Finno-Ungric Languages: Does Hungarian Sound Familiar to Finnish?

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Flora with the blog Lexiophiles discusses the auditory similarities between Hungarian and Finnish in this post from last week.  She argues that native speakers of a language within the Finno-Ugric group, such as speakers of Hungarian and Finnish, can often detect a resemblance in the spoken language of the other group members without prior knowledge.  She proceeds to look closer at the sentence structures of both languages to make further comparisons:

“But just how closely related are these languages really? We cannot understand each other, but this sentence (from Wikipedia) is a fairly good example of how similar the language structures are.  Of course, this is an illustration of the best case scenario – in most cases, only a hardcore linguist could detect any similarities.

English: Live fish swim under the ice in the winter.

Finnish: Jään alla talvella elävät kalat uiskentelevat.
Hungarian: A jég alatt télen eleven halak úszkálnak.”  

Flora concludes her post with two music videos, one in each language, encouraging the reader to see if they can notice this resemblance.

 

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