Hungarian and Finnish are both members of the Uralic family of languages but separated around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/01/the-uralic-languages/ Some Hungarian and Finnish words still sound (and look) quite similar. Indeed, Hajdu (1975) points out that it is possible to construct complete (albeit artificial) sentences using words of similar form, for example: Kala…… Continue reading Hungarian and Finnish share more words than you might think
Tag: Turkish
Where did Russian words come from (4)?
In earlier posts, I looked at 134 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages: 27 adjectives, 3 adverbs and 5 numerals. https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/01/where-did-russian-words-come-from/ 43 verbs https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/02/where-did-russian-words-come-from-2/ 56 nouns https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/02/where-did-russian-words-come-from-3/ In this post, I cover 36 words not inherited by Russian directly from PIE but mostly inherited…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from (4)?
Where did Russian words come from?
In this post, I look at 35 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. In future posts, I will look at another 99 words inherited by Russian directly from PIE and 36 words inherited from other sources, mainly Proto-Balto-Slavic or Proto-Slavic: 43 verbs inherited by…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from?
Languages in Finland
A booklet called The languages of Finland 1917-2017 was written to celebrate Finland’s centenary as an independent state. The author, Fred Karlsson, Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki, and author of Finnish: a comprehensive grammar (2018). The booklet is available online at Languages of Finland_1917-2017.pdf (helsinki.fi), along with Finnish and Swedish…… Continue reading Languages in Finland
Enver Hoxha in Russian in the Old Bazaar
Looking around the Old Bazaar in the Albanian town of Kruja, we came across this book by the dictator Enver Hoxha who ruled Albanian from 1944 until 1985. Photo: Kate Clark The book is volume 2 of a Russian translation of his Selected Works. (A few doors down the road, we saw half a dozen…… Continue reading Enver Hoxha in Russian in the Old Bazaar
Where did Albanian borrow words from?
In this post, I look at 68 words that Albanian borrowed from other languages,. Most of the words were borrowed from other Indo-European languages. In a previous post, I mentioned 70 other words that Albanian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. https://languagemiscellany.com/2025/09/where-did-albanian-words-come-from/ The information comes from the…… Continue reading Where did Albanian borrow words from?
Some things I like about Hungarian
Hungarian differs from most European languages in several ways, partly because it is not a member of the Indo-European family of languages. Hungarian is a member of the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/01/the-uralic-languages/ This post covers some fascinating features of Hungarian: vowel harmony front and back vowels in deictic words possessive word…… Continue reading Some things I like about Hungarian
Great sound charts for 14 languages
There is a superb collection of sound charts at https://ielp.ehe.osu.edu/sep/interactive-ipa-charts They cover 14 languages: Arabic, Bengali, English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Nepali, Persian, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish and Vietnamese. The document for each language contains: a chart showing the consonants used in that language, transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) another chart showing those…… Continue reading Great sound charts for 14 languages
How to need and how to have
The way languages express needing something is linked in a surprising way to how they express having something. In their paper Having “need” and needing “have” Stephanie Harves and Richard Kayne (Linguistic Inquiry, 2012) summarise the facts and suggest an explanation. How to have: H-languages English and some other languages use a transitive verb like…… Continue reading How to need and how to have
The Uralic Languages
According to Kiefer and Laakso (2014), there is a general consensus that there are 6 main branches of Uralic: Ugric: Hungarian (13 million speakers) and, in Western Siberia, the Ob-Ugric languages Khanty (almost 10,000 speakers) and Mansi (probably less than 10,000 speakers) Finnic: Finnish (5 million speakers); Estonian (1 million). Other Finnic languages have many…… Continue reading The Uralic Languages