From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hungary (Hungarian: Magyarország; IPA: [mɒɟɒrorsaːg]; listen (help·info)), officially in English the Republic of
Hungary (Magyar Köztársaság listen (help·info), literally Magyar (Hungarian) Republic),
is a landlocked
country in the Carpathian Basin of Central
Europe, bordered by Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. Its capital is Budapest.
Hungary is a member of OECD, NATO,
EU and a Schengen state. The official language is Hungarian, part of the Finno-Ugric family, thus one of the three
official languages of the European
Union that is not of Indo-European origin.
Following
a Celtic
(after c. 450 BC) and a Roman (9 BC - c. 4th century) period, the foundation
of Hungary was laid in the late Ninth Century by the Magyar
chieftain Árpád,
whose great grandson István ascended to the throne with a crown sent from Rome in 1000. The Kingdom of Hungary existed with minor
interruptions for more than 900 years, and at various points was regarded as
one of the cultural
centers of the Western world. It was succeeded by a Communist
era (1945-1989) during which Hungary gained widespread international
attention regarding the Revolution of 1956 and the seminal move
of opening its border with Austria in 1989, thus accelerating the collapse of the Eastern
Bloc. The present form of government is Parliamentary Republic (1989-). Hungary's
current goal is to become a developed country by IMF standards, having
became already developed by most traditional measures, including GDP and HDI[3] (world
ranking 36th and rising). The country's first ever term of EU presidency is
due in 2011 [4].
Hungary
is one of the 15 most popular tourist destinations in the world[5][6], with a capital
regarded as one of the most beautiful in the world[7][8]. Despite
its relatively small size, the country is home to numerous World Heritage Sites,
UNESCO Biosphere reserves, the
second largest thermal lake in the world (Lake
Hévíz), the largest lake in Central Europe (Lake
Balaton), and the largest natural grassland in Europe (Hortobágy).
Language:
Historically Regnum Mariae Patronae
Hungariae (Latin)
"Kingdom of Mary the Patroness of Hungary"
Hungarian (magyar nyelv listen (help·info)) is a Finno-Ugric language (more specifically an Ugric
language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is
spoken in Hungary
and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighbouring countries. The
Hungarian name for the language is magyar IPA: [ˈmɒɟɒr̪].
As
one of the small number of modern European languages
that do not belong to the Indo-European language family, Hungarian
has always been of great interest to linguists.
There
are about 14.5 million native speakers, of whom 9.5-10 million live in
modern-day Hungary. Some two million speakers live in areas that were part of
the Kingdom of Hungary before World
War I. Of these, the largest group lives in Romania, where
there are approximately 1.4 million Hungarians (see Hungarian minority in Romania).
Hungarian-speaking people are also to be found in Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia, as
well as about a million people scattered in other parts of the world (see Geographic
distribution). As with many European languages, there are a few hundred
thousand in the United States as well.
Classification
Hungarian
is a Uralic language, more specifically an Ugric
language. Connections between the Ugric and Finnic
languages were noticed in the 1670s and established, along with the entire Uralic family,
in 1717, although
the classification of Hungarian continued to be a matter of political
controversy into the 18th and even 19th centuries. Today the Uralic family is
considered one of the best demonstrated large language families, along with Indo-European and Austronesian. The name of Hungary could be
a corruption of Ugrian, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred
to them as Ugrin (pl. Ugrove) seemed to confirm that [1].
However, current literature favors the hypothesis that the Turkic
"On-ogur" ("Ten arrows" or "Ten tribes") is the
origin for the word Hungarian [2] [3]
[4].
There
are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other
Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /aː/ corresponds to Khanty
/o/ in certain positions, and Hungarian /h/ corresponds to Khanty /x/, while Hungarian final /z/ corresponds to Khanty final /t/. For example, Hungarian ház (IPA: [haːz]) "house" vs. Khanty xot
(IPA: [xot]) "house", and Hungarian száz
(IPA: [saːz]) "hundred" vs. Khanty sot
(IPA: [sot]) "hundred".
The
distance between the Ugric and Finnic
languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular.
See also: Regular
sound correspondences between Hungarian and other Uralic languages
Antiquity
and the early Middle Ages
As
Uralic linguists claim, Hungarian separated from its closest relatives
approximately 3000 years ago, so the history of the language begins around 1000 BC. The Hungarians
gradually changed their way of living from settled hunters to nomadic
cattle-raising, probably as a result of early contacts with Iranian nomads.
Their most important animals included sheep and cattle. There are no written
resources on the era, thus only a little is known about it. However, research
has revealed some extremely early loanwords, such as szó ('word'; from
the Turkic languages) and daru ('crane', from
the related Permic languages.)
