Mini Hungarian language lesson: entrepreneurs.

Contrary to what one might think, private enterprise wasn't entirely unheard of in Communist Hungary. In fact as the 1980s was drawing to a close, more and more small, privately owned companies popped up, usually in retail.

The name for these entrepreneurs was "maszek", a syllabic abbreviation of the phrase "magánszektor" ("private sector").

Syllabic abbreviations are a strange beast, while you do get them in English like Interpol or Ofcom, it carries overtones of militarism and oppression.

Orwell's Minitrue is a good example of the latter, while words like DEFCON or SIGINT instantly give away their military origins, and not just because you automatically read them in a drill sergeant's shouty voice.

Unsurprisingly, in Soviet Russia they were in heavy use: not just for organisations like kolkhoz or komsomol but even as newly coined given names like Revmir or Marlen.

(They were pretty popular in German too, probably still are. The authoritarian connotations aren't universal.)

Anyway, in Magyar this kind of word coalescence is very rare because we've got other, more natural ways of composing them.

For example as the nineties began and private enterprise became the norm, "maszek" started to fade away, to be mostly replaced by a new word: "vállalkozó".

This is a textbook example of agglutination: four syllables, each of them a separate morpheme.

"Váll" is "shoulder".
"Vállal" is "to shoulder" or maybe closer to "to undertake".
The "-koz" suffix indicates habituality and finally, "-ó" turns the action into the person doing it.

So vállalkozó is a person who habitually/professionally undertakes things. An entrepreneur.

There, it wasn't that hard, was it.

Well, unlike getting the idea of entrepreneurship to a population that socialised in a centralised industry, which was really hard.

One attempt to tackle this was a TV series titled "Frici, a vállalkozó szellem".

Released in 1993, each episode was 20 minute long (all 30 of them), and it was a kind of educational sitcom combined with social commentary and straight-up public information film.

It was weird.

Set in the run-down village of Pogányszentgyörgy, it chronicles the adventures of an urban bloke moving to the countryside where he finds a talking portrait of someone who lived before WW2, and the portrait goes on to advise him on various matters, like how to start a business.

Featuring an ensemble cast with lots of household names, it was filmed in the village of Tatárszentgyörgy (they didn't bother much with the name, did they), which today isn't anywhere near as ramshackle as it was back then, but the same energy of rural abandonment is still strong

I've got to admit I don't remember much of the plotline or the dialogues but I do know that even back then it struck me as surreal and having found a clip or two online, it's even more surreal than that.

You don't even have to speak Hungarian to feel it.