Hungarian homographs

Question

I've been living in Hungary for a year now and I've been slowly learning the language, so naturally a question arouse: are there any homographs in Hungarian? When I'm talking about homograph I mean a word that has the following characteristics (as per many dictionaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph):

1. shares the same written form as another word;

2. has a different meaning;

3. (and) sounds different.

   I've been looking a lot on the web and I've been asking my Hungarian friends and coworkers and it seems that even the word homograph doesn't really have a meaning for them (at least for the people I've asked), let alone have some homographs in Hungarian.

Answer 1

The spelling of Hungarian is phonetic, so you won't really find any words spelt identically but pronounced differently.

There is one exception. There are two different e sounds in the language, one more open and one more closed. They are distinguished by a substantial fraction of speakers, but not in the "standard" language. Both are spelt as e. When there is a specific need to distinguish them in writing (e.g. in linguistics texts), the closed one is spelt as ë.

There are many minimal pairs, e.g. mëntëk can mean you (plural) go or I save while mëntek means they went.

Answer 2

Hungarian exhibits a much closer correspondence between spelling and pronunciation than English, but there are still a few cases that give rise to ambiguity. Usually this ambiguity is only potential, because one valid pronunciation corresponds to an actual Hungarian word, while the other valid pronunciation results in nonsense. Sometimes, however, both valid pronunciations correspond to actual words with very different meanings.

Recall that the Hungarian alphabet consists of 44 letters, including one trigraph ⟨dzs⟩ and the seven digraphs ⟨cs⟩, ⟨dz⟩, ⟨ly⟩, ⟨ny⟩, ⟨sz⟩, ⟨ty⟩, and ⟨zs⟩. All of the consonants can also occur in geminate forms by doubling their first (or only) letter. For the digraphs and trigraph, these are ⟨ccs⟩, ⟨ddz⟩, ⟨lly⟩, ⟨nny⟩, ⟨ssz⟩, ⟨tty⟩, ⟨zzs⟩, and ⟨ddzs⟩. What all this means is that certain sequences of two to four glyphs could be interpreted as a sequence of one, two, three, or four letters, depending on the context. So if you see ⟨cs⟩ within a word, it might be the digraph letter ⟨cs⟩ (pronounced /t͡ʃ/) or it might be the unigraph letter ⟨c⟩ followed by the unigraph letter ⟨s⟩ (pronounced /t͡sʃ/).

The orthographic sequence ⟨lécsín⟩ is an example of a homograph with two different, equally valid pronunciations and meanings: it can be analyzed either as the compound lé ('liquid') + csín ('elegance'), in which case it is pronounced /ˈleˌt͡ʃiːn/, or as the compound léc ('batten') + sín ('rail'), in which case it is pronounced /ˈlet͡sˌʃiːn/. Admittedly this example is somewhat contrived; while lécsín in the sense of a batten rail is attested (for example, in this book on poultry farming), I haven't been able to find any real-world uses of the "liquid elegance" sense. Still, I suspect that that sense would be understood by native speakers if the word were used in the right context (say, in a whiskey advertisement).

Answer 3

To clarify the question: You mean something like "bank" - of a river, a place to store money or "to bank" as a verb. The reason why it is hard to think of a word which fits the description might be because the language is inherently built so that words quickly morph based on context. Which also implies that there is a lot of meaning packed into non-noun words unlike German and English. Germans can combine different nouns like Esstischreparaturausbildungslizenzbehörde (dinner table repair training licence authority) though.

Eszik - [He/She/It] eats.
Ehetetlen - Inedible.
Ehetetlenség - Inedibility (does not exist in English). "The inedibility of wood is rather displeasing."
Ehetetlensége - [His/Her/Its] inedibility.
Ehetetlenségének - For his/her/its inedibility (as of referencing it).

Not that these words make too much sense - however they are grammatically correct and understandable, just as the German example. Another point is that the sound of words is strictly bound to how they are written. The letters reflect exactly how to pronounce them, thus the requirement for 3. should be basically impossible to ever be fulfilled in Hungarian. Some examples:

Bor - Wine (alcoholic beverage).
Bőr - Skin/Leather.
Sor - Line.
Sör - Beer.

Note: I am actually not an alcoholic. The letters are always adjusted to match the different sound of the word with a different meaning, so it's different than English, where you have to know or figure out the pronunciation of words (the can have at least 2 ways to be pronounced based on the word following up on it). And I myself recognized that I would have difficulties to recognize what is meant if somebody mistakes letters like o, ó, ő, ö, even though I speak 3 languages (if you don't count programming languages). So I blatantly assume it may be a rather common issue for people understanding foreigners trying to speak Hungarian who make pronunciation errors. But when reading, it's often rather clear what is meant.

All of this being said, exceptions apply as the comments below pointed out: házszám for example makes it ambiguous how to pronounce it, as it's a compound of two words: ház and szám. Another example is szám - which means both "number" and "my mouth", however the pronunciation is identical. And then there is this not too excessive list of rare exceptions on Wikipedia for homophones.