Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Two main sentence types are pertinent for Hungarian in the dicussion or word order... the 'neutral sentence' and the 'focus' type." - all previous discussions of Hungarian word order I have read have concentrated on the focus position before the board. I too have noticed a similarity to the Topic/Comment tructure of English sentences, but her analysis here is still too vague to be convincing.

...Hungarian sentences, however, may be written in a variety of word orders and would have English equivalents requiring either a change in intonation or a different expression altogether" - different languages using different features of language - syntax, phonology, lexis - to create the same meaning.

"He solved the problem by shuffling the library, sorting every word in it into alphabetical order and every pixel into order of colour, shade and intensity." - a vulnerability of digital media.

'...but it had been briefed that when Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change..." - linguistic determinism. I often feel closer to non-English speaking Europeans Europeans than say Americans. But then again, how Hungarian am I now?

I was wondering where the writer of the The Wasp Factory was. Now I've found him, I feel slightly nauseous.

"But the moves could become a language, and Gurgeh thought he could speak the language now, well enough (tellingly) to lie in it..." - inspiration for Embassytown?

'Fractions...the s3 possessive is with or without formed with or without the 'j' (unless used in dates, then it is always formed without the j). - Fatigue is really setting in now; an entirely useless 'rule', followed by an equivocation.

'ennélfogva 'consequently, thus'' - new to me, how essential is this?

"ugyanis - for, since because
hiszen - for, since, because'
- not helpful. If the words are completely synonymous, say so: if they are not, explain why.

'This suffix makea intransitive verbs" - repeated four times, she's getting tired now.

"Sometimes more than one variant can be attached to the same root, yielding two different meanings: lelketlen/heartless, lélektelen/lacking in enthusiasm" - yes, but is the distinction productive, and how so?

"Abbahagyta az olvasást/He stopped reading
Nem tetszett neki az éneklés/He didn't like the singing"
- How do you distinquish between the latter and 'He didn't like singing?'

"Word formation...is perhaps the richest area of Hungarian grammar" - No kidding! Perhaps then it deserves more than a twelth of the text. The formation of nouns, verbs erc. should be distributed those chapters, rather than coralled into a chapter by itself.

He just provided a defence of portfolio theory from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Combined with a method of systematically weighting loss aversion, that created what is in effect a 'margin of safety' this looks very much like the Benjamin Graham approach to investing.

"The ideal of logical consistency...is not acheivable by our limited mind" - I'm actually struggling to finish this book because it is so depressing.

Since, Ago, Every, Usually - these are section headings and indicate that this is no longer a grammar of Hungarian, but an English-Hungarian translation manual. The distinction between 'for' and 'since' is that the former refers to a period in time, the latter to a point in time. The distinction between 'ota' and '-(j)a/(j)e' isn't explained.

"Your judgement of probability was ultimately determined by the cognitive ease, or fluency, with which a plausible scenario came to mind."

"Here again, people buy more than protection against an unlikely disaster, they eliminate a worry and purchase piece of mind." - is it that utility theory is wrong, or that utility is being incorrectly equated with material gains and losses?

"This was the main point of the axiomatic version of utility theory that von Neumann and Morgenstein introduced in 1944...[Amos] also introduced me to a famous challenge to that theory" - first quantum indeterminancy, now game theory is Neumann going the way of Marx?

"Why had he done it?" - I hope the italics imply an explanation; because as it stands, a player of games so easily tricked, the plot is deeply implausible.

"Accusative -t: this case has a limired use in time expressions, usually occurring with only a few verbs." - a list would have been nice.

"The use of cases in expressions of time is somewhat idiosyncratic and must be learned individually" - I wonder how much of a role the conscious learning of a grammatical rule and its conscious application plays in language learning, if any.

"Many time expressions are fixed and require no further case marking or postpositions" - Why? I remember thinking while studying English grammar, that grammarians throw adverbs into the remainder bucket.

'szerint' is a postposition! I always assumed it was some kind of verb.

"Demonstrative pronouns...are commonly used cataphorically, i.e. to refer ahead or refer back to something previously mentioned." - she means 'anaphorically' here, it would have been better to make the distinction between the stricter meanings of these terms and given examples. She has made something which is quite similar to English appear unnessecarily mysterious. English just allows more ellipsis than Hungarian.

"Some idioms require the use of reflexive pronoun where English does not" - no examples given.

Suffixing of locative cases; v-stems, fleeting vowels etc - isn't all of this phonology rather than morphology? And isn"t it the result of a phonetic alphabet rather than an particularly complex grammar?

"Because, after all, it doesn't really matter what politicians do; nationalism will always produce one war per generation." - in fairness to the politicians of our generation - Orbán, Trump, Johnson - they're trying their best.

"Iagos don't exist. People will do everything Iago did; but they"ll never say they're villains" - I usually use Hitler (I probably didn"t know anything of Iago when I read this), but definitely one of my moral ideas I picked up from Huxley.

"Good is a matter of moral craftsmanship. It can't be produced, except by individuals" - nice Aristotlean idea, somewhat at odds with the idea that the personality is the root of all evil that Propter has otherwise been promoting.