Hungarian Phonology - Consonants

Consonants

This is the Hungarian consonantal system using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

• ^* It is debated whether the palatal consonant pair consists of stops or affricates. They are considered affricates by Tamás Szende, head of the department of General Linguistics at PPKE, Doctor of Linguistics, and stops by Mária Gósy, research professor, head of the Department of Phonetics at ELTE, doctor of the HAS. The reason for the different analyses is that the relative duration of the friction of /c/ (as compared to the duration of its closure) is longer than those of the stops, but shorter than those of the affricates. /c/ has the stop-like nature of having a full duration no longer than those of other (voiceless) stops such as /p, t, k/ but, considering the average closure time in relation to the friction time of the consonants, its duration structure is somewhat closer to those of the affricates.

Almost every consonant may be geminated, written by doubling a single letter grapheme: ⟨bb⟩, ⟨pp⟩, ⟨ss⟩ etc., or by doubling the first letter of a grapheme cluster: ⟨ssz⟩, ⟨nny⟩, etc.

The phonemes /dz/ and /dʒ/ can appear on the surface as geminates: bridzs ('bridge (the card game)'). (For the list of examples and exceptions, see Hungarian dz and dzs.)

Hungarian does not use any haceks or any other consonant diacritics like the surrounding Slavic languages. Instead, the letters c, s, z are used alone (t͡s, ʃ, z) or combined in the digraphs cs, sz, zs (t͡ʃ, s, ʒ), while y is used only in the digraphs ty, gy, ly, ny as a palatalization marker to write the sounds c͡ç, ɟ͡ʝ, j (formerly ʎ), ɲ.

The most notable allophones are:

• /j/ becomes if between a voiceless obstruent and a word boundary (e.g. lopj 'steal').
• /j/ becomes e.g. between voiced obstruents, such as dobj be 'throw (one/some) in'
• /h/ may become between two vowels (e.g. tehát 'so'), after front vowels (e.g. ihlet 'inspiration'), and word-finally after back vowels (e.g. doh 'musty/mouldy/stale smell') if it isn't deleted (which it often is; e.g. méh 'bee').

  According to Gósy, it becomes (rather than ) in words such as pech, ihlet, technika ('bad luck, inspiration, technology/technique'), while it becomes postvelar fricative in words such as doh, sah, jacht, Allah, eunuch, potroh.

• /h/ becomes when geminated, in certain words: dohhal ('with blight'), peches ('unlucky').