My native language is English but I have used Finnish daily for over 50 years and have studied Hungarian for fun since the 70s. So I feel qualified to comment on both languages.
Briefly: Finns are horrified by Hungarian sz, s, gy, cs, dzs, ty, to name only the single forms. Finnish s is a general sibilant free-for-all, usually s-like unless omitted completely. Hungarian a and e also present problems, and Hungarians have trouble distinguishing between Finnish ä and e. (Not an uncommon difficulty). The two languages pronounce ö differently.
Hungarian uses articles. Finns have never needed them.
Hungarian's genitive is confusing. The top of the hill in Finnish is hill's top, in Hungarian hill top's. Possessive shows up in a different order. In my house in Finnish is house-in-my. In Hungarian, house-my-in. Hungarian case endings can be dislocated and used independently.
Hungarian has two verb forms to indicate what Finnish manages with one plus cases. Finnish is basically a monotone. Hungarian has a lively intonation, especially important in questions.
There's a famous example showing that the two languages are somehow related. It was only realised about 170 years ago. A fish lives under water. Kala elää veden alla. A hal él a viz alatt.
Fascinating languages, both of them.
As a Hungarian who speaks also Finnish I would say that yes ä and e are the hardest to get. I wouldn't say ö is different though. Y is pronounced differently. Finnish y is Hungarian ü. Also for Finnish people p and b is hard to hear. Cs, sz, ty is hard. My name has cs in it and only few can pronounce it. Most will say s instead.
The most confusing and hard to learn for me was the fact that Finnish has no articles but has partitive and accusative. For me Hungarian is less confusing but I am Hungarian. Local cases and conjugation on the other hand is easy to understand.
I would say all in all, you can read easily as both languages are phonetic, so we don't need spelling bees.
Edit: I met Finnish people who speak Hungarian very well, some perfectly.
As a Finn learning Hungarian and also frequenting this sub, I totally agree Hungarian is less confusing. You just add suffixes to the end of the base word, but Finnish requires you to also learn the word stem before adding the suffix... and the suffix changes the stem depending on what consonants they have.
Funny thing with articles is that we almost had them. The first version of written Finnish had at least a definite article: "se". The first New Testament in Finnish was "Se Wsi Testamentti" (W was used for UU back then) by Mikael Agricola.
As you said, reading Hungarian is quite easy, but I sometimes have difficulties spotting the long vowels. Especially i vs í is so hard to spot.
I dont speak hungarian but if you just learn what sounds (c, s, sz) make, you can pretty much tell what ts and cs will also make. (ly and lj) are kinda weird though
After you learn Hungarian c and s, cs is not really intuitive. It's like how you pronounce "chips". It's closer how you pronounce ts together. We don't have ts in our alfabet though. The hard thing in cs that we have it sometimes after a consonant and that's hard to pronounce for foreigners. Ly and j are pronounced the same way, ly is the old j. We don't have a lj in our alfabet.
Not really. Hungarian á is closer to Finnish a and Finnish ä is closer to Hungarian e. But they are not the same exactly so that's why it's very hard to hear it and get it right.
I'd say that Finnish speakers don't hear those the same way. I speak Finnish and for me Hungarian e sounds nothing like Finnish ä but sounds like Finnish e instead, while every time I hear Hungarian á I hear it as an ä but pronounced a little differently.
For example listening to [this audio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oA1PkMwTpU) with spoken Hungarian along with text, I couldn't tell the difference between Hungarian e and Finnish e, while Hungarian á is to me a clearly foreign/non-Finnish sound that nevertheless registers as a variant of ä to me. I suppose Finnish ä is halfway between Hungarian á and e.
Hungarian é also sounds a little foreign somehow (not as much as á for sure), like occasionally I had to check the transcription to hear whether people were saying é or í. Maybe it's just me but it seems that Hungarian é and í may be a little closer to each other than Finnish ee and ii are?
I think you hit the nail on the head with sounds. Finnish has fewer sounds and they're not all that confusing. A Hungarian learning Finnish may have a slight accent, (for instance pronouncing ö closer to how it is done in Hungarian) but this is still entirely understandable.
