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GEORGE P. FLETCHER as her native language. By the time I came along, my parents, Fanny and Miklós, had adapted more to life in Chicago and decided to speak English with me. This was unfortunate. First, because my parents spoke imperfect English, and secondly, I was going to school and even if I did not know a word of English in Kindergarten, I would have learned the language in a matter of months. Hungarian belongs to small minority of non-Indo-European languages in Europe. Finnish is the closest relative. There is an unmistakable rhythm to these languages. Once I head a couple speaking Finnish and thought for a moment that it was Hungarian. The interesting feature of Hungarian as a language is that it lacks a gender distinction. This does not imply that Hungarians can’t tell the difference between male and female. It’s simply that they don’t think it is as important as some other things, namely spatial relations. If you want to say that you are putting one object next to, beside, or on top of another object, one has to mark these spatial relations with an elaborate set of suffices. One feature of Hungarian I celebrate is the way to say ‘I love you.’ One word — Szeretlek — says it all. An amateur linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed that language influences the way we think. This is hard both to prove and to refute. Yet it might be true Erné Rubik invented his famous cube because he was Hungarian. Another feature of the language is that there is an elaborate system for expressing respect and familial associations. Unlike English with its reliance on a single form ‘you’ in the second person (‘thou’ has become archaic), Hungarian has three levels of respect. In the most serious form of deference the third person is used. Also, familial relationships are expressed in terms like bácsi — older brother, which has become a general term of esteem. None of these complications is a problem for native speakers, but for a wannabe Hungarian speaker like myself these details can be daunting. One other point about the language. Hungarians have magnificent ways of cursing. My father never said anything grave. But one of my uncles used an expression that would put most Americans to shame. Suffice it is to say that it referred to the deity and a sexual act. Of course there are significant places in Hungary outside of the capital. Lake Balaton in the west is a popular place for vacations, Pécs in the southwest is the location of the Herendi porceldn factory. I have made many trips and still retain my mother’s collection of Herendi lamps. The puszta is famous for its cowboys and Debrecen in the East is the home ground of my uncle Béla. Allow me to close with an anecdote that captures the lost glory of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon. After Hungary declared war against the United + 144 +
