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- Topic: Hungarian >
- "Szép városokat akarok látni."
19 Comments
I translated this as "I want to see pretty cities" and was marked wrong because it should have been "beautiful cities." I thought that szép could mean either one. Is it unusual for someone to say that a city is "pretty?"
29
Just "pretty city" sounds funny to me. And unusual. "This city is pretty" sounds more normal.
If one is correct, so is the other. But I guess "beautiful city" is more usual in English.
- 29
Oh, it is correct, no question about it. It just sounds funny to me. And I have never heard anyone say it until now.
I also translated it as pretty cities. In English we might be more likely to say beautiful city but it wouldn't seem unusual to hear pretty city.
I went with "pretty" too, despite its awkwardness--it's just faster to type!!!
I went with "nice" (even shorter to type :-p), which is accepted for "szép" in other sentences, and got the dreaded red X...
Why is "I want to see beautiful towns." wrong? And how do I distinct "city" and "town"?
- 1304
Is there another word to differentiate between a town and a city? Usually the difference is based on size, eg status, population and facilities. Village for instance has its word, falu, so what is a town?
This is a very culture-dependent topic that even changes with time. I had to look up what the difference between a town and a city is even supposed to be. If a settlement with 100k people is a "small-city" then we quickly end up with the conclusion that Hungary hardly has any cities apart from Budapest as there are like 5 other places with 100k+ population - so this kind of differentiation feels useless. It's all just "város". Officially, many 1-2k places are "város"es, although that's a bit ridiculous in my opinion. But I feel it would be the same kind of ridiculous to call Pécs or Székesfehérvár a "kisváros", which I think is the closest to an equivalent of "town". A place I would call a "kisváros" has like 20k-60k population, preferably some basic hospital, a hypermarket but probably no university.
- 1304
Thank you for your perspective, MrtonPolgr. I suspect the definition of cities and towns varies from country to country, and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. However, it seems population size and facilities are the key elements that differentiate one from the other.
How to hungarians differentiate between cities and towns? I varos the only word for both?
How to hungarians differentiate between cities and towns?
It's pretty much an artificial distinction in English.
Some cities are very small (St Asaph has about 3500 inhabitants), some towns are big.
Some cities are cities because they got "awarded" the title, more or less at random.
So even in English, there is no objective distinction between the two words.
- 383
For one, English isn't the only language with such a distinction, and the words city and town are used in translation of, say, Japanese shi and cho. Town is from Old English and city used to refer to certain towns since Middle English. London Town, say, is the old part of the city. Interestingly (from http://50.23.33.246/word/v%C3%A1r ) város is made up of vár + -os, vár being cognate with war in English meaning a fortification/castle. So it's a castle town, something with a castle. I wonder half-seriously if city might be városos. This would explain why it sounds ridiculous in their language . . .
Oh, the answer seems to be that you use the English words city and town: "Az angol nyelvben két szó is megfelel a magyar város kifejezésére: city és town." -- https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1ros
Both city and town should be accepted. I mean, if we want to split semantic hair, half of the sentences here don't make sense ("Do you hear those apples?" comes to mind) so why being strict with this one???
