[nier]

Yes, please don’t assume that most people who speak German call it a revolution either.

Wende means turnaround and that’s good enough for the rest of us.

But today I learned that Hungarian is a Uralic not a Slavic language and so of course I had no chance discerning which word in «rendszerváltás» stood for system or change, which made me mad enough to want to look it up:

rendszer (“system”) +‎ váltás (“change”)

[schoen]

I know Hungarian doesn't normally have any Indo-European roots, but it can of course borrow words from neighboring languages, so I would have wondered whether váltás could have be borrowed from a Romance language, from the same root as volte/volta (from Latin volvo), meaning 'turn' (particularly given the possible cultural influence of German Wende, which we were just discussing).

I checked on Wiktionary and this nice theory is not right; váltás has been traced back to Proto-Finno-Ugric roots and has known cognates in other distant Uralic languages. Oh well! At least we live in a miraculous time where one can easily check etymologies in various language families in five seconds. :-)

But amusingly, "revolution" itself also literally etymologically means ... turn!

[fpetm]

The names given to these important events are always controversial and are often politically motivated. For example in Hungary the 1956 revolution was called a counterrevolution under socialism, or for a more recent example the election of Orban in 2010 (who has been prime minister since) is often called another "rendszerváltás" in opposition circles. Also, Hungarian being an agglutanative language the word "rendszerváltás" breaks down into simpler roots: "rendszer" = "rend" (order) + "-szer" (unique suffix) and "vált" (to change) + "ás" (suffix which turns verbs into nouns). I find this language really cool because of the fact that most words decompose into very simple morphemes.

[nier]

Interesting. This -szer suffix seems to be used a lot. Attached to hajtó, it turns driver to fuel. Attached to autó, it turns car to car service. Attached to pàra, it tuns vapor to vaporizer. Attached to fékező, it turns braking into brake fluid.

Seems like adding -szer turns the meaning of the word into its enabler.

[MonkeyClub]

> Wende means turnaround

"Revolution" also means "turnaround".