The Turkic
languages later, especially between the 5th and the 9th centuries, had a
great influence on the language. Several words related to agriculture,
to state administration
or even to family relations have such backgrounds. Interestingly, Hungarian
syntax and grammar was not influenced in a similarly dramatic way.
The Funeral Sermon and Prayer
The
Hungarians migrated to the Carpathian
Basin around 896
and came into contact with Slavic
peoples, borrowing several words from them (for example tégla –
"brick", mák – "poppy", or karácsony –
"Christmas"). In exchange, the neighbouring Slavic languages also
contain some words of Hungarian origin (such as Croatian čizma – "boot",
or Serbian ašov – "spade").
The
first written accounts of Hungarian, mostly personal and place names, are
dated back to the 10th century. Hungarians also had their own writing
system, the Old Hungarian script, but no significant
texts remained from the time.
[edit] Since the
foundation of the Kingdom of Hungary
The Kingdom of Hungary was founded in 1000, by Stephen I of Hungary. The country was a
western-styled Christian state, and Latin
held an important position, as it was usual in the Middle
Ages.
Therefore,
Hungarian was also heavily influenced by Latin. The first extant text of the
language is the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, written once
in the 1190s.
The earliest example of Hungarian religious poetry is the Old Hungarian 'Lamentations of
Mary', a poem about the afflictions of Mary when she saw the death of her son.
More extensive literature in the Hungarian language arose
after 1300. The first Bible translation is the Hussite
Bible from the 1430s.
The
language lost its diphthongs, and several postpositions transformed into
suffixes, such as reá 'onto' – 1055: utu rea
'onto the way'; later: útra). Vowel
harmony was also developed. At one time, Hungarian used six verb tenses; today, only
two (the future not being counted as one, as it's a compound formed with an
auxiliary verb).
The
first printed Hungarian book was published in Cracow in 1533, by Benedek Komjáti.
The work's title is Az
Szent Pál levelei magyar nyelven[5], i.e. The
letters of Saint Paul in the Hungarian language. In the 17th
century, the language was already very similar to its present-day form,
although two of the past tenses were still used. German,
Italian and French
loans also appeared in the language by these years.
In
the 18th
century, the language was incapable of clearly expressing scientific
concepts, and several writers found the vocabulary a bit scant for literary
purposes. Thus, a group of writers, most notably Ferenc
Kazinczy, began to compensate for these imperfections. Some words were
shortened (győzedelem > győzelem 'triumph'); a
number of dialectical
words spread nationally (e. g. cselleng 'dawdle'); extinct words were
reintroduced (dísz 'décor'); a wide range of expressions were coined
using the various derivative suffixes; and some other, less frequently used
methods of expanding the language were utilized. This movement was called the
'language reform' (Hungarian: nyelvújítás),
and produced more than ten thousand words, many of which are used actively
today. The reforms lead to the installment of Hungarian as the official
language over Latin
in the multiethnic country in 1844.
The 19th
and 20th
centuries saw further standardization of the language, and differences
between the mutually already comprehensible dialects gradually lessened. In 1920, by signing the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary lost several
territories, and along with these, 33% of the ethnic Hungarian population.
Today, the language is official in Hungary, and
regionally also in Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia.
Vocabulary examples
Note:
The stress is always placed on the first syllable of each word. The remaining
syllables all receive an equal, lesser stress. All syllables are pronounced
clearly and evenly, even at the end of a sentence, unlike in English.
- Hungarian (person, language): magyar
[mɒɟɒr]
- Hello!:
- Formal, when addressing a
stranger: "Good day!": Jó napot (kívánok)! [joːnɒpot ki:vaːnok]
- Informal, when addressing someone
you know very well: Szia! [siɒ] (it sounds almost exactly like American colloquialism "See
ya!")
- Good-bye!: Viszontlátásra!
(formal) (see above), Viszlát! [vislaːt] (semi-informal), Szia (informal: same stylistic remark as
for "Hello!" )
- Excuse me: Elnézést! [ɛlneːzeːʃt]
- Please:
- Kérem (szépen) [keːrɛm seːpɛn] (This literally means "I'm
asking (it/you) beautifully", as in German Danke schön,
"I thank (you) beautifully". See next for a more
common form of the polite request.)
- Legyen szíves! [lɛɟɛn sivɛʃ] (literally: "Be (so)
kind!")
