The direct object of a verb is what is being acted upon. For example, when you say: The bird is eating a worm, then the word worm is the direct object of the verb eat, because it is the worm that is being eaten, or somehow acted upon in general.

It may, however, happen to be the other way round, if, say, the bird is dead: The worm is eating the bird. Here, the direct object is the bird, because now it is the bird that is being acted upon (eaten).

What I am going to discuss here is how direct objects are marked.

You may already know that the suffix -t is used to mark the direct object in Hungarian. (A suffix is an ending placed after the stem of a word.)

Now this suffix -t might seem like a minor point. What difference does one little letter make anyway…? Well, as it turns out, there are many such „little letters” that have grammatical meanings in Hungarian. These suffixes are called morphemes.

Morphemes are building blocks of words, many times with grammatical functions.

The suffix -t is a morpheme that has the function of marking the direct object in Hungarian. In other words, direct objects in Hungarian are marked morphologically.

English also has a way to mark direct objects, but it is not morphological, it is syntactical. That is, syntax or more specifically word order is used to mark the direct object in English.

Incidentally, the study of the internal structure of words (morphology) and the order in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences (syntax) is a field in linguistics called morpho-syntax.

But enough of the fancy terminology. Here are some hopefully useful examples for you.

A children’s rhyme in Hungarian begins like this:

Volt egyszer egy kisbaba
Földre tette Anyuka

Which translates as:

Once upon a time there was a little baby
Mother put him onto the ground

Let’s use this for our examples:

The mother put the baby on the ground. – Az anya a földre tette a babát.

You might ask: How do you know that it was the baby that was put onto the ground and not the mother? In other words, how do you know that the (direct) object is the baby and not the mother?

In English it is not so obvious for us Hungarians. What we need to know is that English has a strict word order: Subject + Verb + Object, or SVO for short. Aha, so then mother must be the subject, put must be the verb, and baby must be the object. Fair enough. (The subject of a verb is the source of action, the actor.)

In Hungarian it is pretty clear for us: baba is marked with the suffix -t, thus becoming babát, so it must be the object.

Now, if you were to turn it around and swap the subject and the object, here is what you would do:

In English, you would need to move the words around. In Hungarian, you would just move the suffix -t:

The baby put the mother on the ground. – Az anyát földre tette a baba.

As you can see, both English and Hungarian have this idea of the direct object. The only difference lies in the way it is expressed or marked. English uses word order (syntax), Hungarian uses a suffix (morphology) as a marker for the direct object.

Next, I am going look at some of the phonological aspects.

Phonology is the study of speech sounds, or phonemes, and especially the rules these phonemes obey in words. Phonemes are basically vowels and consonants.

Notice how the last vowel of the stem is usually lengthened. (A stem aka root is the basic form of a word to which suffixes are attached.) For stems ending in /a/ or /e/ , these sounds will usually become /á/ and /é/ when the suffix -t is added:

• anya – anyát
• baba – babát
• utca – utcát (Megtaláltam az utcát. – I found the street.)
• mese – mesét (Mondj egy mesét! – Tell me a story.)
• este – estét (Jó estét kívánok! – (I wish you a) good evening.)

For vowels other than /a/ and /e/, the -t suffix is simply attached, no lengthening takes place:

• csoki – csokit (Kérsz csokit? – Do you want (some) chocolate?)
• falu – falut (Ismerem azt a falut. – I know that village.)

If the end vowel is already long, there is nothing to lenghten of course:

• autó – autót (Hol hagytam az autót? – Where did I leave the car?)
• fiú – fiút (Válassz ki egy fiút! – Choose a boy!)
• cipő – cipőt (Megyek venni cipőt. – I am going to buy (a pair of) shoe(s).) (Remember we usually just say one half of any pair.)
• fésű – fésűt (Hová tetted a fésűt? – Where did you put the comb?)

If a stem ends in a consonant, an extra vowel called the binding vowel is usually inserted in between the stem and the suffix -t:

• ország – országot (Szeretem ezt az országot. – I love this country.)
• vár – várat (Látod a várat? – Do you see the castle?)
• nem – nemet (Nemet mondott. – He said no.)
• egy – egyet (Egyet kérek. – I would like one.)
• hegy – hegyet (Megmásztad a hegyet. – You climbed the mountain.)
• gyümölcs – gyümölcsöt (Sok gyümölcsöt eszem. – I eat a lot of fruit.)

