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: Uralic
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
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
New law in Lithuania lets people use foreign letters
The Lithuanian alphabet is based on the Roman alphabet but does not include the letters ‘q’, ‘x’ and ‘w’. As a result, using those letters in the official spelling of people’s names in Lithuania has not been possible. However, that has now changed. On 26 January 2020, the President of Lithuania signed a new law…… Continue reading New law in Lithuania lets people use foreign letters