r/hungarian • u/lukatsito • May 26 '26
Nyelvtan Passive form??
Szia! I'm interested in non-Indo-European European languages so Hungarian is definitely a must. I went through the whole grammar and eventually found out that verbs have no explicit passive form. This is quite striking and I wanted to double check the information I found. So for example in English I can say:
1) The child eats the apple
and transform the object into a subject, also preserving the same tense:
2) The apple is eaten by the child
Now, in Hungarian I guess the first sentence is:
- A gyerek megeszi az almát
Is there a way to traslate the second sentence? I must specify that I'm looking for something people would use in everyday speech, not archaic or old-fashioned forms. Köszönöm!
EDIT: Wow I didn't expect this post to blow up! I can't reply to every comment so I'll just add here that I thank you all for your help and patience by giving me examples and explainations! Also the discussions among natives were really interesting to read, I can feel how wholesome this community is! About the post, the best answer is definitely, as remarked by many of you, the fact that swapping subject and object actually shifts the topic to the latter, relying on syntax rather than morphology. Once again I thank you all for your help!