I must say that I am a bit ashamed of my threadbare article that I wrote last year about Cluj’s “Hungarian Days” festival, particularly this paragraph: I can’t say that I ever participate much in the Hungarian days festival, mostly because I don’t speak the language or eat Hungarian foods. I’ve certainly heard the concerts going every night from the central square and it’s kind … Continue reading At Play in the Fields of Paprika
You know sometimes I forget that some of my readers are at the very first rung of the ladder in terms of understanding Romania and the Romanian language. I had someone ask me the other day about an extremely common phrase. Time to cover the basics! When saying “thank you” the common way to say it (which applies to most situations) in Romanian is multumesc … Continue reading Word of the Day: Thank Ya Very Much
Just about every language on the planet, including Hungarian, uses the Greek word atom to refer to one of the smallest units of matter in existence. The word comes from a (equivalent to English “un”) and tom meaning “to cut” because originally it was thought that it was the smallest unit and was “uncuttable” or indivisible. Incidentally, the CAT scan (often called just CT now) … Continue reading Hungarian Word of the Day: Atom
One of the easier Hungarian words to pronounce has to be the word buli, more or less just like you’d think it sounds. At least around here, it usually means a “party”, almost identical to the way the Romanian word chef is used. The Hungarian word buli has an interesting history, borrowed first from German and that originally from the French poule, from the Latin … Continue reading Hungarian Word of the Day: Buli
The other day The Woman and I were talking about what are known as smelling salts, a very powerful aromatic mixture given to people who have lost consciousness in order to use a biological response to “jolt” them awake. In ordinary Hungarian the word “só” means “salt” but the interesting thing is that their name for “smelling salts” is repülősó, a combination of the word … Continue reading Hungarian Word of the Day: Repülősó
All Things Romania 