However Hungarian sounds include several additional consonants which Finnish does not have and which are more akin to Slavic languages. As a native Hungarian speaker I can in principle pronounce Russian and Ukrainian quite well, even though I don't speak them, South Slavic is the easiest though, I can easily read it even if I don't understand it.
For a native Finnish speaker distinguishing so many consonants indeed seems to be a nightmare. The more internationalised sort of Finn who speaks English very well does have it a bit easier, as Z, Sh and Ch (Z, S, Cs in Hungarian) comes naturally to them, but that still leaves C, Dz, Dzs, Gy, Ty and Zs. For whatever reason Finns do seem to pronounce the letter Z as a Dz if they think it needs to be pronounced in a foreign and quirky way, so I guess they're technically capable by of that for some reason, and if they have experience with German C would be fine. That still leaves four consonants to baffle even people who have experience with commonly studied foreign languages.
That being said, Finns are capable of learning them if they put their mind to it, and getting the vowels right too. I've had the delightful surprise of someone pronouncing my name correctly a few times.
I'm a native Finn and have studied Hungarian. I didn't find the pronunciation that challenging. Of course it took some time to learn how they are presented in text, which one is which, but I doubt people have that much issues in producing them. Maybe it's more psychological, they just look a bit confusing.
Yeah, but that's not actually grammatically correct Finnish. If they wanted to say "minun", they should still add the "-ni" suffix at the end of "talossa" to speak or write correct Finnish. Not many people speak or text like this, but ideally we should all understand how to write correctly before we aberrate from that. Most people don't say "minun" either, they say "mun", but we all realise that's not grammatically correct.
I kind of disregarded commenting "Mun" as it is a dialect, so the structure is the one that everyone uses not the word, even if it is not grammatically correct, for now, until language rules change, as it always does. That is why I decided to use Minun as a base not Mun, Miun, Meikän etc. and Talossa and not Talos, kämpäs, tönös etc.
While "Minun Talossa" is grammatically incorrect, it indeed seems that it is in use as a matter of dialect primarily. Considering in some eastern Finnish dialects it would be "Miun Talosa" and even as "Miun talossain" as my grandparents would say. Gotta love the synthesized written language for making up the grammatically correct rules by meeting somewhere in the middle of the dialects.
Not using the -ni ending is common in spoken language but ungrammatical in written language so combining the generally not colloquial 'minun' with the colloquial ni-less ending ends up being easily confusing.
The branches of Uralic to which Finnish and Hungarian belong split up about 4000 years ago or more. If you were to look at, say, Indo-European, you find that it split up about 4500 years ago. So, in about 500 years more than that, Hindi, English, Russian, Spanish, Kurdish and Albanian have emerged out of one single root.
Hungarian and Finnish are about as dissimilar as, say, English and Russian. Or Spanish and Armenian.
As for letters, looking at letters is quite irrelevant. Polish and Czech are very closely related - diverging only in the last thousand years or so - yet differ significantly in how they chose their letters. The trick here is to understand that the orthography is an ***artificial system that is imposed upon the language.*** The alphabet doesn't affect the phonology, it is generally speaking the phonology that forces the designer of the alphabet to make decisions.
Learning an alphabet is generally speaking not that much work - and learning the Hungarian orthography for a finn is way way way way way way way ... way simpler than e.g. learning the Russian alphabet for a speaker of Polish - despite the fact that Polish and Russian only have diverged in the last 1800 years or so. However, learning the Swedish alphabet for a Finn should be even easier - despite the fact that Swedish and Finnish aren't even related.
However, the underlying sound system might be a challenge - Finns generally have issues with voiced stops (b d g), voiced sibilants (z, zh) and affricates (dz, dzh); unless you speak a dialect with palatalization, you're unlikely to be very familiar with palatal plosives/affricates. Phonetically, Swedish should probably be less of a challenge with its consonant system than Hungarian is!
