[#DuolingoForumGems originally posted on 2016-07-20 on the Duolingo Hungarian for  English speakers forum by eino81 ] 

'Piros' and 'vörös'

I just met this sentence ('A híres amerikai énekesnő kiszáll a piros szőnyegre' - The famous American singer gets out onto the red carpet) and I was wondering, how can a native speaker put such a word into this phrase... Please correct it, I already clicked on the Report button... But I will tell a bit more about the word 'red'.

We Hungarains have TWO words for the color RED. A quite neutral, like 'piros' and a - I would say - poetic one, 'vörös'. Its meaning is also 'bloody' (blood is vér, if that is a 21st century word, that is véres, so bloody, but vörös is kind of like a dialect word, but used actively in the Hungarian vocabulary). ...

Where can we use piros and where vörös? There are certain phrases, words, where only one of them could be accepted.

piros - anything neutral, like:

• piros labda - red ball
• piros pötty - red dot
• piros alma - red apple

vörös - if the red is dark like the blood, or if the name is quite elite...

• vörösbor - red wine (like blood, see)
• vörös haj - red hair (piros haj sounds like someone with paint on his/her head...)
• Vörös-tenger - Red Sea (Piros-tenger sounds sooo childish)
• vörös szőnyeg - red carpet (quite aristocratic, isn't it?)
• Vörös Hadsereg - Red Army (huge, and again, blood...)
• Vörös Oroszlán - Red Lion (good name for a restaurant...)
• Vörös Ördögök - Red Devils...

Of course we have surnames from both, Ildikó Piros is an actress, and Sándor Weöres (yes, it is vörös, but written in an old way, same pronunciation) was a poet. Or he, his surname is also Vörös: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Voros

Comments:

comment by jzsuzsi
True:)
For example the communist red flag is "vörös" but the Hungarian flag is piros, fehér, zöld.

comment by spiraldancing
So ... the famous "red carpet" that they have at the Academy Awards should be vörös ... but if you just happen to have red carpeting in your living room ... might that be piros?

comment by eino81
Yes, that can be a... piros szőnyeg :)

comment by JanTatouse
This is interesting. In Czech we also have two words for red, červená (piros/red) and rudá (vörös/dark red). But the dark red is used in 90% of the cases for concepts related to communism or the Soviet Union. Red Army, Red Square, Red glow above Kladno (a propagandistic book and movie), Red banner, etc.. Our red carpets and wines are ordinary red, perhaps because the commies weren't that chic :)

comment by vvsey
This is really an interesting topic. And it is exciting to learn that something you thought was unique to your language actually occurs in several other languages. We are all humans after all, we are not so different, our blood is universally red, and we all observe the world with human eyes. Yet there are also differences.

Here is a link to the Hungarian red (but the whole article is worth reading!):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language#Two_words_for_.22red.22

And another link, describing colors in general, and cultural differences in describing various colors. It also mentions the multiple words for red in Hungarian, as well as in Turkish, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Cultural_differences