Forty words of love in Hungarian

As a child, Charlotte Mendelson thought her grandparents' native Hungarian sounded ridiculous. But now her tiny vocabulary keeps their memory aliveMy grandmother was fearless. Yet if I asked her about the past, she would start crying. What kind of monster would have questioned her? So I resisted and now it is too late.She and her husband, my maternal grandparents, were Hungarians. Or so I thought. They spoke Hungarian, impenetrably, to each other. Even after 50 years in Britain, their accents remained so strong that kindly strangers would direct them to tourist attractions. To my sister and me, their English-born grandchildren, they seemed entirely, comically foreign. Daring, touchy and fond of puns, prone to expansive hand gestures and public emotion, they were the big-eyebrowed and ferocious heirs of Dracula and Attila the Hun. We saw them weekly, took them on holiday, ate their garlicky food and waved our hands around as they did – how could we not have inherited the Magyar temperament? Our father's family, equally foreign, just as marked by tragedy and courage but harder to define, was quietly and unfairly sidelined. We were too busy being proudly Hungarian; it explained us.I was in my 30s before I noticed something peculiar. My grandmother always told people she was Czech. I couldn't ask her about it. A central tenet of Hungarianness, or at least my grandparents' variety of it, was the protection of young relatives from any reference to death or sadness and our family ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: The Guardian Family Hungary Grandparents and grandparenting Language Features Life and style Languages Source Type: news