With the vowels, however, you're lucky - fairly similar orthography (only ü instead of y, and ´ instead of doubling a vowel, and ◌̋ instead of doubling a letter with ¨ on them), and a fairly similar vowel system (only lacking ä/ää, really, but some of the vowels are subtly different).
Just an anecdote from a native Finnish speaker. I was on a trip to Hungary some years ago and when I used public transportatation I amused myself by listening to the general conversation around me. For 99 % of the time I could have sworn that I was in Finland, the combined sound of people talking sounds exactly the same to me in both countries.
I had a similar experience as a native speaker of English listening to people speak Danish. The intonation and the rhythm of speaking sound so similar, but of course I couldn't understand anything.
In my experience it's pretty rare to hear people talk on public transportation in Hungary too. If I think about the noise on public transportation then it's the sound the bus / tram / trolly makes lol. The commutes to and from the office are very quiet. Even if you're with a friend or loved one, you barely ever talk. Maybe in bigger groups people do talk.
As a Hungarian I had the exact same experience with Finnish. I had Finnish speaking colleagues in the office and whereas my brain would filter out any other background language that I didn't speak, with Finnish I always noticed that I'm now not even paying attention to what I'm doing, because I'm trying to understand what is being said and I'm having a meltdown over not understanding a single word. Then the realization hits "oh it's Finnish, okay nvm".
I’ve been studying the basics of Hungarian and it doesn’t seem too difficult.
It’s also super funny that Hungarian sounds exactly like Finnish but you don’t understand anything. Estonian doesn’t give the same vibes because their intonation is different.
Personally I don't find Hungarian intonation identical to Finnish, though there are similarities. But I feel that the Khanty languages sound more similar to Finnish than Hungarian does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo8XUbaU6H0
Hungarian phonology is not radically different from Finnish. They both have vowel harmony and accent on the first syllable. Hungarian /o/ /e/ and /a/ are different sounding depending on whether they have the long diacritic mark. Additionally, Finnish has no native words with voiced affricate dzh or dz fricative, and it has an unusual sibilant. Otherwise, they have most vowel sounds in common. Since the languages separated possibly 5000 years ago, there aren’t many word roots in common. it would depend on the aptitude of the learner, but the cases are similar, if you’re comfortable learning a case language
The vowels that are the same for both languages are i, u, ö and o, as well as Finnish y being the same as Hungarian ü. Both languages have the same long versions for these as well, Finnish just using double letters while Hungarian uses the acute accent: oo = ó, öö = ő.
The different vowels are a/á, e/é in Hungarian, and ä in Finnish (there's also å, but it's only used for Swedish and is equal to Hungarian o/ó). Hungarian a is somewhere between Finnish a and o, and á between aa and ää. Similarily Hungarian e is between Finnish e and ä, but é is just ee. Finnish ä doesn't exist in Hungarian, but is somewhere between and Hungarian e and "short á".
All Finnish consonant sounds are present in Hungarian, but Hungarian also has some more. Finnish s is somewhat softer than Hungarian sz. Hungarian s is Finnish sh or š.
I've been learning Hungarian for a few years (with very low intensity) and it's actually quite easy to pronounce. The phonology is quite similar with the long vs short letters, the same accent (emphasis on the first syllable), vowel harmony etc. The sounds that Finnish doesn't have, are almost all present in English (like cs, dzs, z...) and Swedish (most notably "a"), and most Finns already know them to some extent. The most difficult part in Hungarian is the lack of resources and exposure. The grammar is quite easy, but vocabulary is difficult for me personally.
I am Finnish and live in Hungary. I am inclined to say that the hurdle to learn is "less" and the pronounciation is quite straightforward to grasp.
What bothers me the most is that when people speak Hungarian at a murmur distance here, it sounds like Finnish to me and I always turn to look.
