[#DuolingoForumGems originally posted on 2019-04-20 on the Duolingo Hungarian for English speakers forum by peter.kristof.hu ]  https://duolingo.hobune.stream/comment/31821286

Hungarian in focus -- Word order

Or the focus in Hungarian. Topic, focus, predicate. These things compose the key to be understanding of the Hungarian syntax, word order, the use of verbs and preverbs, verb modifiers, negations and questions. According to the traditional classification, the two main parts of a sentence are the subject and predicate. Besides that, linguistics recently use the topic-predicate (also called topic-comment) concept.

Then came the generative grammar, a new paradigm, which gave the languages a whole new perspective. Unfortunately, it has not spread in schools and public awareness, but it's not surprising because this theory requires lots of specific knowledge. The generative grammar defines a set of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. This theory affected other disciplines, too.

Hungarian linguists have also been processing the language based on the generative grammar in the last decades. Though the work has not finished, however, the Hungarian language is said to be the best processed Non-Indo-European language.