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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH
is given in Appendix 1. A large volume of papers resulting from the Hungari¬
an-English contrastive project was published in 1980, edited by Läszlö Dezsö
and William Nemser. Further volumes, edited by Eva Stephanides, were pub¬
lished in the 1980s.
1.2.1 Hierarchies of difficulty
According to CL, learning difficulties are solely due to structural differences
between the two languages, and they can be predicted from the extent and
nature of differences. According to Ellis (1985), “contrastive analyses soon
realised that there were degrees of similarity and difference”. The following
degrees of difference were identified (Ellis’s examples have been replaced with
Hungarian-English examples by the present author).
1. No difference between a feature of the first and second language: e.g.,
Hungarian /s/ is the same as English /s/: szent - sent;
2. Convergent phenomena: two items in the first language become coalesced
into one in the L2, e.g., Hungarian kényv and ftizet may both correspond
to English book;
3. An item in the first language is absent in the target language: e.g.,
geminate consonants, definite and indefinite verb conjugation are present
in Hungarian, but absent in English; culture specific words like makos¬
patkó and disznótor are absent in English;
4. An item in the first language has a different distribution from the
equivalent item in the target language: e.g., velar /n/ in Hungarian occurs
only before /k/ and /g/, while in English it also occurs word-finally and
medially, without a velar consonant following it; the word fivér, corre¬
sponding to brother in English, is less often used in Hungarian than
baty(ja) and öccs(e), while the phrases younger brother and older brother
are less often used in English than brother;
5. No similarity between first language feature and target language feature:
e.g., in Hungarian negation is achieved by inserting the word nem before
the verb ("Nem tudom"), whereas in English the word not has to be add¬
ed to the auxiliary (“I don’t know”);
6. Divergent phenomena: one item in the first language becomes two items
in the target language, e.g., the Hungarian 3" person pronoun 6 diverges
into he and she in English; Hungarian /e/ diverges into English /e/ and
/e/, and Hungarian megtart diverges into English keep and hold.
It was supposed that these linguistic differences lead to learning difficulty.
“Hierarchies of difficulty” were proposed, e.g., by Stockwell, Bowen, and Mar¬
tin (1965) and Prator (1967).
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