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Hungarian is a language isolate

Name: Anonymous 2008-01-07 13:50

I'm sick of jealous people who want to take away the uniqueness of the Hungarian language by inaccurately linking it with other languages it has little to do with such as Finnish or Turkish. The most common thing they cite are a handful of similar words and "vowel harmony". Vowel harmony means a different vowel in the suffix is used depending on the earlier vowels that are in the word. The vowels Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish use are completely different.

Other languages that has been unfairly categorized into a language family are Albanian and Armenian, the Indo-European family.

Name: Anonymous 2008-01-09 8:34

>>12
Sorry, no one really cares about Hungary here.

>>14
Similarities stop there.

No, they don't.

-Finnish and Japanese both have postpositions*:
E.g. Lentokentälle - Kuukou ni - to the airport

*Okay, they're not "postpositions" per se, more like particles and the like. But they're still attached to the end of the word, dammit!!

-Both Finnish and Japanese use "n" for the genitive case:
E.g. kissan auto - neko no kuruma (猫の車) - the cat's car

In colloquial Japanese, the o in no (の) is actually dropped. Thus we get:
nekon kuruma (猫ん車)

-Finnish and Japanese can express grammatical number through "t":

ihmiset - hitotachi - people

(There is no real plural in Japanese, though. But there are certain kind of words that denote plurality, like kigi ("trees") and hitobito ("people").

-Both Finnish and Japanese lack articles (a, an, the).

-Both Finnish and Japanese have a similar sentence structure, where the most important information usually comes last. English is the exact opposite.

-You can find a similar logic behind many Finnish and Japanese expressions.

-Both Finnish and Japanese are more or less synthetic (like all other Uralic and Altaic languages).

>>13
Apart from the things listed above, Finnish and Japanese are not very similar. Finnish has a lot of stuff Japanese doesn't, and vice versa.

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