JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES

October-December 2009 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume I., Issue 4.
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MOLNÁR, Zsolt & MOLNÁRNÉ CZEGLÉDI, Cecília
The Creative Hungarian Language and Its Special Teaching Method
Part 2. : The Sound Symbolical Nature of the Hungarian Language 1
In the first part of this series we illuminated the essence of the Hungarian language: the method of
how it creates the wordbushes from the roots by creators. Now we turn more deeply to the basic
morphological elements of our language, and will examine their nature, origin and features.
The basic semantical units of Hungarian language
In western linguistic tradition words are considered as the smallest, most basic semantical elements
which have their own, well defined, separate, invariant meaning and form. Morphological elements
below the level of words are not considered as stable, separate entities or can not been identifiable at all.
This dogma is maybe true for languages studied most deeply by western linguists, on which the western
linguistic tradition has been built up, inflecting languages and some isolating ones. But this dogma is
apparently not true for Hungarian – as we have seen it before, and will be studied more deeply later –
and presumably neither for other agglutinating languages. In Hungarian roots, creators and relators
(and if we differentiate, markers) should be considered as basic bricks with which the construction of the
semantic net starts. These elements are strictly defined and invariant; they carry exactly determined
meaning and have stable form. They have all the features which basic semantic building blocks should
have.
Sir John Lyons in his famous and several times published underlying work on semantics 2 wrote the
followings: “For an agglutinating language is one in which the word-forms can be analysed as sequences of
morphemes, each of which is invariable; in the same sense that the words of isolating languages are invariable; and
it is the morphemes, rather than the words, that are the basic grammatical units. But in inflecting languages like
Latin and Greek, with which Western traditional grammar was primarily concerned (and from which some of its
concepts were inappropriately transferred to languages of a different type), … the analysis of word-forms into
smaller grammatical segments (where they can be so analysed) does not result in sequences of morphemes, each of
which is invariable.”
In an agglutinating language morphemes should be considered as basic grammatical elements. In
Hungarian from cca. two thousand (or slightly less) roots, with help of cca. 30 primary creators (and
1 Authors´ homepage is: http://www.tisztamagyarnyelv.hu/
2 John Lyons: Semantics. Cambridge University Press, 1977 - 1996, p. 72.
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