly, it turned out that bűn 'sin' does not become büntet 'to make someone sin', but:
instead, it meant büntet 'to punish'. I also learned that the suffix -és turns a verb into a noun, so következés was "succession, sequence, order" and that -képpen is a suffix that turns it into an adverb: következésképpen is consequently, like büntetésképpen = as a punishment:
By the end of my trip, I was addicted. I could explain why egészségedre 'Cheers!' is actually "to your health", and even more literally "to your being whole"; viszontlátásra 'goodbye' is actually "to seeing [each other] again":
I refused abbreviations like viszlát, taking pride in the long words I learned to decode. Then, inadvertently, it became useful as I made the switch from Ottoman-Russian history to "Habsburg in Eurasia" History.
