The population of the country is composed of various nationalities. The conquering Hungarians did not oppress the ancient inhabitants of the land but left them undisturbed in the use of their native language, and, even in later days, their tolerance went so far as to actually favor foreign, and, more particularly, German immigrants, and to this exceptional forbearance alone must be traced the survival of so many nationalities, and the lack of assimilation, after so many centuries. Classified as to languages spoken by the inhabitants, the chief nationalities number as follows: 1, Hungarians or Magyars, 6,500,000—the ruling, and, so to say, the political nationality of the country, their language, the Magyar[*] being the language of the state; 2, Germans, 1,900,000; 3, Roumans, 2,400,000; 4, Slovaks, 1,800,000; 5, Croats and Serbs, 2,400,000; 6, Ruthenes, 350,000. Besides these there are other nationalities but in insignificant numbers. [*] The language of the Hungarians, or Magyars, belongs to the Uralo-Altaic stock, and must be classified with those mixed languages which have sprung up from the amalgamation of different branches of the said race. In the case of the Hungarian language we have before us a mixture of the Finnic-Ugrian and the Turco-Tartar idioms, and the question of its fundamental basis has been constantly a matter of dispute between philologists. Its phonetic system, as a strictly Asiatic language, being essentially different from that of the Indo-European or Aryan languages, we give here the following rules of pronunciation to be used in this book: VOWELS: | CONSONANTS: _Hungarian._ _English, etc._ | _Hungarian._ _English, etc._ a o in hot. | cs ch in chalk. á a in far. | cz ts in charts. e e in net. | gy dy in how d’ you do. é ai in fail. | ly gl in Italian gli. i i in pin. | ny gn in Italian ogni. í ee in deer. | s sh in shirt. ó o in no. | sz s in saint. ö eu in French meuble. | ty ty in hit you (tu in ö eu in French deux. | tune). u u in full. | zs s in pleasure. ú oo in too. | ü u in French juste. | ü u in French dur. | The relative numbers of the various religious denominations are, in round figures, as follows: Roman and Greek (united) Catholics 60%; Eastern-Greek (non-united), 16%; Lutherans, 7%; Calvinists, 13%; Unitarians, 1/3 %; Jews, 4%.