Simplified Grammar of the Hungarian Language Hardcover – Import, 20 Aug 2015

This is the shortest grammar book I have ever seen in all the languages I can read. Hungarian is more complicated than most European tongues so it should have been described in a length comparable to Latin or Sanskrit. The book is a reprint of a 1888 version. Letters are blurring and diacritics are sometimes undistinguishable. I found the latter outrageous because diacritics on vowels are crucial in properly denoting the meaning of a certain word. Throughout the book you have to carefully mark lost acute or umlaut accents, and this will nearly spoil your mood for reading a new book. As to the structure, Ignatius employed an Indo-European framework, dividing the grammar into descriptions of various speeches like noun, adjective, pronoun, numeral, verb, etc. This approach fits ill with an Ugric language. For example the auther says the Hungarian nouns have five endings, namely nominative, attributive/possessive, genitive, dative and accusative, and gives their endings at the beginning of the introduction. Reader with previous knowledge in Indo-European inflective languages may regard them as the same as in Latin or Greek. In fact Hungarian noun endings are suffixes freely joined to the coda of a substantive structure as the expression demands. A noun can be followed by more than one functional endings in Hungarian, while it is impossible in Latin. Finno-Ugric languages are agglomerative rather than inflective, thus substantives tend to be unstable in form. This grammar only gives a pity 4 pages on "etymology" in which only a fraction deals with agglomeration. The auther's excuse is that this phenomenon is too vast to be contained in this mini grammar. As a result a non-Hungarian reader only watches a word assembling game with nothing to learn about. Given all grammatical idiosyncrasies of Uralic language, I was surprised that Ignatius dedicates only the last two pages to syntax, which amounts to nothing more than explanations of several sentences. Vowel harmony, an Uralic feature that lacks Indo-European correspondence, even fails to find a place in this grammar. To sum up, the auther made an unsuccessful attempt to outline Hungarian grammar in Indo-European framework; his work is further constrained by presupposed length and printing deficiency.