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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 03:21 PM EDT |
The language group in question is called "Finno-Ugric" (or
finno-ugrian), and it is quite distinct from, say, romance
languages or germanic languages or slavic languages or
celtic languages (all of which are in the indo-european
group; finno-ugric isn't). That doesn't mean that a Finn
can converse with a Hungarian, or even find any words in
common.
This is hard to illustrate for English speakers; English
is a very new language that still closely resembles all its
Germanic and Scandinavian cousins who are all located just
across the water from England. (It helps that we share the
same writing system and that our similar histories have led
to similar amounts of borrowing from unrelated sources like
Latin. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Wol on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 03:25 PM EDT |
As I understand it ... there were several waves of migration out of Africa,
language-wise.
The first wave of languages has, afaik, disappeared (likewise the third). The
second wave is the wave to which Finno-Ugric belongs. This was pretty much wiped
out by the third and fourth waves. The fourth wave is modern Indo-European.
Then, about 1500, with Genghis Khan, what became Hungarian migrated from its
refuge in Mongolia or regions east, and ended up in Hungary.
So the VOCABULARY of Finnish and Hungarian is completely unrelated, the two
languages having come from different ends of the indo-european land mass. But as
far as the *grammar* is concerned, they are each other's closest relative and
massively way different from pretty much every other modern eurasian language.
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 06:02 AM EDT |
Linguistic experts (the reputable ones) do not go looking only for similar
words, but also grammatical structures and the histories of the languages, as
far as available. There are also known rules about how languages tend to
evolve.
Laymen speculating on the similarities of languages is great fun, but should be
considered about as relevant to the reality as laymen speculating on nuclear
energy, curing cancer, or other specialist topic...
Historically, Finnish has been subject to a lot of very funny theories because
of how much it differs from most other European languages (except Estonian,
which is close enough to be almost mutually intelligible, but not quite). It was
not until the 19. century with researchers braving ravenous mosquitoes in
Siberia looking for related languages (now mostly dead languages) that the
proper connections were made.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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