"Nincs jég otthon."
Translation:There is no ice at home.
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"Otthon" means home when you are away from home and "itthon" means home when you are at home. "Otthon van" = "He is at home"; "Itthon vagyok" = "I am at home".
that's a good way to memorize it, as i'm sure that's why they are used (ott - there + hon - home ("archaic"), itt - here + hon - home). Though I think it can be useful to mention that "otthon" is also used when you are speaking about the place where you live. E.g. : this is my home - ez az én otthonom
To me, "back home" sounds like you're talking about a place you consider to be home that you haven't been to in a long time ... like if you're travelling or have moved to another country, your home country is "back home" ... I would never use "back home" to just mean my house where I happen not to be at the time of speaking, but I'll totally accept this as dialectal difference.
Not exactly but you're on the right track! "Hon" is "home" indeed, but in its own it is a mostly outdated form of "homeland" or "fatherland" (though we call that "anyaország" or "anyaföld" with faintly different meaning). "Hon" is the closest equivalent of Latin (and romance) "Patria". We almost never use it for home as a house / flat, and it counts as an archaic or outdated, deprecated form for general use or figure of speech. "Itthon" or "otthon" are more common descendants that may show relative distance from "°hon" but not necessarily.
---=== For hardcore learners: ===---
"Lenn az Alföld tengersík vidékin,
Ott vagyok honn, ott az én világom,
Börtönéből szabadúlt sas lelkem,
Ha a rónák végtelenjét látom"
(Petőfi Sándor)
In a hastily improvised, bold translation:
"Dawn on fields of Great Plains, sea-like flatlands,
I feel like home there, that's the true world of mine,
My soul is eagle that escaped its prison
When I see the endless lands of 'rónas'"
The original is a bit archaic, with some vovel changes: "vidékin" is "vidékén" today; "honn" is "itthon/otthon"; "szabadúlt" is "szabadult" now, with short "u" and "róna" is a kind of puszta, or prairie—while "puszta" is more like a wasteland with very low fertility, róna doesn't refer to the agricultural value and means a very flat land, undisturbed from waters, woods, villages. It doesn't mean uninhabited land, it is just scarcely inhabited.
Don't forget that Spanish is almost the same language as English comparing to Hungarian. ;) :D
No, of course, they are but the same language family with really big and painful differences, but as Indo-European languages, they have very common features. In Hungarian there are so different structures and so many thing to learn that the constricted length of the language tree must include bigger steps.
For your further information, the cat eats rice is "a macska rizst eszik" in Hungarian. Silly cat. ;)
82
But I just had a question where the answer was "otthon vagyok"!!! Does that mean "I am there at home"? It doesn't make much sense in English.
Not really. If you mean this in the context that "Nincs otthon" could be translated to "She is not home", then the "Nincs otthon" in reality is more like "Ő nincs otthon", just the personal pronoun is omitted. So "nincs" really is just "is not", or as other comments have been describing it on this page "nem van".
In general use we never call ice cream as "jég". It is either "fagylalt" (the soft one) or "jégkrém" (the harder one), sometimes "parfé" or "parfait" stylized as the French original that we borrowed. Therefore "There is no ice at home" can mean two things:
- We don't have ice cubes at home
- The waters or the roads are not covered with ice (in the winter of course).
For the latter: in our climate it is not rare that the winter temperature drops below 0°C (32°F) at night. In Budapest downtown and the bigger cities it may be warmer. So when you go to the suburbs you may find ice or icy roads, and you may be surprised, stating that "there is no ice at home".
The standalone sentence would inform us about the missing ice cubes. ;)