- I would like ____, please: Szeretnék
____ [sɛrɛtneːk] (this example illustrates the use of the conditional tense, as a common form of a
polite request)
- Sorry!: Bocsánat! [botʃaːnɒt]
- Thank you: Köszönöm [křsřnřm]
- that/this: az [ɒz], ez [ɛz]
- How much?: Mennyi? [mɛɲɲi]
- How much does it cost?: Mennyibe
kerül? [mɛɲɲibe kɛryl]
- Yes: Igen [iɡɛn]
- No: Nem [nɛm]
- I don't understand: Nem értem
[nɛm eːrtɛm]
- I don't know: Nem tudom [nɛm tudom]
- Where's the toilet?:
- Hol van a vécé? [hol vɒn ɒ veːtseː] (vécé/veːtseː is the
Hungarian pronouncation of the English abbreviation of "Water
Closet")
- Hol van a mosdó? [hol vɒn ɒ moʒdoː] – more polite (and word-for-word)
version
- generic toast: Egészségünkre!
[ɛɡeːʃʃeːgynkrɛ] (literally: "To our
health!")
- juice: gyümölcslé [ɟymřltʃleː]
- water: víz [viːz]
- wine: bor [bor]
- beer: sör [ʃřr]
- tea: tea [tɛɒ]
- milk: tej [tɛj]
- Do you speak English?: Tud(sz)
angolul? [tud(s) ɒngolul] Note that the fact of asking is
only shown by the proper intonation: continually rising until the
penultimate syllable, then falling for the last one.
- I love you: Szeretlek [sɛrɛtlɛk]
- Help!: Segítség! [ʃɛgiːtʃeːg]
- It is needed: kell
- I need to go (lit. 'my going is
needed'): Mennem kell
Origins
of socialism
See
also: History of Socialism
The
appearance of the term "socialism" is variously attributed to Pierre
Leroux in 1834,[8] or to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud in France, or
else in England to Robert Owen, who is considered the father of the cooperative movement.[9]
The first
modern socialists were early 19th century Western European social critics. In
this period, socialism emerged from a diverse array of doctrines and social
experiments associated primarily with British and French thinkers—especially Robert
Owen, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis
Blanc, and Saint-Simon. These
social critics criticised the excesses of poverty and inequality of the Industrial Revolution, and advocated
reforms such as the egalitarian distribution of wealth and the transformation
of society into small communities in which private property was to be
abolished. Outlining principles for the reorganization of society along
collectivist lines, Saint-Simon and Owen sought to build socialism on the
foundations of planned, utopian communities.
According
to some accounts, the use of the words "socialism" or
"communism" was related to the perceived attitude toward religion in
a given culture. In Europe, "communism" was considered to be the
more atheistic of the two. In England, however, that sounded too close to communion with Catholic overtones; hence atheists
preferred to call themselves socialists.[10]
Claude Henri de
Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, founder of French Socialism
By
1847, according to Frederick Engels, "Socialism" was
"respectable" on the continent of Europe, while
"Communism" was the opposite; the Owenites in England and the
Fourierists in France were considered Socialists, while working class
movements which "proclaimed the necessity of total social change"
termed themselves "Communists". This latter was "powerful
enough" to produce the communism of Étienne
Cabet in France and Wilhelm
Weitling in Germany.[11]
The First World War
When
the First World War began in 1914, many European
socialist leaders supported their respective governments' war aims. The
social democratic parties in the UK, France, Belgium and Germany supported
their respective state's wartime military and economic planning, discarding
their commitment to internationalism and solidarity.
Lenin,
however, denounced the war as an imperialist
conflict, and urged workers worldwide to use it as an occasion for proletarian
revolution. The Second International dissolved during the war, while Lenin,
Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg, together with a small number of other Marxists opposed to the
war, came together in the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915.
[edit] The Revolutions
of 1917-23
By
1917, the atmosphere of enthusiastic patriotism which had greeted the start
of the First World War had evaporated and was replaced
by an upsurge of radicalism in most of Europe and as far afield as the United
States (see Socialism in the United States)
and Australia.
In
February 1917, revolution broke out in Russia and the workers, soldiers and
peasants set up workers', soldiers' and peasants' councils (in Russian,
soviets), while power was placed into the hands of a Provisional
government prior to the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. Lenin arrived in
Russia in April 1917 and called for "All power to the Soviets". The
Bolsheviks won a majority in the Soviets in October 1917 and at the same time
the October Revolution was led by Lenin and Trotsky.
