Characteristics of the Hungarian language in AX Semantics

fundamentals

Hungarian is an agglutinative language with multiple suffixes for one word.

Hungarian doesn't need gender. The AX platform is applying vowel harmonies automatically. Opinions differ on how many cases exists in Hungarian and what is or is rather an adverbial suffix. In our implementation we consider 18 cases.

grammatical name	values	examples

lexicon

nouns

note

All lexicon entries for countries are already in the platform for Hungarian - so all examples below work by using the global lexicon. (actually not at the moment)

examples

As a first example lets use Ausztrália. In Hungarian Ausztrália is quite regular -- we don't need lexical information for it.

In the sentence

Ausztráliából Párizsba utaztak.
(They traveled from Australia to Paris.)

the container configuration needs the cases annotated: elative for Ausztrália and illative for Párizs to apply them correctly.

For some countries the case is not elative but sublative (the suffix changes from ból to ról). For example

Máltáról Párizsba utaztak.
(They traveled from Malta to Paris.)

Another case switch happens from illative to delative when for example Máltá is in the second position in the sentence:

Párizsból Máltára utaztak.
(They traveled from Paris to Malta.)

Here the suffix ba changes to ra. Both case switches are saved in the lexicon for the countries that need this switches.

Some countries needs a definite article in Hungarian. For example

Az Egyesült Arab Emírségekben élnek.
(They live in the United Arab Emirates.)

For countries the lexicon adds the definite article to the container if needed.

WARNING

The case switches are not available in the lexicon mask at the moment. If you need them, please talk to us!

Some best practices for Hungarian nouns with switches

• a lot of countries don't need a lexicon entry. So the default for determiners has to be "none" and only added for the (less common) ones that need a definite article.