Hungarian (or MAGYAR) Language

Member of the Ugrian or Finno-Hungarian family of languages, and agglutinative in its structure. Latin was long the speech of educated Hungarians, and the native literature is of comparatively recent growth. Hungarian Music. The fact that the musical practitioners of Hungary are chiefly Gypsies has given rise to the erroneous belief that Hungarian music is Gypsy music. Liszt helped to spread the error by means of his book Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie , in which he tells of the origin of his popular Rhapsodies Hongroises . The fact is that the melodies played by the Hungarian Gypsies are genuine Magyar folk-tunes, belonging to songs some of which are of great antiquity. The most marked peculiarities of Hungarian music are the scale, containing superfluous seconds (thus, a, b, c, d-sharp, e, f, gsharp, a), and a rhythm like that called the Scotch map or catch, in which the emphasis is shifted from the strong to the weak part by making the first note take only a fraction of the time of the second. This rhythm is a direct product of the Magyar language. In his Hungarian Rhapsodies Liszt has copied the character of the national dance called Czardas, which consists of two movements, La u and Fri , the former slow, the latter fast. These alternate at the will of the dancer, who gives a sign to the band when he wishes to change from one to the other.