An early morning rainstorm had made the ride almost pleasant. The heat had been sucking the air out of the city. I boarded a shaky yellow tram car at an especially fancy crossing of the Danube, the “Liberty Bridge,” towards the Kelenföld train station. All trains traveling southwest into Hungary leave from this station.

I was going to the city of Pécs at the suggestion of a laminated booklet seated on the check-in desk at the hostel I’d been staying in. It was a natural stop on my slow march south and west into the Balkans, maybe to the Dalmatian coast of Croatia and further into Montenegro and Greece.

The station seemed to be a repurposing (although I suppose the purpose is much the same) of an older station, reconstructed underground and in the shadow of a large shopping center. The timetable flashed with white letters, alternating between Hungarian and English. Pécs: 14:12. 15 minutes.

Retracing the flow of people who had tickets in-hand, I found the ticket machines in a large central corridor lined with bakeries and cheap clothing stores. I stepped in line behind a group of teenage boys carrying skateboards, dressed in a black-and-grey ensemble of sweatshirts and cargo pants. It reminded me of the kids I’d see back in high school. I tap my destination on the screen and get my ticket, really a receipt with a word written across the top — Menetjegy.

Hungarian is unlike any language I’ve seen, so the unfamiliarity of the word is not surprising. Hungarian belongs to the "Uralic" language group, a complete isolate from the surrounding Slavic and Romantic languages — divergent as far back as the primordial Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language that is believed to be the common ancestor of nearly all of the languages of Europe.

Uralic languages, the most spoken of which is Hungarian, also include Finnish, Estonian, and, in much smaller numbers, tribal and nomadic languages of Northern Scandinavia (Sami) and Northwestern Russia. Perplexingly, within the Uralic languages, the closest proposed relatives of Hungarian are Mansi and Kanty, both spoken by small indigenous groups located in a region to the east of the Ural Mountain range (hence Uralic) that splits European Russia from its Asian counterpart.

Hungarian is an agglutinative language, where the addition of suffixes and occasionally prefixes gives meaning and context to words and sentences. My forints turned a menetjegy into menetjegyem, appended with the first-person possessive suffix -em, “my ticket”.

As I boarded the train and the conductor informed me that I was, in error, seated in first-class — something which was evidently to be explained on a mysterious second ticket that I hadn’t purchased – it became clear that I actually needed menetjegyek (the -ek suffix creating plural nouns). The conducted pulled a machine from his pocket, swiped my card, and printed a long and narrow reciept. I gathered my backpack and ticket slips and slinked to the trailing car.

Hungarian is not the only language to do this. The original word, menetjegy, is a more specific construction of a much more basic word “jegy”, meaning ticket. Menet suggests a trip or path, hence menetjegy was a kind of “trip ticket”.

I leaned back in my second-class seat, contemplating what the Pécs-bound Hungarian chatter around me could be saying. My train (vonat, from the verb von — to pull — and the suffix -at, a noun creating suffix) was traveling through Hungary (Magyarország – from the Hungarian word for the people of Hungary – Magyar – and the suffix -ország – “country or land”). It’s a language of abstraction — but once you know the particular contours of that abstraction (what is the meaning of this verb being made into a noun), the language starts to take shape.

Agglutinative languages are often contrasted with what are called “analytical languages”. English is a notable member. We express meaning by arranging words in a particular order. You are able to understand this sentence because of the particular arrangement of helper verbs “are able”, parts of speech “this sentence”, and a highly constructed word order.

We have the ability to transform nouns into verbs and verbs into adjectives (writers write and to create is to be creative), but those tend to be specific to become specific words themselves. To eat is not to be eative.  In Hungarian, by contrast, words can enter existence by following the rules presented by each part, stringing together meaning through process. It’s a nightmare to learn.

This is what makes Hungarian such a difficult language to learn. It builds from seemingly endless potentials, constructed in such a way that meaning can only become clear once everything that must be included is included. And there are many, many parts that you may need to include. Fluency begins only when you’re aware of what you know and what you don’t know.

There is a subconscious logic that is unrecognizable, imperceivable, un-figure-outable to outsiders. To speak is to learn the patterns of observation, of meaning, of how things are, and to transform those patterns into something original.

It’s what separates us from the nature, why languages was so monumental to the formation of human societies. It doesn’t just reflect our thoughts and feelings about the world — it creates them. It draws borders and set rules where they wouldn’t otherwise be. It frames experience. It provides order to chaos.

We scrawl on clay tablets and then protect them with our lives. We embed divine meaning into printed books, deliver sermons and speeches. We build processes on top of language, abstracting language into computer code and into programming languages and into platforms and back into language. We enforce language through algorithms and laws. We fall in love with the way someone expresses themselves, we say unforgivable things.

To use language is to materialize in the world. To exist. To know, with some certainty, what it is to exist at all.

New World Person