Csípősségmentes

We have a little can of paprika in our kitchen. It's now empty, but we still keep it as a beautiful souvenir of our days in Budapest in 2025. It's also a remarkable example of what Chico Buarque says in "Budapeste", one of his best-known books: Hungarian is the only language that the devil respects. I understand. The long words, full of accents and hard to pronounce, can be a bit scary indeed.

A few days ago, I was "reading" some of those long words on the back of the can when one of them, printed in red capitals, caught my attention: CSÍPŐSSÉGMENTES. I noticed that the last part of the word, ségmentes, was quite similar to the Portuguese word for seeds, sementes, so the naive me quickly assumed that the word had something to do with seeds. Since I don't know Hungarian, I asked ChatGPT whether my assumption was correct. It wasn't, of course.

It turns out that long word is actually sorta three different words. Combined. It goes like this:

• Csípős is an adjective that means spicy
• ség is a magical suffix that turns that adjective into a noun, i.e., csípősség means spiciness
• mentes is another magical suffix that prepends "free of" or "without" to whatever comes before. It turns spiciness into "free of spiciness"

So, in short, csípősségmentes is a complicated way of saying, "This is sweet paprika. Don't expect it to burn your tongue". As you can see, it has nothing to do with seeds.

Later that day, I was talking to my wife about my wrong guess when I remembered the word helplessness, which I happen to know (and like) because of "Helplessness Blues", a record by Fleet Foxes. That word is also sorta three different words combined: help + less + ness. In fact, English has plenty of similar words, all of them following the some word + ful or less + ness formula, such as "hopelessness", "mindfulness", "usefulness", and so on.

Let's dissect "helplessness":

• Help (as "hope", "mind", "use", and all other examples that come to mind) is a noun and a verb. I don't know English well enough to know what class it belongs in this context
• What I know for sure is that less turns that first part into an adjective meaning "without hope", exactly the function played by mentes in csípősségmentes
• Finally, ness turns what comes before into a noun that means "the feeling or state of being without hope", according to the Cambridge English Dictionary. Once again, we can map this function to a counterpart in csípősségmentes: that's what ség does

So, in short, both words behave the same way, just in a different order. That got me thinking about why one of the languages feels "natural" while the other carries the bad reputation of being "the only language that the devil respects". I believe that happens for at least three reasons:

1. Familiarity: we (Westerners) are more exposed to the widely spoken language, English, than to Hungarian, which is only spoken in Hungary and a few other places in Central Europe. As such, the chance that you know words like "help", "hope", "mind" and "use" is way higher than the chance that you know "csípős"
2. Word components are longer. While "hopelessness" has 12 letters, "csípősségmentes" has 15
3. A lot of accents. We have them in Portuguese too, but they are limited to one per word. "Csípősségmentes" has three!

Combined, the three aspects above surely make Hungarian seem scary. In English, if you happen to know at least one of the some word + ful or less + ness words, you can get away with any other word that uses the same formula as long as you know the some word part. In Hungarian, on the other hand, we're left clueless: we don't know that the word can be split into three different parts because we don't recognize any of them.

Don't expect a big takeaway here. At the end of the day, it all comes down to familiarity, and familiarity requires exposure, time and a lot of patience. After some time, it pays off and the words don't scare you anymore. Even the long, full of accents, hard-to-pronounce ones.