"Az nem alma, ez pedig nem szék."
Translation:That is not an apple, and this is not a chair.
14 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
The original meaning was "that".
Many languages -- including Latin, English, and Hungarian -- started off without a definite article "the", but they had a word for "that": a demonstrative determiner.
Later, this word started to be used as a definite article as well in those languages. (For example, Italian il, la "the" is from Latin ille, illa "that"; the meaning "the" already shows up in late Vulgar Latin.)
Sometimes, the demonstrative determiner split off from the definite article -- for example, in English, we now have "the" (from the original masculine form) and "that" (from the original neuter form) which acquired distinct meanings.
In Hungarian, az has a parallel form a used before consonants in the same phrase -- both when it means "that" and when it means "the", e.g. az előtt ... "in front of that ..." versus a mögött ... "behind that ..." and az autó "the car" versus a kocsi "the car". (I've seen the spelling a’ used in an old dictionary, indicating that it used to be felt as a kind of abbreviation of az.)
One thing Hungarian does that English doesn't is that when you want to put "that" before a noun, you need both the old az "that" and the new az "the" -- for example, az az autó, az a kocsi for "that car" (literally, "that the car"). Similarly with ez az autó, ez a kocsi for "this car". Perhaps because you can often leave off the verb "to be": compare az a víz "that water" with az víz "that is water".