At the Petrograd Soviet on the 25 October 1917, Lenin declared, "Long
live the world socialist revolution!" [18]
The
elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in November
1917 and were won by the non-Marxist, peasant-based Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party
with almost twice as many votes as the Bolsheviks.[citation needed] The
Constituent Assembly was convened for 13 hours between 4 p.m. and 4:40 a.m.,
January 5-6, 1918. The SR leader Victor
Chernov was elected President of the fledgling republic. The following
day the Bolsheviks dissolved the assembly.[citation needed]
In
this period, few Communists — least of all Lenin and Trotsky — doubted that
the success of socialism in Soviet Russia depended on successful socialist
revolutions carried out by the working classes of the most developed
capitalist countries.[19][20] For
this reason, in 1919, Lenin and Trotsky drew together the Communist Parties
from around the world into a new 'International', the Communist International (also termed the
Third International or Comintern).
The
new Soviet government immediately nationalised the banks and major industry,
and repudiated the former Romanov regime's national debts. It implemented a system of
government through the elected workers' councils or soviets. It sued for
peace and withdrew from the First World War.
Arguably
for the first time, socialism was not just a vision of a future society, but
a description of an existing one, at least in embryo. On 26 October 1917, the
day after seizing power, Lenin drew up a Draft Regulations on Workers'
Control, granting workers' control in enterprises with not less than five
workers and office employees, who were to be granted access to all books,
documents and stocks, and whose decisions were to be "binding upon the
owners of the enterprises".[21]
The
Russian revolution of October 1917 gave rise to the formation of Communist
Parties around the world, and the revolutions of 1917-23 which followed.
The German Revolution of 1918 overthrew the old
absolutism and, as in Russia, Workers' and Soldiers' Councils almost entirely
made up of SPD and
Independent Social Democrats (USPD) members were set up. The Weimar
republic was established and placed the SPD in power, under the
leadership of Friedrich Ebert. The Workers' and Soldiers'
Councils were put down by the army and the Freikorps.
In 1919 the Spartacist uprising challenged the power of
the SPD government, but it was put down in blood and the German Communist
leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg were discovered and brutally murdered. A Communist regime under
Kurt
Eisner in Bavaria
in 1919 was also put down in blood.
A Communist regime briefly held
power under Béla Kun in Hungary. There
were revolutionary movements in Vienna, the industrial centres of northern Italy, and
revolutionary movements in the Ruhr area in Germany in 1920 and in Saxony in
1923.
However,
these revolutionary movements failed to spread the socialist revolution into
the advanced capitalist countries of Europe. In Soviet Russia things were
desperate. In August 1918, Lenin was shot in the head and wounded by Fanya
Kaplan. Under siege from a trade boycott and invasion by Germany, UK,
USA, France and other forces, facing civil war and starvation, the Soviet
regime implemented War Communism in June, 1918. All private enterprise
was made illegal, strikers could be shot, "non-working classes"
were forced to work and the Soviet regime could requisition grain from the
peasants for the workers in the cities.
By
1920, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, had largely defeated the White Armies. In
1921, War Communism was ended, and under the New Economic Policy (NEP), private ownership
was restored to small and medium enterprises, and especially to the peasants.
The peasants had resented and hindered the requisitions of grain so that the
situation in the cities remained desperate or was getting worse. Lenin
declared that the "commanding heights" of industry would still be
under state control, but that the NEP was a capitalist measure in a country
that was still largely unripe for socialism. Businessmen and women, called
'NEPmen', began to flourish,[22] and the
rich peasant (or 'Kulak',
meaning 'fist') gained more power.
Lenin,
now half paralysed from several strokes, castigated the powers the state had
assumed in the Soviet Union by 1923. It had reverted to "a bourgeois
czarist machine... barely varnished with socialism".[23] After
Lenin's death in January 1924, the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, falling steadily under the control of Stalin, rejected the theory
that socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union on its own. Stalin
declared a policy of "socialism in one country", namely
the Soviet Union. Despite demands by the increasingly marginalised Left
Opposition for the restoration of soviet democracy,[24] the
Soviet Union continued to develop a bureaucratic
and authoritarian
model of social development, which was condemned by moderate socialists, Trotskyists
and others for undermining the initial socialist ideals of the Russian
Revolution.[25]
Hungarian
Soviet Republic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hungarian
Soviet Republic or Soviet Republic of Hungary (Hungarian: Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság)
was a Communist
regime established in Hungary from March 21 until August 6, 1919, under the
leadership of Béla Kun. It was the first Communist government to be
formed in Europe
after the October Revolution in Russia which
brought the Bolsheviks
to power in that country. Lasting only four months, the Soviet republic fell
apart when Romanian
forces occupied Budapest. The successor to the state was the Kingdom of Hungary formed after
the Romanian army pulled out of Hungary.
