Get pronunciation advice from a native speaker, Hungarian edition
‘the Hunyak’ monologue from Cell Block Tango, Chicago
So, for tip lucky number 13 on Friday the 13th, I want to make a proposition:
It’s worth getting *pronunciation advice from a native speaker.
Here’s where Koko Vocals vocal coaching lessons come in…
You may not have known this, but my first language is Hungarian…
According to T.V. Tropes.com, in the 2002 film version of Kander and Ebb’s musical Chicago (1975), “Katalin Helinski (the Hunyak) is a Hungarian character with a Polish surname played by a Russian actress. She also speaks a line of Russian briefly in the film after saying the rest in Hungarian (with very bad pronunciation).”
This is an accurate statement. It took me a long, long time to decipher (as a native Hungarian speaker) what the character was saying in the famous ‘Cell Block Tango’, a montage of six female inmate characters’ stories about how they got into jail. ‘The Hunyak’, in her monologue, pleads innocence, the only English sentence being “Not guilty.”
So, if the monologue is indecipherable, how should it be pronounced? I’ll get to that in a moment.
First, there are a few things to know about the Hungarian language:
It’s written phonetically, in Latin alphabet (not Cyrillic, like Ukrainian or Greek, like Greek).
There are several ‘letters’ represented by two letters, which don’t appear in Indo-European languages.
These double letters sound like single sounds, some of which are familiar to speakers of other languages.
It’s not Indo-European!
If you’re interested in the nerdy elements of the Hungarian language, including its history, why it’s the only non-Indo-European language smack-dab in the middle of Europe and some of its properties, like agglutination, check out NativLang’s video Hungarian Explained.
So, what are these letter combinations that create sounds?
The Hungarian Consonants
We are talking about consonants here. The strangest, most unusual ones (might as well jump right in, right?) are these:
gy, ty, and ny
The easiest way in with these is to start with the ‘ny’. It’s the nya-nya-nya in the playground teasing chant (also useful for twang, see Twang, what is it?), or ‘nyet’, as in ‘no’ in Russian. It’s like the ‘ñ’ Spanish sound in ‘El niño’ or ‘canyon’ (a Spanish word adopted into English).
Now, keep the same placement of the tongue and pretend you have a cold to say ‘gy’. It’s closer to ‘dy’ sound, but all in one go, mushed together. (You have a similar sound in ‘dj’ during the monologue on the word ‘mondja’ = ‘he says’. The ‘d’ and ‘j’ together are, sort of accidentally, pronounced in the same way.)
Then, there’s ‘ly’.
This is essentially the same as ‘y’.
Here is a video of me modelling these: nyanya, gyík / nagy, tyúk, lyuk
Modelling unusual Hungarian consonants. via the Koko Vocals Tiktok
Next, we have two familiar sounds, just written differently:
S and Sz
If you speak or read Polish, you might think you’ve got this down, but you would be wrong. The pronunciation is the opposite in Polish! So, the ‘s’ is ‘sh’(like ‘sugar’) and the 'sz’ is ‘s’ like ‘sznake’ (just kidding, like ‘snake’!).
Zs = treasure; Je m’appelle… or Zsa Zsa Gabor, even!
Cs = Charlie; Tschaikovsky
C = tsunami
The Hungarian Vowels
There are several unusual vowels, but you will recognise them if you speak German or French:
Ö (written the same in German) is very similar to the longer version ‘ő’ (Eu, E in French)
Ü (same in German) again is lengthened to ‘ű’, e.g. as in the Hungarian word for ‘loyal’ = ‘hű’ (‘u’, ‘ue’ in French)
Most of the unusual vowels are avoided in the monologue, the only one being ‘a rendőrségen’ (‘at the police station’). There is nary an ‘ü’ or the lengthened version ‘ű’.
There are plenty of dark ‘E’-s, which is very much a part of Hungarian, as per the above NativLang vid. This brightens out and lengthens when you put an accent on it: ‘É’, like ‘cave’ in a Scottish accent.
You have ‘A’ (closer to ‘oh’ - this is a similar vowel in Farsi and Finnish) and 'Á’ (which is closer to ‘cat’, but held longer). ‘I’ (ee!) and ‘U’ (ooh!) are like the Italianate vowels, and are simply lengthened with an added accent ‘Í’ (ee-ee) and ‘Ú’ (oo-ooh).
Here is the text of the monologue, as translated via Joshua Ferri of the Daily Soup magazine (2015). (‘Lakóm’ should be translated as ‘my lodger’ or ‘my renter’.)
And… here is a video of me, Anikó at Koko Vocals, performing the Hungarian Cell Block Tango monologue from Kander and Ebb’s Chicago (1975) as ‘the Hunyak’ Katalin Helinszki:
‘The Hunyak’s’ Hungarian monologue from Cell Block Tango in Chicago the musical, from native speaker Anikó Tóth of Koko Vocals. via the Koko Vocals TikTok
Were you able to follow it?
Good luck!
If you’re still struggling, get in touch to book your vocal coaching lessons!
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