Richard Futrell
Budapest 2009
With an undergraduate language grant from CREEES I got to spend a month this summer in Budapest studying Hungarian. I went with several goals: I would become able to actually speak the language, lining up all the correct inflectional endings in milliseconds without recourse to charts; I would research a few linguistic phenomena that play into my research; and I would obtain a background in Hungarian literature and Hungarian nuance that would allow me to appreciate and someday translate Hungarian works. I think I made progress in all these.
In pursuit of fluency, I went in search of immersion. I had planned to live in the dorms of Eötvös Loránd University and attend a language program there, but upon arrival I placed out of their programs and thus lost my housing in the dormitories. I sent a flurry of e-mails to every Hungarian or Hungarian-related person I knew in search of a host family, with limited results, because in the month of August everyone is on vacation at Lake Balaton. I ended up spending my month bouncing from home to home, apartment to apartment, in a whirlwind tour of Budapest and its suburbs. I found myself living with a Russian teacher, the younger sister of a former friend of one my professors, in the shadow of a socialist apartment block in Óbuda, living next to the heir to a formerly Hungarian castle now in Slovakia, or living a block away from the house where the widow of Miklós Radnóti still lives.
The language courses I found were top-notch. I had a class from one of the finest teachers of Hungarian and a knowledgeable linguist, Ildikó Fazekas. My classmates included a Latvian E.U. translator, a Japanese woman, a Belgian musician and two Polish nuns; the best language in common was Hungarian. In the afternoon, I took private courses with Borbála Boldoghy, working through snippets of classic Hungarian literature. We proceeded backwards from the oppressive time of the /szocialista rendszer/, through the Silver Age of the 1920s and 30s, and finally to the poems and vignettes of the nineteenth century.
Everyone who¹s been there loves Budapest. The entire city is either Art
Nouveau or socialist apartments (and that only in the suburbs). There is
a used book store (an /antikvárium/) on nearly every street and at least
one strange character on every block. While I was there, I witnessed the
State Foundation Day, complete with air parades, historical
re-enactments, and the airing of the 1000-year-old right hand of Saint
Stephen. In Budapest I shared /fröccs/ (a sort of carbonated wine) with
a Hungarian linguist and discussed plural agreement patterns, I sat
under the shadow of the last remaining Soviet monument to complete my
homework every afternoon, and I ordered /paprikás /chicken at every
opportunity. I also had the opportunity to travel: from the
hastily-Christianized former Turkish town of Pécs to the austere
Calvinism of the eastmost Debrecen to the vast empty plains of
Hortobágy. The latter was an attempt to understand the iconic landscape
of early Hungarian literature: the lonely alkali flats occasionally
disturbed by horseback armies.
I've returned with vastly improved language skills, a whole shelf of fine antique books, and sixty surveys worth of data on number agreement in relative clauses. I¹m positive that I will return some day soon.