Tejelni
   In the middle of summer, me and my foreigner friends were walking in the streets of Budapest Hungary. It was a beautiful hot day, people were half naked, there was loud Hungarian music going on in the local markets. We were near the beach and you could hear the sound of the water hitting the rocks. As we enter one of the liquor stores we try to buy cold beer. When we were about to pay the and go to the cashier, my friends who speak little English hear the cashier say “tejelni” they all burst into laughter. The cashier who doesn’t have the slightest clue why my friends are laughing at him gets mad and kicks us out. But what exactly the cashier meant when he said “tejelni”.
The word literally means to milk a cow so I understand why it seemed funny to them but the cashier meant to say to pay up when he said “tejelni”. The Hungarians use a lot of slang words and they all sound weird compared to English. Furthermore, Hungarian is considered to be one of the most difficult language to learn. Learning the slang makes it also easier to communicate in Hungary. “Tejelni” is a word many people use when they tell someone to pay up, so it is a good thing if you know what this slang means.
The Hungarian language is totally different to the dialects spoken by its neighbors, which usually speak Indo-European languages. In fact, Hungarian comes from the Ularic region of Asia and belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group, meaning its closest relatives are actually Finnish and Estonian. Before Hungarian the language was spoken in Latin, but then it was replaced by Hungarian in 1844.
The word “Tejelni” originated in the 20th century and first mainly people in the city called Pecs were first using this word. However later through the years the word was used in every part of Hungary. The meaning to pay up came from when people were milking a cow they were making a lot of money in the farms. So basically the slang word came from that to pay (money).
When people use this word people who just learn the language and doesn’t know much about the slang words in Hungary might get confused what the person might trying to say. It is a very important aspect to learn as much slang in Hungary as you could, because when communicating it is easier to understand the person.
One fun fact about slang in Hungary that there is a word that made out of 44 words with no English equivalent, Hungary’s longest word is the 44 letter long phrase: MegszentsĂ©gtelenĂthetetlensĂ©geskedĂ©seitekĂ©rt. Because due to its length, it’s not used in daily conversation on a regular basis. What does it mean? Something along the lines of “for your continued behavior as if you could not be desecrated”. Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means that various grammatical components – such as affixes and stems can be added to a word to increase its length (and change its meaning). Thanks to this, words of over 100 letters have been created in the past, although the longer the word, the more it can tend to lose its meaning.
Over the years since its creation as a language, Hungarian has evolved and changed just like any other dialect. However, staying true to its ancient roots, Hungarian contains a whopping 68% of its etymons, or original words. Compare this with the four percent retained by the English language, or the five percent kept by Hebrew, and the scale is even more impressive.
In the end “Tejelni” is an important slang used by Hungarians because many people use it when someone has to pay something, so it is better if you know the actual meaning behind it because people definitely don’t mean to tell you to milk a cow.
Source:Â https://dailymagyar.wordpress.com/category/hungarian-words-all-posts/hungarian-slang/
https://books.google.com/books?id=y_MBw_clh4UC&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=Tejelni+szo+szarmazasa&source=bl&ots=8czZToURSY&sig=ACfU3U264Jsfc0Fr1Qv3RTFvBsl3oiY9MA&hl=hu&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-t9nArI3hAhWKY98KHfNiBB0Q6AEwBXoECAgQAQ
