Like English, But Without the Words - by Marian Kechlibar

The Central European blog (Kechlibar.net)

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Like English, But Without the Words<br>A small introduction to the Babel that is Central Europe.

Marian Kechlibar<br>Aug 23, 2026

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Occasionally, a good comment will lead to a new article, and Dabor’s comment on the previous article, which touched on (partial) mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages, was exactly one such comment. I started typing an answer… and quickly found out that it wouldn’t fit any reasonable comment window.<br>We will leave out German, with which most English speakers are already acquainted, and concentrate on the rest.

For a native English speaker, the very idea of meeting someone speaking a closely related language is somewhat exotic. English, with its peculiar history (hello, Normans!), is a loner in the Germanic language family, quite distant from the rest. Depending on how generous you are with the dialect-vs-language classification, its nearest extant relative is either Scots or West Frisian, a small language spoken in northern Netherlands.<br>This is a funny dialogue between someone who speaks Old English and asks a Frisian farmer for a brown cow that produces a lot of milk for cheese and butter. Given that these are fairly ancient words, the relationship is still unmistakable after 1500 years of mutual separation:

Frisian: “Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk”

English: “Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Frisian”.

More modern topics are obviously harder to parse:

But, as one of the commenters says: “It’s like English, but without the words.” and another adds: “As a native English speaker, I have no doubt that if we were both drunk we’d understand each other perfectly.”<br>So, if you want to experience the feelings of a Pole who just arrived in Croatia, book a trip to the north of the Netherlands and start asking the locals for cheese. Cheese is a good topic to bond over anyway.

Back to Central Europe. We should deal with the odd ones first, and the odd ones are the Hungarians, a totally different people in the midst of an Indo-European crowd. Their language has nothing in common with the rest of the region, even the most basic words like one, two, three, mother, father, brother are simply unrecognizable. Spoken Hungarian sounds a bit like an incantation, and Hungarian artists do sometimes exploit this. Just listen to this piece of music.

Hungarian is not a complete language isolate, but for all practical purposes it might as well be. Its closest extant relatives are Finnish, Estonian, and a bunch of tribal pagan languages slowly dwindling in the forests of northern Russia and western Siberia. But closest does not mean close and, for a random Finn, spoken Hungarian sounds totally alien. You need the scientific tools from the field of comparative linguistics to prove the ancestral connection; it is not obvious to anyone alive today.<br>This contributes to feelings of isolation and peculiarity that the Hungarians have against, well, everyone else, and also explains their intense patriotism. The Hungarians know that they are one of a kind and that if they die out, their entire thousand-year culture goes away with them. Their birth rate isn’t really better than anywhere else, but they will also not toy around with massive immigration from the outside. The fact that it was Orbán’s Hungary which first erected physical barriers against the migration wave of 2015 and started spraying the migrants with tear gas cannot be simply explained by the fact that Orbán was right-wing. On this topic, a supermajority of his nation was behind him.<br>From the linguistic point of view, we should note that there is a specific group of words in Hungarian that is of clearly Slavic origin and modern Slavs can perceive those Slavic words just fine. It has everything to do with early Hungarian history.<br>Early medieval Hungarians (~ 9th to 10th century) came from the steppe as nomadic raiders. They were very good with their spears and bows, but their only contact with agriculture happened when they were torching the hut of some hapless peasant named Jaromír over his head.<br>Of course this could not last forever, and when the rest of Central Europe persuaded them1 to give up their glorious marauding ways, the Hungarians started building their kingdom of St. Stephen in the fertile Pannonian plain. And quickly found out that some agricultural terminology would be handy, if only to tell the now-subjugated Jaromírs what to do. So, instead of developing their own words, they simply adopted the Slavic ones.<br>And so, a weaver is takács (CZ: tkadlec), a smith is kovács (CZ: kovář), a courtyard or a manor is udvar (CZ: dvůr), cherries are cseresznye (CZ: třešně, SK: čerešně) and a liquor made of fruit is pálinka (CZ: pálenka).<br>The latter is very important, as this is the word which finally made the Hungarians into full card-carrying members of the Western...