Vita:Megszólító eset

Lost phonetic distinction

Sorry, I cannot easily type Hungarian accent marks on my keyboard, so it is easier for me to write in English. If you learnt Hungarian in Szeged before the schools (probably successfully) exterminated the local dialect, you will appreciate this example. In the Szeged dialect, the main feature is that many Hungarian e sounds are replaced with an ö sound. Another, less well-known feature is the substitution of a short é sound for many other e sounds. Paraphrasing the lyrics of a well-known song about an aged musician that lost his sense of musical pitch and tunes the G string too high, one might say "Te Lajos, rossz már a te fülhallásod." If you pronounce this with the Szeged dialect, the e in Te is an e sound, but the e in te is a short é sound. The word Te is vocative, while the word te is nominative, acting as a possessive. No one who knows the Szeged dialect would get this wrong. Zsigmond Móricz tried to preserve the Szeged dialect in some of his novels, but he got many ö replacements wrong, so reading these novels for someone who knows the Szeged dialect is jarring. Mateat ^vita 2021. március 29., 01:15 (CEST)