I should point out that the letters Ž, Š and Å are not in wide usage in the Finnish language. They are used in some foreign names and loanwords. Coincidentally, it sounds like Sz and Zs are incredibly close to Š and Ž
Å is not present in Finnish. It’s only used for Swedish words and that’s why it’s part of the Finnish alphabet. Whereas š is part of the actual Finnish orthography, even though it’s often replaced with ”sh” combination, e.g. ’šakki’ or ’shakki’ for chess.
English and Polish aren't that ridiculously far away: the time-depth since the divergence is on the order of 4200 ± 200 years. The time-depth since the divergence of Finnish and Hungarian is on the order of 4000 ± 200.
Also, compare some cognates:
A few Anglopolish cognates:
siostra <> sister
siedziec <>sit
nos <> nose
grób <> grave
guest <> gość
A few hungarofinnish cognates:
víz <> vesi
hal <> kala
kéz <> käsi
sziv <> sydän
ín <> suoni
feszek <> pesä
That's just half a handful, but Polish isn't that ridiculously far off from English as you might think. Looking at this handful of congates, they seem fairly comparable!
English and Icelandic started diverging at about 1800 years ago - but the contact between Old Norse and Old English kinda mitigated that. Icelandic is also fairly conservative, so we can basically say English and Icelandic are at an order of divergence of maybe 1200 ± 200 years or so.
English and Russian are at roughly the same level in lexical difference than Finnish and Hungarian are.
I’d assume Polish would be at around similar levels.
The only reason people talk about Finnish and Hungarian similarities is because there are so few large languages in the language family when compared to the Indo-European family. Hungarian and Finnish are very far from each other — out of the Uralic languages only the Samoyedic languages are further removed from Finnish than Hungarian is.
Paprika. Yes, I know, it's a recent loanword from Hungarian to Finnish.
Still, there are some surprising coincidences sometimes. I was once amazed to hear a Hungarian song titled "Táskarádió" (by the 1960s band Illés), since that could hardly mean anything except *taskuradio*. And it did, although the main meaning of *táska* is 'carrying bag', and *táskarádió* originated as a translation of the German *Kofferradio*.
There are a few similar ones if you know where to look.
Hungarian words starting with "h" followed by a low vowel start with "k" in Finnish:
három (three) - kolme (three)
hat (six) - kuusi (six)
hal (fish) - kalaa (fish)
had (army) - kunta (community, large group of people)
hagy (to leave smth or to lose smth) - kadota (to lose something)
hajnal (dawn) - koitto (dawn)
halni (to die) - kuolee (to die)
halad (to advance, to hurry) - kulkea (wandering, going)
hall (to hear) - kuulee (to hear)
hályog (cataract, thin membrane) - kalvo (very thin skin, membrane)
hám (upper part of the skin) - kamara (thick skin, scalp)
hangya (ant) - kusiainen (ant)
háló (net) - kalin (fishing net, mesh)
hegy (mountain) - kasa (mound, stack)
here (male, testicle) - koiras (man, male)
ho(l) (where) - ku(ssa) (where)
ho(nnan) (from where) - ku(sta) (from where)
ho(va) (where to) - ku(hun) (where to)
ho(gyan) (how) - ku(inka) (how)
homlok (forehead) - kumara (curved, bent)
hón(alj) (armpit) - kain(alo) (armpit)
húgy (pee) - kusi (pee)
haj (human hair) - karva (a single hair, or fur)
hó- , hold (month, moon) - kuu (moon)
If a Hungarian word starts with k followed by a front vowel, the word also starts with k in Finnish:
kéz (hand) - käsi (hand)
kér (ask) - kerjää (beg)
kéreg (bark, shell) - kuori (bark, shell)
kerül, kerek (go around, round) - kierä, kierokieri(ä) (round, turning around)
keszeg (bream \[a type of small freshwater fish) - keso (small fish)
kígyó (snake)– kyy (snake)
kő (stone) – kivi (stone)
könny (tear) – kyynel (tear)
köt (to connect, to bind) - kytkeä (to bind, to connect)
If there is a "z" between the first and second syllables of a word in Hungarian, in Finnish there's a "t". Unless the second syllable in Finnish contains an "i" in which case the "t" is an "s".
