# Népszínház



## alili81

Hello everybody,

I'm trying to figure out how to pronounce "*Népszínház*", the name of a former Budapest theatre that was destroyed in the 1960s. I don't speak Hungarian at all, so... could someone help me?
Thanks a lot in advance!


----------



## Orreaga

Hi alili81,

The "sz" is pronounced as unvoiced "s" in English or French, and the "z" is voiced. The "h" is pronounced as in English. All the vowels (since they are accented) are long, the "é" and "í" are closed, and the "á" is very open, so the last syllable sounds like English "has". Did I confuse you? So a reasonable English construction would be "nape-seen-has" (final "s" voiced) with the first syllable stressed.


----------



## alili81

> Did I confuse you?


 
Not at all! Thank you very much for your help, Orreaga!


----------



## Zsanna

Congratulations, Orreaga! It wasn't an easy job.

I would just warn about the last bit: the vowel in "ház" is not pronounced as "has" in English. It rhymes more with "gaz" in French (change the first "g" to the English "h" and there you are!) or "does" in English - although both a bit shorter than necessary.
(The BE pronunciation of "fast" would give the right length.)


----------



## empee

The above explanations are very useful. One tiny refinement though: the vowel in the first syllable ('é') is not a diphthong as the transcription 'nape-seen-...' suggests. It's closer to the Scottish English sound (you can find a sample of this vowel here: clydesdale.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/cnl3/audio/sse/ak/e.wav).


----------



## Orreaga

Üdvözlöm a fórumon, empee!

Thanks to you and Zsanna for refining my description of how to pronounce this word... I should have waited for a native to reply initially, my enthusiasm got in the way of precision.  

Anyway, perhaps a little explanation of the derivation of *népszínház* would be of interest to this thread:

*nép*  = people, "folk"
*színház*  =  theater
*szín*  =  color
*ház*  = house


----------



## empee

Dear Orreaga, I thank you for your welcoming words and let me contribute to your explanation of how to make sense of _népszínház_.

I think it is true that the compound is made up of _nép_+s_zínház_ ('folk theatre'? or perhaps 'national theatre'?). However, I do not believe that _szín_- in the word _színház_ has anything to do with the homonym _szín_, meaning 'colour', although I must confess I have never seriously thought about, or studied, its etimology.

There are a bunch of other related words, such as _színész_ 'actor', _színdarab_, _színjáték_ 'play', _színigazgató_ 'the director of a theatre', _színjátszás_ 'acting' or 'the acting profession', etc. All these words have _szín_ 'stage' or 'stage with the setting' as their compound element. This word might be related to the same word denoting a type of farm building (the English equivalent is possibly _barn_ but I am not sure and I welcome any correction on this point).

Some additional info: the Hungarian word _színpad _also corresponds to the English word _stage_. While this word only refers to the physical place where the actors perform, _szín_, on the other hand, also has the meaning 'scene' (a part of an act in a theatrical play). Interestingly, _szín_ is pronounced (almost) exactly like _scene_.


----------



## Orreaga

Kedves empee!

Now that you mention that "szín" could possibly derive from a Latin word for stage ("scena") I seem to recall a Hungarian friend saying something like this, yet nevertheless I continued to think of a "színház" as a "house of color" (OK, it would be "szín háza", I'm just picturing the lights and costumes), and a "színész" as a colorful sort of person, and the szabadtéri színpad on Margit-sziget, another colorful place, etc.  

If you happen to find a Hungarian etymological dictionary please let me know what it says!


----------



## Zsanna

I have only a _Nyelvművelő Kézikönyv_ (I can't imagine that many people have a Hungarian etymological dictionary at hand...) but nothing is mentioned about the etymology of _színház_ in it. 
There is an indirect indication, however, that _szín_ in our word is not the same as the one meaning colour (nor the one meaning _barn,_ the one empee mentioned earlier) because these three are called: " 3 azonos alakú szavunk". 
The only connection between the first two is the fact that both can be (and often are) pronounced with a short "i".
I am fairly sure that you are right thinking that the origin is latin for the one meaning theatre. (After all, we had a "teátrum" as well... ))


----------



## Orreaga

Köszi szépen, Zsanna!  I think we're getting closer.  Come to think of it, my friend in Budapest I'm sure has an etymological dictionary, I'll ask him to look it up.


----------



## Orreaga

Great luck!  My friend pulled through, he has a personal copy of _Etimológiai szótár: magyar szavak és toldalélok eredete_ (ed. Zaicz Gábor, 2006). 

He writes: "The *szín* element of *színház *means 'stage' (as a place) or 'scene' (as a part of a play) but it was also used in the meaning 'theater', so the *ház *was originally only an explanatory (redundant) element attached. This *szín *(stage or scene) is not related to *szín *as 'color', but it was created from *játékszín *(theater, stage, literally, originally play-shed) and it took over its meaning, and at the same time it separated from an earlier word *szín*, meaning 'shed', as in a tent of foliage or a simple shed in which early actors performed.   

