[friendly_chap]

Absolutely, think "lick" vs "leak". I think the author means Hungarian maybe uses very similar looking letters to denote this (ie "lik" and "lík").

In Hungarian also every vowel comes in pairs of short-long: a-á (what vs high), e-é (ever vs eight), "o-ó" (moss vs most), "u-ú" (put vs you), "ö-ő" (fur vs ... well long version has no English equivalent I think but German does: schön).

[bmacho]

a-á and e-é are not short-long pairs. a is /ɒ/, á is /aː/, e is /ɛ/, é is /eː/.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_phonology#Vowel_exam...

[MarkusQ]

From your source (page up a bit):

"Hungarian has seven pairs of corresponding short and long vowels. Their phonetic values do not exactly match up with each other, so ⟨e⟩ represents /ɛ/ and ⟨é⟩ represents /eː/; likewise, ⟨a⟩ represents /ɒ/ while ⟨á⟩ represents /aː/.[14] For the other pairs, the short vowels are slightly lower and more central, and the long vowels more peripheral."

So yes, they apparently are "short-long pairs".