Solar Hungarian Generator

Hungarian is agglutinative: a word is a stem with suffixes stacked onto it, each one carrying a grammatical relation. Solar Hungarian makes that structure visible: the stem sits at the centre and its affixes arrange around it, so a word is drawn as a small solar system.

It is Vilmos Horváth's. He published it in early 2023 after four months of work, and 444 picked it up within days of it reaching Reddit.

I saw it on that Reddit post and that was that. Before I had got as far as wondering whether I was allowed to use it, I was already sketching gameplay systems around it: in-world signage, set dressing, a whole visual grammar for a Furthest Frontiers spinoff where M. explores the abandoned sacred site of an extinct race.

So in August 2024 I wrote to him: could I use it, and — being something of a programmer myself — would a public generator be of any help. That got me an invitation to the Discord, and I started that week.

What I needed from it was specific: Hungarian text turned into SVG clean enough to import into Unreal as assets. What the system needed was to be writable rather than only drawable. Turned out I first had to relearn the Hungarian language.

Implementing the generators was fun. Because a word builds outward as a system of rings, every one of the source SVGs had to be definable by maths that scales. Every affix in the language needs a geometric form, and they attach and rearrange in funny ways. It grew into 267 SVG modules: noun, verb, participle and adjective derivational suffixes, verb and nominal inflections, modifier markers, question words, copula negation, and the letterforms themselves.

const arcLengthCache = new Map();

export function adjustAngleForConstantArcLength(baselineR, baselineDeg, newR) {
  const key = `${baselineR}_${baselineDeg}_${newR}`;
  if (arcLengthCache.has(key)) return arcLengthCache.get(key);

  const baselineRad = (baselineDeg * Math.PI) / 180;
  const arcLength   = baselineR * baselineRad;
  const newRad      = arcLength / newR;
  const newDeg      = (newRad * 180) / Math.PI;

  arcLengthCache.set(key, newDeg);
  if (arcLengthCache.size > MAX_CACHE_SIZE) {
    arcLengthCache.delete(arcLengthCache.keys().next().value);
  }
  return newDeg;
}

It is a layout problem as much as a linguistic one. Affix forms attach at angles around the stem and must not collide or fold back through each other, so the arrangement is solved with d3-force rather than positioned by hand. Everything stays adjustable down to a single glyph: the angle enclosed by the arcs of an A is a setting.

A year passed quickly, fighting 2D geometry and the language itself. In its current form it is already capable of drawing complex sentences, but the UX feels more like a spaceship cockpit than a tool for a general audience.