Hold onto your False (Hungarian) Friends
It's time to talk about the weirdness of the Finnish Language and Bandcamp Friday Recommendations
Today is Bandcamp Friday, a glorious day in which a benevolent corporation waives all of their commissions and passes the whole shebang onto the musicians and small record labels that support them. If you want to buy on Bandcamp, today is a good day to do so.
Naturally, this got me thinking about the evolution of European languages, a topic that has fascinated me of late now that I do not work and time is, unlike Charlie Watt (R.I.P), on my side. I have been trying to watch crime shows from each European country that exports them. Recently it’s been shows from: Sweden, Denmark, Wales, Italy, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands and Poland. I have not heard an American accent on TV or in my real life for several months now. Of course, I still tend to think with an American accent and when I get excited, I sound like an angry Texan so that’s…good times. God taunting me. And 98 per cent of all the music I listen to is American. I love the sound of Americans singing. It’s the talking that…
Moving on.
Did anyone ever tell you that Swedes do not understand Danes? Norwegians understand them but they still think Danes sound like drunken Norwegians taking the piss. I’m still on the hunt—aren’t we all?—for quality Estonian crime dramas. Mostly because I like the sound of Uralic languages.
With Dutch and Swedish, half the time I feel like I’m listening to a semi-English show, a weird experience of knowing a language but not knowing you know it. The linguistic similarities between these three closely related German languages are many and uncanny. But the Uralic languages are dark and mysterious. More mysterious even than Slavic languages which English speakers have been exposed to more on account of the former U.S.S.R. being a cultural bogeyman to us for more than 50 years.
I was trying to think if I’d ever actually heard anyone speaking one of the three major surviving Uralic languages: Finnish, Estonian or Hungarian? My partner worked with a server from Talinn here in Vancouver. Never met her. The shoegazing band Pia Fraus, whose link I shared a couple posts ago, is Estonian. But they sing in English. I am taking a long time to say no. No, I have never heard Finnish or Estonian spoken. To outside listeners, the languages sound identical. However, 800-years of German rule transformed Estonian differently. There is no intelligibility between the two. But it sounds like there are. Confusingly, the two languages are littered with what linguists call “false friends.”
False friends are words that are the same in spelling and pronunciation, but they no longer mean the same thing in one language that they do in another. It would be like someone said to you, clear as a bell, “Hey, do you have a light?” and you offered them your lighter. But what they had really said, in their language, was, “The sun is hot today!” and you were mocking them by offering them your lighter. In short, the two closest Uralic cousins in the whole world can no longer understand each other at all. The more you are certain you understand, the less you actually do.
It struck me as a curious situation. But not half as bizarre as Hungary.
The greatest European literary mystery of them all. How the hell did the Uralic language get all the way down to Hungary? And why did the Uralic languages fade everywhere except the far, far north of Europe…except Hungary? The Hungarian people are descended from Turks. Yet they dropped their Turkic language for a Northern one. They kept it even after the Northern people had all migrated back to the Baltic.
The truth is, you should ask Richard Ragany. Richard Ragany is one of several Hungarian and Hungarian-Canadians I’d had the pleasure to know here in Canada but the one I met first. I got invited to his parent’s house in Forest Lawn, Calgaary once. We were eating pork from a pig that Richard’s dad had slaughtered in the garage. They served the pork medium rare and I blurted out if it was safe to eat. Mrs. Ragany laughed and explained to me then what the cuisson of pork was meant to be. You can see why I only got invited once. Rich has lived a most remarkable life, from Calgary to Toronto to New York to London, where he has put down roots. He has a new record out (in English!) on Bandcamp.
So too does Cole Friesen. The Friesens, as some of you will know, were Mennonites who moved from the Netherlands to the Ukraine to Russian to Western Canada. They started off speaking a language called Low German. The still speak it. Low German is the German spoken in the North part of the country. Linguistically, it sits between Dutch and German. Low German is like Catalan, similar to French, similar to Spanish—way fewer speakers and getting squeezed out by both of the big boys on either side. Cole Friesen, my friend and brother in law, also has a record out right now on Bandcamp.
They sing only in Low German.
Just kidding.
But seriously, folks let’s support minor and dying European languages and all of our musically inclined friends who may or not speak those languages!
Please feel free to swear at me (in foreign languages only please) in the comments section below.
Hold onto your False (Hungarian) Friends
Fahr zur Hölle!!