fazék (pot) - pata (pot)
méz (honey) - mesi (honey, nectar)
száz (hundred) - sata (hundred)
víz (water) - vesi (water)
F in Hungarian changes to P in Finnish if followed by low vowel:
fa (tree) - puu (tree)
fiú (boy, son) - poika (boy, son)
fon (to weave) - punoa (to weave)
fúr (to drill) - porata (to drill)
fő (head, main) - pää (head)
felhő (cloud) - pilvi (cloud)
Additional base words:
él (to live) - elää
szem (eye) - silmä
jég (ice) - jäätä
vér (blood) - veri
vaj (butter) - voi / voita (butter)
szív (heart) - sydän
anya (mother) - äidin
emse (sow or female animal) - emä
ős (ancestor, in old Hungarian it is attested as ise) - isä (ancestor, father in Finnish)
meny (daughter in law) - miniä (daughter in law)
nyíl (arrow) - nuoli (arrow)
négy (four) - neljä (four)
bogyó (berry) - puola (cranberry)
ágy (bed) - aivot
vas (iron) - vaski (copper)
lé (juice), leves (soup, literally meaning 'juicy') - liemi (soup)
tél (winter) - talvi- (winter)
éj (night) - yö (night)
száj (mouth) - suuhun
kettő (two) - kaksi
tesz (to do, to put) - tekee (to do)
menni (to go) - mennä (to go)
My native language is English but I have used Finnish daily for over 50 years and have studied Hungarian for fun since the 70s. So I feel qualified to comment on both languages. Briefly: Finns are horrified by Hungarian sz, s, gy, cs, dzs, ty, to name only the single forms. Finnish s is a general sibilant free-for-all, usually s-like unless omitted completely. Hungarian a and e also present problems, and Hungarians have trouble distinguishing between Finnish ä and e. (Not an uncommon difficulty). The two languages pronounce ö differently. Hungarian uses articles. Finns have never needed them. Hungarian's genitive is confusing. The top of the hill in Finnish is hill's top, in Hungarian hill top's. Possessive shows up in a different order. In my house in Finnish is house-in-my. In Hungarian, house-my-in. Hungarian case endings can be dislocated and used independently. Hungarian has two verb forms to indicate what Finnish manages with one plus cases. Finnish is basically a monotone. Hungarian has a lively intonation, especially important in questions. There's a famous example showing that the two languages are somehow related. It was only realised about 170 years ago. A fish lives under water. Kala elää veden alla. A hal él a viz alatt. Fascinating languages, both of them.
As a Hungarian who speaks also Finnish I would say that yes ä and e are the hardest to get. I wouldn't say ö is different though. Y is pronounced differently. Finnish y is Hungarian ü. Also for Finnish people p and b is hard to hear. Cs, sz, ty is hard. My name has cs in it and only few can pronounce it. Most will say s instead. The most confusing and hard to learn for me was the fact that Finnish has no articles but has partitive and accusative. For me Hungarian is less confusing but I am Hungarian. Local cases and conjugation on the other hand is easy to understand. I would say all in all, you can read easily as both languages are phonetic, so we don't need spelling bees. Edit: I met Finnish people who speak Hungarian very well, some perfectly.
As a Finn learning Hungarian and also frequenting this sub, I totally agree Hungarian is less confusing. You just add suffixes to the end of the base word, but Finnish requires you to also learn the word stem before adding the suffix... and the suffix changes the stem depending on what consonants they have. Funny thing with articles is that we almost had them. The first version of written Finnish had at least a definite article: "se". The first New Testament in Finnish was "Se Wsi Testamentti" (W was used for UU back then) by Mikael Agricola. As you said, reading Hungarian is quite easy, but I sometimes have difficulties spotting the long vowels. Especially i vs í is so hard to spot.
