A kisfiú, aki papagájt akar

What does “tart” mean in Hungarian?

Tart is one of Hungarian’s hardest-working verbs. Its base sense is “to hold,” but it also means to keep an animal — papagájt tartani sok munka, “keeping a parrot is a lot of work” — to last (két óráig tart, “it lasts two hours”), and to take or hold something abstract: szünetet tart, “takes a break”; előadást tart, “gives a talk.”

The animal sense has a noun of its own, állattartás (“animal keeping”), which turns up on pet-shop signs and in flat rental adverts. Prefixed forms fan out further: megtart (to keep, to hold onto), betart (to observe a rule), kitart (to persevere), fenntart (to maintain), tartozik (to owe). When you see tart in a Hungarian sentence, read the object first — that is what decides the meaning.