Schlagobers and Schmetterlings

A cognate is a word in one language that sounds like and has a similar meaning to a word in a different language, and the two words usually share a common linguistic ancestor. Mother and father, in English and Mutter und Vater in German are examples of cognates. English, German, French, Spanish, Italian are all descended from and members of the Indo-European language group. Recognizing cognates makes language learning much much easier. Hungarian is its own language group. Some sources put it with Finnish and Estonian but then usually go on to say ‘well maybe not’. This means that neither my English nor my German is at all helpful for figuring out signs or menus or anything else.

Hungarian may not have linguistic cognates with English but Hungary does have a lot of political cognates with the United States. Prime Minister Victor Orban is proud of his illiberal Christian government. He has made it harder for opposition parties to work together, he has weakened the Judiciary and has taken away the ability of the people to change unfair election rules. His stoking of Hungarian nationalism is seen as counterproductive to Hungary’s integration into the EU.

The Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation. This new memorial ‘forgets’ to mention the tens of thousands of Jews killed, deported to camps or enslaved by the Hungarian government before the German invasion in 1944. Personal momentos have been unofficially added to bring some balance.

Notice the two flags flying from the Parliament, Hungary and Transylvania. Transylvania was a part of Hungary ceded to Romania after WWI. In other countries most major government buildings that we have seen have been flying their national flag as well as the flag of the European Union.

Linguistic cognates are useful when learning a language, political cognates will hopefully help us to learn a lesson before it’s too late.

TC and I have arrived in Budapest, we are staying on a floating hotel (an old cruise boat) on the Danube. Budapest is not an old city, most of what we are seeing is 200 - 300 years old. During that time though the remodeling guys have been busy. The Hapsburgs applied guilting to anything that wasn’t moving; the Germans unfortunately left the city with a lot of piles of destroyed real estate and the communists were overly fond of anything square and made out of concrete.

We plan to be here thru Friday when we’ll rent a car and travel to Eger and the surrounding wine making region. Four wheels, air conditioning and wine tasting, TC is very excited.

Dan playing in the fountain, pressure plates under the stones would turn off the water jets as you walked by. TC frequently pretends that I belong to a passing tourist group.

Schlagobers and Smetterlings, whipped cream and butterflies are not cognates.