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.
