I loev languages with vowel harmony and agglutination, and Finnish is closely related to my native language so learning it might be easy, but I don't know what use it would have other than reading Kalevala.
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Anonymous2008-02-04 13:00
>>89
>Finnish is closely related to my native language
Estonian?
I guess that's the only language Finnish is closely related to.
Not closely to Hungarian really, though some similarities still remain.
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Anonymous2008-02-05 1:50
Oh yeah and of course there are some minor languages that are related to Finnish just like Estonian but they are not spoken widely and are not primary languages in any country. Livonian (Finnish: liivi) for example is the language that is closest to Finnish, but sadly enough, just about 20 people speak it according to wikipedia :P
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Anonymous2008-02-05 4:45
I think Finnish has some similarities to Japanese/Korean and Altaic languages (some consider Japanese/Korean to be a distant branch of Altaic languages anyway) but not to the degree of being closely related.
>>95
Are you a jealous Swedish weeaboo or something?
Finnish and other Finno-Ugric languages do have some striking similarities with Japanese and the Altaic language group. However, that does not imply that Finnish is related to any of them in any way, as >>94 clearly stated. There simply isn't enough evidence.
Aren't the Uralic languages a branch of the Altaic one too?
But even so, that's so far back that the relationship between the languages is almost irrelevant. Bengali, for instance, is a Indo-European language, but can hardly be called similar to most languages within Europe.
The similarities are so insignificant that this whole discussion about Finnish and Japanese being related is pointless.
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Anonymous2008-02-05 15:45
>>97 Aren't the Uralic languages a branch of the Altaic one too?
No, although it has been proposed.
The similarities are so insignificant that this whole discussion about Finnish and Japanese being related is pointless.
A nice non sequitur fallacy, isn't it?
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Anonymous2008-02-05 16:42
>>96
No, I just hate Japan, Japanese people and Japanes language. But most of all, I hate non-Jap people that want to be Japs.
Finland is basically Sweden Jr. The swedes rolled up in there and made everyone their bitch, even the government. Hell, Swedish is an official language there. And the Finns don't do shit about it. Pussies.
There's not enough proof to put them in the same group, but there's a strange continuum of fundamental properties that goes along finnish->hungarian->turkish->mongolian->korean->japanese
okay not a continuum exactly as the parts they share are quite far apart, but nevertheless... Also, sumerian.
>>106
No srsly. It's considered an isolate but there are a few similarities with those.
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Anonymous2009-03-27 4:43
>>106
Really? You call bullshit when it gets there?
Absolute bullshit.
Finnish and Hungarian have well-established links, and they fall into the Uralic family.
There are some links for Turkish and Mongolian, but this is argued back and forth like no ones business. I'd say they've just been in contact for hundreds of years, but other people would say they're genetically related. People who do group these put them in the Altaic family.
There is no good evidence that Korean and Japanese are related to them, and no good evidence that Korean and Japanese are related to each other. Again, I'd say hundreds of years of contact, but others would say they are related. But this is much more tenuous. Grouped with themselves, you could call this the Koreo-Japonic family.
Genus Homo->Homo habilis->Homo erectus->Homo heidelbergensis->Homo sapiens
なるほどね！
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Anonymous2009-03-27 5:20
Ｗｈｏ cares about that kind of stuff actually? I mean how is it relevant that turkish and japanese may have originated from the same source like 100.000 years ago. do turkish people think they are japs just because of that or what lol.
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Anonymous2009-03-28 16:23
>>108
Exactly, the problem with the whole Altaic issue is, since Turkish and Mongolian are so diverse, if you "group" them together you might aswell go and group these somewhat similar other languages too, but none really have the amount of similarity like most indo-european languages have. Including the Sumerian bit -which I know as my mom was a sumerologist (and apparently that's not a word in english)- I think it just shows a linguistic ancestry sharing far, far away and nothing really more.
>>110
No, it's important in the sense that languages showing correlation are easier to learn for the speakers, and of course there's the pure academic aspect.
>>111
The Altaic languages, specifically the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic families, have had extensive contact throughout history and pre-history.
"Altaic" is probably a good name for an areal grouping of languages (specifically Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages) that share several features because they've been in contact for millenia. It is probably not a good name for a language family. And it probably should not include Korean, Japanese, Ainu, or Sumerian.
>>109
Historical linguistics and evolutionary biology have borrowed back-and-forth extensively since the late 1700s.
>>110
I'd have to go with an academic pissing contest, as to why it's important.
>>112
I insist they're equally irrelevant on the grounds that geography has no bearing and contact between languages happens all the time. I think they should either just drop the whole thing or add the close isolates.