Re: Finno-Ugric languages
| From: | J.A. Mills <xenolingua@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, September 18, 1998, 18:38 |
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In a message dated 9/18/98 9:53:14 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
tommiepowell@EARTHLINK.NET writes:
<< >I'd like to know something: how are Hungarian and Finnish related? I know
>they belong to the Finno-Ugric branch, characterized by agglutination and
>vowel harmony. >>
I studied Finnish for seven months in a small town north of Helsinki. When I
returned from that trip, I got together with a student who had spent a similar
amount of time in Hungary studying Hungarian. We compared a word list of 300
words and a sentence list of over 50 examples (All taken from language texts
and supported by our own experiences). Despite my language background, I
would have sworn that these two languages had very little in common. In fact,
less than 5% of the material we compared was recognizable/guessable. As far
as can be seen from that kind of quick survey, Finnish is about as similar to
Hungarian as Hindi is to English. Just FYI.