"*Színház *dates to 1830 (a product of language reform), *szín *as 'shed' to 1067/1465, *szín *as 'stage/scene' to 1786 (and *szín *as 'color' to the 12th century). No Latin connection is mentioned. By the way, *kocsiszín *is used today for the place where transport vehicles are kept at night."

So empee, your intuition appears correct.


----------



## Zsanna

Orreaga, thanks for sharing the results of your investigation! 

I, for myself, am suspicious of most "new fangled" dictionaries (lots of "fly-by-night-cowboys" in the publishing area nowadays in Hungary) especially when they contradict the (good old, trustworthy) _Nyelvművelő Kézikönyv_ according to which the word *szín* meaning "barn/shed" is simply a homonym together with colour and stage/scene so they do NOT share any meaning. 

It may have been created from *játékszín* but it still does not explain a lot of things. Just a few aspects to consider:

1) *játékszín* being a compound word (*játék+ szín= *game/play + ?), its components must have come from somewhere. 
From shed? Maybe but why not rather from "stage/scene"? (Supposing still that my book is right and there are 3 homonyms.) 

I would think that early theatrical performances needed more a stage (so that people could see what was going on even from rear rows) than a shed to play in. 
[There are long periods without rain and cold in Hungary, a shelter would not be as necessary as in a country with a different (e.g. oceanic) climate (like England).]

If you think of the verb *fellépni* (a synonym of _to play_ - as an actor), it indicates above all that one had to "go/step up", which also points towards stage.
There is no synonym of _to play_ with a first meaning of _to enter/to go in_ (i.e. to a shed or barn...) which would be logical if *szín* was really firstly used in the sense of _shed_.

Also, the actors were wondering from one place to the other - most of them even in the time of Petőfi, towards the middle of the 19th C - so they could not carry a "shed/barn" with them - although their cart could always serve as a stage!

Another aspect: I do not feel *ház* redundant added after *szín*. 
Just remember, none of us could tell you what the word *szín* really means with exactitude! (Which could indicate that its original meaning is either too old to remember or that it is a borrowed word with an origin not widely used/known in Hungarian.) 
I think it is exactly because of the lack of a clear meaning that this word only appears in compound (or, less often, képzett) form in our language.

But to come back to *színház* and my argument: wouldn't you find it more logical that theatre should be a "stage + house" (= a house with a stage in it) rather than a "shed + house" (= a house with a shed in it)? (In any case, you have sheds/barns next to/near a house, rather than "in"...!) 
Well, my instinct tells me it's more likely to be the first.

All that even if we neglect a strong similarity in the pronunciation of scene and szín.

2) However, I really don't like the idea of neglecting that bit, either. 

Although I do not know exactly when theatre performances really started in Hungary, 
I know that still in the end of the 18th C we had a special movement for fabricating new words (nyelvújítás) to meet the need for expressing new ideas in Hungarian which was becoming the official language of the country. (As opposed to Latin, which was our official language until then.) 
So Latin always had an enormous impact on Hungarian without any doubt. How many words we have that we feel "totally" Hungarian and they are really of Latin origin! (E.g. persze, szervusz, jussa (vkinek) stb.) 
That, even it itself would be enough to suspect that it is a borrowed word and that the most likely candidate for that was Latin....
But I'm getting much too long with this, so I'll stop for now.


----------



## Orreaga

Zsanna, what you have to say is very interesting, and I'm glad to read it and comment further.  

I'm only an amateur linguist and no expert, so I couldn't comment on how reputable my friend's dictionary is.  It's also difficult to know what he translated verbatim for me from the dictionary entry and what he editorialized himself (he was a serious student of linguistics in Hungary).

Here's my idea: since apparently the word *szín* as "shed" seems to predate the word as applied to the stage, I wonder if there was a semantic change that allowed the meaning of the word to eventually include "stage."  I think it's plausible that there was a type of shed used in early Hungarian theater that was also raised, like a stage. Would that settle the conflict you have between the two meanings?  Here's an illustration of a medieval traveling theatrical group (granted, not Hungarian), which is performing in something that looks like both a portable shed and a stage, would you agree?  These kinds of traveling theaters are still common today in many places.  Perhaps *szín* as "shed" gradually evolved to stand for "stage" as well  (I think "barn" is something different, to me a shed is something open on one or more sides, while a barn has four walls).

I'm familiar with the nyelvújítás and the official historical status of Latin in Hungary.  As you know many foreign words came into the language as calques, literal translations into Hungarian of compound words.  Could this be another example? I'm thinking of the English term "playhouse" which is often used for names of theaters.


----------



## Zsanna

You are right. We'd better concentrate on the facts.

I did not know that in English homonyms could be interpreted differently. 

The same _Nyelvművelő Kézikönyv_ defines azonos _alakú szavak_ this way: "hangalakjukban azonos, jelentésükben merőben eltérő szavak" - as I interpreted them. (I do not know of any other possible defintion for them in Hungarian.)

(Etymology or common origins are not included in the definition.)


----------



## zoltan82

hi everyone!
Here are some letters in the hungarian language how to pronounce in english.
sz = (s)un
cs = (ch)eck or ciao .)


----------

