sam and the city

Budapest Part I - language issues

Good day faithful readers. What did you do on the weekend? Me, I went to Budapest, and it was gooood! I was quite nervous before I went. Every time I’d travelled to non-English speaking countries previously I certainly wasn’t fluent, but at least I had known the very basics like yes, no, thankyou, hello, goodbye, and some of the numbers. Going to Hungary my entire vocabulary was limited to “Goulash” and “hello”. Don’t get me wrong, I tried, but how are you supposed to remember, let alone pronounce words that are different combinations of vowels and z’s?

The only reason that “hello” stuck in my head is that in Hungarian it is “szervusz”, which according to my faithful phrase book pronounced “ser-vus”. Every time I thought about it I’d picture a group of people sitting impatiently at a Hungarian restaurant yelling at the waiter “SERVE US”! The waiter looking around smiles, gives a little wave and wonders to himself why these customers are so vocal and persistent with their greetings.

As it happened though, my phrase book was almost entirely unnecessary. Every time that I went somewhere I’d spend an hour practicing my lines, walk up, confidently say “szervusz” (then chuckle to myself) and the person would reply in perfect English! I’ve actually come to the conclusion that no-one in Hungary says “szervusz”, they all say “hello”, albeit in a strange accent that kind of sounds like pillow without the p. Either this or they can spot a foreigner like myself a mile away.

I’ve probably got a bit of a bias view because of the areas that I visited, but it seams as though Hungarian is nearly turning into a second language in its own country. You can certainly see the need though when a single person is having to deal with people from Germany, Italy, France, Spain, other Easter European countries, all one after the other. The entire time that I was in Budapest I only came across one person who didn’t speak English, and that was the 200 year old lady operating the cloak room at the national gallery… and I’m sure that she was probably taking lessons.

posted by sam @ 10:15 pm