Hungarian transliteration

[IreneStr]

I am currently working on a transliteration module for as many languages as possible. I'd like to include Hungarian as well, but I am not sure about the transliterations.

The transliterations will be used in URLs and in case people only have a non-Hungarian keyboard available. Therefore, the non-standard latin characters that are used in the Hungarian alphabet should be transliterated to standard latin characters. So imagine you are typing on a old-fashioned British typewriter, without umlauts, accents etc.

Like I wrote, I am unsure about some transliterations, and I hope someone could assist me.

Google came up with conflicting transliterations:
For example, according to this site ö and ü should be transliterated to o and u.
However, according to Wikipedia ö and ü should be transliterated to oe and ue.


This is the list of characters I'd like to transliterate:
á
é
í
ó
ö
ő
ú
ü
ű

What is your perspective on the transliteration of these characters? Do you have additions? Have I overlooked certain characters?

Thank you!

 

[tomtombp]

Hello Irene, I'm not a grammar guy and this is the first time I've heard about transliteration. I just can tell you you've got all the vowels above that are specific to Hungarian. However we also have consonants that don't exist in other languages. They are called double (or triple) consonants.
These are:
cs
dz
dzs
gy
ly
ny
sz
ty
zs

Let me just pick one (the easiest) and compare its pronunciation with its English equivalent:
Hungarian sz is pronounced the same as the English s
(The Hungarian s is is pronounced as the English sh.)

For the rest let's wait for Zsana or the other grammarists.

Or you can simple google "double consonants in Hungarian".

You will get hits like this:

Alphabet and Pronunciation

There are also other differences. For example our v and w are pronounced the same.

 

[IreneStr]

Thank you for the information tomtombp!

Fortunately, how consonants are pronounced does not matter for transliterations. As long as the standard latin characters are used, like 'sz', they won't cause problems in URLs.

Imagine you've written an blog about a 'körte', a pear. Would you want your URL to be www.myblog.hu/korte or www.myblog.hu/koerte (or something else without ö)?

And what about the following words?

század (company) --> szazad?
gép (machine) --> gep?
emelő (lever) --> emelo? emeloe?
súly (weigth) --> suly?
laboratórium (laboratory) --> laboratorium?
hűho (hype) --> huho?
hír (word) --> hir?
füzet (pamphlet) --> fuzet? fuezet?

 

[tomtombp]

Oh, ok, I understand now.
Just simply drop the dots and apostrophes. That's what I do when I'm lazy to find special characters or that's what all Hungarians do when typing on a non-Hungarian keyboard. Everybody will understand it. Your other version would just confuse people. They would look more like typos to most people.

 

[IreneStr]

Thank you for your help! I really appreciate it

 

[uress]

Hi! There are 2 ways:
1. just forget all the points and kommas.
2. telegraph-style: á=aa, é=ee, Í=ii, ó=oo, ö=oe, ő=ooe, ü=ue, ű=uue.

 

[IreneStr]

Thank you uress! Which option do you think is more frequent on the Internet?

 

[uress]

Welcome
The 1st one.