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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH
12.2 TYPOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES: THE SYNTACTIC LEVEL
From the syntactic point of view, languages are usually classified on the basis
of word order. The two commonest word orders are SVO (subject, verb, object)
and SOV (subject, object, verb). English belongs to the SVO type; Hungarian
is a topic-prominent language, in which both the SVO and the SOV word orders
may occur.
Hungarian sentences are divided into a topic part and a predicate part, with
the topic functioning as the logical subject of the predication (E. Kiss 2002:
2). Put another way, English is a subject-prominent language, while Hungarian
is topic-prominent. In English, the topic and the grammatical subject roles
have to coincide. The relative freedom of word order of Hungarian is made
possible by its rich morphology.
This typological difference may cause difficulties for Hungarian learners: it
takes some time to get used to a fixed word order and to learn that changes in
emphasis, at least in writing, cannot be expressed by simply changing the word
order as in Hungarian.
The rich morphology of Hungarian is also responsible for another charac¬
teristic feature: it is a pro-drop language, i.e., subject and object pronouns are
dropped unless they are stressed. However, this feature is rarely transferred
into English: Hungarian learners will easily switch to using pronouns instead
of verbal inflections.
12.3 TYPOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES:
THE PHONOLOGICAL AND PROSODIC LEVEL
The main differences at the phonological level concern differences in the pho¬
neme inventories of English and Hungarian, in the vowel and consonant systems
as well as in the articulation of individual vowels and consonants and in pho¬
nological processes like assimilation. Negative transfer, i.e., substitution of L1
Hungarian speech sounds for L2 English sounds is common, and some pro¬
nunciation mistakes may easily fossilise, resulting in a typical Hunglish accent.
Even more important are the prosodic differences. According to language
typology, Hungarian is a syllable-timed language, while English is stress-timed.
This difference has serious consequences for Hungarian learners. One conse¬
quence of stress-timing is that unstressed syllables in English will be weak,
and the vowels of weak syllables will be reduced. Vowel reduction does not
occur in Hungarian. Consequently, a distinctive feature of a Hunglish accent
is non-reduction of vowels in weak syllables (including unstressed function
words). Forgács (2007: 44) notes the same problem in connection with German:
Hungarian learners tend to pronounce the German ending -en too clearly. The
difficulties for a Hungarian learner of English are compounded by variable
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