Hungarian Vocal Music, with an Introduction to Hungarian Lyric Diction, Part 1

A BRIEF SKETCH OF opera, operetta, song, and choral literature in the Hungarian language was undertaken in Part 1 of this article (JOS 66, no. 3, January/February 2010). Rather than attempting to describe this vast repertory in any detail, the article aspired merely to raise awareness of the existence of this varied body of music literature, and to serve as a reference tool for further exploration. Part 2 provides an overview of the essential elements of pronunciation of the Hungarian language, as a point of departure toward the goal of acquiring intelligible and sensitive lyric diction skills. HUNGARIAN PHONOLOGY Phonetic Overview The Hungarian language is a largely phonetic language, with very little allophonic variation within phonemes. There are 24 consonant phonemes, 14 vowel phonemes, and one glide phoneme, and a strict one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and spelling, which allows for easy transcription into IPA. For this reason, this article uses phonemic notation (//) when presenting IPA transcriptions. Digraphs, Trigraphs, and Diacritics The Hungarian language employs 8 digraphs, one trigraph, and 9 letters with diacritic marks. These are considered separate letters from their component glyphs, and the digraphs and trigraphs are and should be considered single letter-consonants for the purpose of linguistic analysis. These letters are , , , , , , , , . Syllabification and Stress There are two rules of syllabification in Hungarian: 1) the nucleus of each syllable is composed of one and only one vowel; and 2) consonants favor the onset position. In practical application, this means the following: * All syllabic nuclei are vowels, and there are no other syllabic sounds (such as the syllabic in the English word bitter). * There are effectively no diphthongs in Hungarian, only hiatuses. Any consecutive vowels form nuclei of separate syllables. * An intervocalic consonant forms the onset of the following syllable. * A cluster of two consonants is split (recall that this does not apply to digraphs, which are considered single letters), with the first forming the coda of the previous syllable and the second forming the onset of the following syllable. * A cluster of three or more consonants is split favoring the onset. The first consonant forms the coda of the previous syllable and the rest form the onset of the following syllable. Syllabic stress always falls on the first syllable of a word. Compound words (words of many syllables broken up by a hyphen) have only a single stress at the beginning of the unit. All other stresses are considered equally unstressed with no secondary stress. Thus the following examples are divided and stressed as follows: Consonants The consonantal phonemic inventory is presented in Table 1. Many of the sounds can be found in traditional sung languages (Italian, German, French, English), and, unless otherwise noted, a consonant is to be pronounced as in English. * Plosive consonants are to be articulated without aspiration. * /t/ and /d/ are to be articulated dentally. * Word-final , , and are not devoiced as in German, but, rather, maintain their voiced forms. hold = /hold/, not /holt/ At word junctures however, unvoiced consonants are voiced before initial voiced consonants, and vice versa. Thus, The orthographic to phonetic correspondence of con- sonants is presented in Table 2. All consonantal sounds have a one-to-one correspondence with their letter- consonants. Therefore, there are virtually no exceptions to the rules presented in the table. The Hungarian extended alphabet, resulting from the proliferation of foreign words, clouds this simple correspondence, but is not discussed here. Gemination Orthographically doubled consonants are geminated (lengthened) in Hungarian. …