However, if the stem ends in certain consonants (/j/, /l/, /ly/, /n/, /ny/, /r/, /s/, /sz/, /z/, /zs/), then the suffix is usually just a bare -t:

• reggel – reggelt (Jó reggelt kívánok! – (I wish you a) good morning.)
• igen – igent (Igent mondott. – She said yes.)
• lány – lányt (Szeretem ezt a lányt. – I love this girl.)
• más – mást (Játsszunk valami mást! – Let’s play something else.)
• busz – buszt (Lekéstem a buszt. – I missed the bus.)
• ez – ezt (Ezt kérem. – I want this./This please.)
• Balázs – Balázst (Láttad Balázst ma? – Have you seen Balázs today?)

But sometimes it is not only a bare -t after those consonants either, a binding vowel is still inserted:

• tej – tejet (Szeretem a tejet. – I like milk.)
• munkahely – munkahelyet (Jó munkahelyet választottam. – I chose a good workplace/job.)
• fehér – fehéret (Szeretem a fehéret. – I like (the color) white.)
• fél – felet (Kérek egy felet. – I’d like one half.)
• víz – vizet (Kérsz vizet? – Do you want (some) water?)

Rules have been formulated in modern linguistics as to when and why these vowel insertions happen, but a detailed discussion would go beyond the scope of this brief introduction.

Also notice how the last vowel of the stem is sometimes shortened:

• fél – felet (Kérek egy felet. – I’d like one half.)
• víz – vizet (Kérsz vizet? – Do you want (some) water?)

There are well-established rules for both vowel shortening and vowel lengthening, but again, it would go way beyond the scope of this discussion. Let’s look at cases instead.

Case is a grammatical category of nouns (e.g. anya – mother), pronouns (e.g. ő – he/she; ez, az – this, that) and numerals (e.g. egy – one) that reflects the grammatical function performed by those words in a sentence or phrase. Nouns, pronouns and numerals take different forms in Hungarian, depending on their cases.

When the stem anya takes a new form with the suffix -t added to it, this new form constitutes a grammatical case in Hungarian. It is called the objective case (or more technically the accusative case, from the Latin accusativus), because the word anyát functions as the grammatical object. The suffix -t is also known as a case ending, that of the objective case.

We say the word anyát is „in the objective case”. Unfortunately, that does not make much sense to an English speaker, because English has lost almost its entire case system over time. Not all of it, though. There are certain remains of the case system in English, which will help you understand cases a little bit better. For example, personal pronouns in English do have different forms depending on the case. Consider these pairs: I – me, he – him, she – her, we – us, they – them. Here the pronouns me, him, her, us and them are used as direct objects, or in other words they are in the objective case.

Now look at the rhyme again:

Volt egyszer egy kisbaba
Földre tette Anyuka

Once upon a time there was a little baby
Mother put him onto the ground

Consider the English translation first. Notice the word him, which is the object. In addition to taking the position of the object, that is, the O position in SVO (that’s syntax), the word he also changes its form: it morphs into him (that’s morphology). Technically speaking, that is a syntactical + morphological marking of the object – a rare exception in English.

You might wonder why the equivalent of him is missing in Hungarian. Well, it is hidden, but you could include it: Földre tette őt Anyuka. (Hungarian just allows it to be omitted, but I cannot go into the why here. English, on the other hand, does not allow this omission because the O position in SVO must be filled, as word order is always the primary way, and almost always the only way of marking the object in English.)

Finally, I must mention that a direct object (or a word in the objective case) does not always translate into a direct object in English, and vice versa. The reason is because grammatical cases don’t always match up between languages. I’ll close this discussion with a few examples on such mismatches when Hungarian happens to use the objective case, whereas English does not:

• Várom a novembert. – I am waiting for November (to come).
• Köszönöm ezt az estét! – Thanks for this evening.
• Egy órát dolgoztam. – I worked for an hour.
• Egy kicsit fáradt vagyok. – I am a little tired.