Incidents of In My Language, That Sounds Like... specifically involving the Hungarian language.
- In Hungarian koton (pronounced the same as cotton) exclusively means condom. Elementary schooolers learn this word quite fast, of course. Cotton in Hungarian is either vatta for the wadding or gyapot for the plant.
- In Hungarian, the last name of Ferdinand Foch (French marshal during WWI) means "(liquid) shit".
- Barack means apricot/peach in Hungarian. Now, when a certain American politician was elected president...
- Hungarian word for "tree" is "fa", and, following grammatic rules, plural of that ("trees") would be "fák", which is pronounced almost exactly as you imagine.
- Generally Hungarian humour uses a lot of wordplays like this. A well known what is "How is (worker of a certain profession) called in (certain language)?
- Example: How do you call an innkeeper in Greek? Abrosz Tisztakosz (Avrous Tiztakous). In Greek it's gibberish, in Hungarian it means "the tablecloth is very dirty."
- How do you call the retired British gynaecologist? Sir Ben White. It's a normal British name, but in Hungarian it sounds like szőrben vájt, literally meaning "was digging around in fur."
- "halal" means "lawful" in Arabic and is used for many things. In Hungarian "halál" means "death". An eerie coincidence, because when non-Muslims hear the Arabic word, the meaning they automatically think of is "halal slaughter" — an infamously brutal method of slaughtering animals without stunning them.
- The Hungarian word "lakat" sounds like the English word "locket" but actually means "padlock". This led to a translation error in the Hungarian version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where a locket is referred to as a padlock.
- Hungarian sajt (cheese) sounds like English "shite".
- Adverts for piña coladas look either very rude or hilarious to Hungarians; in their language "pina" (without the accent) has a very different meaning.
- In several languages (Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian, Slovak, Hungarian and Czech), kurva means "whore". It means the same in Polish, where it's spelt kurwa. But in Swedish and Indonesian, kurva means "curve; bend".
- Hungarian to English examples:
- "áll" means "stand", "stop", and "chin".
- "át" means "through; across; over".
- "be" is a suffix meaning "in; into".
- "Hé!" is the Hungarian spelling of "Hey!" or "Hi!".
- "mind" means "every" and "both".
- "most" means "now; at the moment".
- "nő" as a noun means "woman; female", and as a verb means "to grow".
- "ön" means "you".
- Hungarian persze (of course) versus Finnish perse (ass).