Birth of the Soviet Republic
The
immediate cause of the formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was the
failure of Count Mihály Károlyi's government of the re-born state
of Hungary to organize the country's social and economic life after the lost war
and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. After less than six months in power, Károlyi was dismissed by a
coalition of Social Democrats and Communists.
The
Hungarian Communist Party was very small at this time, but its members were
very active and it grew rapidly. An initial nucleus of the party had been
organized just a few months earlier, in a Moscow hotel on November 4,
1918; when a group
of Hungarian prisoners of war and some other Communist sympathizers formed a
Central Committee. Led by Béla Kun, they soon left for Hungary and started to
recruit new members and propagate the party's ideas, radicalizing many of the
Social Democrats in the process. By February 1919, the party
numbered 30,000 to 40,000 members, including many unemployed ex-soldiers,
young intellectuals and ethnic minorities.
Science
Rubik's
cube
Hungary
is famous for its excellent mathematics education which has trained
numerous outstanding scientists. Famous Hungarian mathematicians include Paul
Erdős, famed for publishing in over forty languages and whose Erdős
numbers are still tracked; János
(John) Bolyai, designer of non-Euclidean (or "absolute") geometry in
1831;[44]
and John von Neumann, a pioneer of digital computing. Many Hungarian Jewish
scientists, including Erdős, von Neumann, Edward
Teller, and Eugene Wigner, fled rising anti-Semitism
in Europe and made their most famous contributions in the United States.
Hungarian
inventions include the noiseless match (János
Irinyi), Rubik's cube (Ernő
Rubik), and the krypton electric bulb (Imre
Bródy). Several other inventions were made by Hungarians who fled the
country prior to World War II, including holography
(Dennis
Gabor), the ballpoint pen (László Bíró), the theory of the hydrogen
bomb (Edward Teller), and the BASIC programming language (John
Kemeny, with Thomas E. Kurtz).[44]
(Interestingly, my Dad’s best subjects were
science/math; my best subjects were science/math; and daughter Jennifer’s
best subjects were science/math)
Rubik's
Cube
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Rubik's cube)
Variations of Rubik's Cubes (from left to right: Rubik's Revenge, Rubik's
Cube, Professor's Cube, & Pocket Cube).
Rubik's
Cube (commonly
misspelled rubix, rubick's or rubics cube) is a mechanical puzzle invented in 1974[1] by the Hungarian sculptor and professor
of architecture
Ernő
Rubik. Originally called the "Magic Cube" by its inventor, this
puzzle was renamed "Rubik's Cube" by Ideal Toys in 1980 [1] and
also won the 1980 German Game of the Year (Spiel
des Jahres) special award for Best Puzzle. It is said to be the world's
best-selling toy, with some 300,000,000 Rubik's Cubes and imitations sold
worldwide.[2]
In a
typical Cube, each face is covered by nine stickers of one of six solid
colours. When the puzzle is solved, each face of the Cube is a solid colour.
The Cube celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2005, when a special
edition Cube in a presentation box was released, featuring a sticker in the
centre of the reflective face (which replaced the white face) with a
"Rubik's Cube 1980-2005" logo.
The
puzzle comes in four widely available versions: the 2×2×2 (Pocket
Cube, also Mini Cube or Ice Cube), the 3×3×3 standard cube, the 4×4×4 (Rubik's
Revenge), and the 5×5×5 (Professor's Cube). Recently, Greek inventor
Panagiotis Verdes patented a method of creating cubes beyond the 5×5×5, up to
11×11×11. His designs, which include improved mechanisms for the 3×3×3,
4×4×4, and 5×5×5, are suitable for speedcubing,
whereas existing designs for cubes larger than 3×3×3 are prone to breaking.
In June 1, 2007, these designs
were being tested are currently not widely available yet, although videos of
actual, working prototypes for the 6×6×6 and 7×7×7 have been released, and it
was recently announced that these cubes would be released sometime in 2008.
Curse
of Turan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Curse of
Turan (Hungarian: Turáni átok) is a belief that Hungarians have
been under the influence of a malicious spell for many centuries. The
"curse" manifests itself as inner strife, pessimism, misfortune and
several historic catastrophes.
Origin
There
are different theories of origin. It is notable that choice of theory is more
controversial than the existence of the curse.
Saint Stephen and Christianity
Perhaps
the most popular origin theory is that the curse resulted from Hungary's
conversion to Christianity in the year AD
1000 under King Stephen. The vanquished adherents of the
old Hungarian religion cast a curse upon Christian Hungary to last either for
ever or perhaps for 1,000 years.
1848 revolution
Another
theory is that the curse was created as legend during the 1850s in the
aftermath of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and
reflected the overwhelming pessimism of this repressive decade.
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