Well, that’s not exactly what the MTI piece said (subscription only), but it might as well have. According to it, a new Museum of the Hungarian Language was opened yesterday by President László Sólyom in Széphalom on the former estate of Ferenc Kazinczy (pictured), the man widely considered to have saved the Hungarian language around the beginning of the 19th century, when he led linguistic reformers who essentially yanked Hungarian forward two hundred years, thus saving the nation from having to speak German, or God forbid, French. In case you’re wondering why the name Kazinczy sounds so familiar although you never knew about this guy, it’s because there’s a street named after him in District VII, and it’s the same street you stumble out onto after enjoying quite a few korsós at Szimpla Kert. The irony of writing about language while pluralizing a Hungarian word in English is not lost on me. At the ceremony for the museum opening, Sólyom stated that he hoped the museum would help preserve Hungarian culture and spur linguistic advances. We hope so too, because at the rate things are going, Hungarian will cease to be a language and merely become a mispronounced and badly conjugated dialect of English.
President Opens Museum in Memory of the Hungarian Language
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It would not be terrible at all to spell it ‘korso’k’. Indeed it would spare confusion among English-speaking readers about pluralization in Hungarian. The meaning of korso’s and korso’k in the context of the sentence is the same.
Well the ‘correct’ way would have been to say “…a few korsó,” as nouns in Hungarian do not take a plural ending after numbers or adjectives of quantity: ‘három / néhány korsó’ = three / a few (large) beers. I hope this adds to the debate about pluralisation in Hungarian.