Hunglish.orgFerenc Kazinczy was a man of letters credited with simplifying and standardizing the Hungarian language; so how come it's still so difficult?
Ferenc Kazinczy is known by every Hungarian as the guy who reformed the Magyar nyelv; he was fluent in French and German, translated numerous classic texts, and started up the first literary magazine in Hungarian, Magyar Muzeum.
According to wikipedia, Kazinczy was implicated in the democratic conspiracy of the Abbot Ignac Martinovics, Kazinczy was arrested in December 1794 and condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment and he was jailed in the Kufstein Fortress.
Kazinczy died of cholera in 1831.
Today there are streets named for Kazinczy all over Hungary and I’m sure he was a great man, but one wishes that he had gone further and simplified the Hungarian language a bit more.
My guess is there used to be even more vowels. Perhaps as many as 20 or 30. He may have been the one that pared that number down to the more manageable sum we have today.
He was supposed to have shortened some Hungarian words. Köszönöm szépen for that. I cannot imagine how long the words used to be.
SMS text messaging may be shortening the words even more and also reshaping the language, but somehow it ain’t getting simpler.