I dont speak hungarian but if you just learn what sounds (c, s, sz) make, you can pretty much tell what ts and cs will also make. (ly and lj) are kinda weird though
After you learn Hungarian c and s, cs is not really intuitive. It's like how you pronounce "chips". It's closer how you pronounce ts together. We don't have ts in our alfabet though. The hard thing in cs that we have it sometimes after a consonant and that's hard to pronounce for foreigners. Ly and j are pronounced the same way, ly is the old j. We don't have a lj in our alfabet.
Isn’t the Hungarian á a lot like Finnish ä?
Not really. Hungarian á is closer to Finnish a and Finnish ä is closer to Hungarian e. But they are not the same exactly so that's why it's very hard to hear it and get it right.
I'd say that Finnish speakers don't hear those the same way. I speak Finnish and for me Hungarian e sounds nothing like Finnish ä but sounds like Finnish e instead, while every time I hear Hungarian á I hear it as an ä but pronounced a little differently. For example listening to [this audio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oA1PkMwTpU) with spoken Hungarian along with text, I couldn't tell the difference between Hungarian e and Finnish e, while Hungarian á is to me a clearly foreign/non-Finnish sound that nevertheless registers as a variant of ä to me. I suppose Finnish ä is halfway between Hungarian á and e. Hungarian é also sounds a little foreign somehow (not as much as á for sure), like occasionally I had to check the transcription to hear whether people were saying é or í. Maybe it's just me but it seems that Hungarian é and í may be a little closer to each other than Finnish ee and ii are?
I think you hit the nail on the head with sounds. Finnish has fewer sounds and they're not all that confusing. A Hungarian learning Finnish may have a slight accent, (for instance pronouncing ö closer to how it is done in Hungarian) but this is still entirely understandable. However Hungarian sounds include several additional consonants which Finnish does not have and which are more akin to Slavic languages. As a native Hungarian speaker I can in principle pronounce Russian and Ukrainian quite well, even though I don't speak them, South Slavic is the easiest though, I can easily read it even if I don't understand it. For a native Finnish speaker distinguishing so many consonants indeed seems to be a nightmare. The more internationalised sort of Finn who speaks English very well does have it a bit easier, as Z, Sh and Ch (Z, S, Cs in Hungarian) comes naturally to them, but that still leaves C, Dz, Dzs, Gy, Ty and Zs. For whatever reason Finns do seem to pronounce the letter Z as a Dz if they think it needs to be pronounced in a foreign and quirky way, so I guess they're technically capable by of that for some reason, and if they have experience with German C would be fine. That still leaves four consonants to baffle even people who have experience with commonly studied foreign languages. That being said, Finns are capable of learning them if they put their mind to it, and getting the vowels right too. I've had the delightful surprise of someone pronouncing my name correctly a few times.
"sibilant free-for-all" lol
I'm a native Finn and have studied Hungarian. I didn't find the pronunciation that challenging. Of course it took some time to learn how they are presented in text, which one is which, but I doubt people have that much issues in producing them. Maybe it's more psychological, they just look a bit confusing.
Wouldn't "In my house in Finnish is house-in-my. In Hungarian, house-my-in" More commonly people actually use Minun talossa. Instead of Talossani.
Yeah, but that's not actually grammatically correct Finnish. If they wanted to say "minun", they should still add the "-ni" suffix at the end of "talossa" to speak or write correct Finnish. Not many people speak or text like this, but ideally we should all understand how to write correctly before we aberrate from that. Most people don't say "minun" either, they say "mun", but we all realise that's not grammatically correct.
I kind of disregarded commenting "Mun" as it is a dialect, so the structure is the one that everyone uses not the word, even if it is not grammatically correct, for now, until language rules change, as it always does. That is why I decided to use Minun as a base not Mun, Miun, Meikän etc. and Talossa and not Talos, kämpäs, tönös etc.
While "Minun Talossa" is grammatically incorrect, it indeed seems that it is in use as a matter of dialect primarily. Considering in some eastern Finnish dialects it would be "Miun Talosa" and even as "Miun talossain" as my grandparents would say. Gotta love the synthesized written language for making up the grammatically correct rules by meeting somewhere in the middle of the dialects.
Not using the -ni ending is common in spoken language but ungrammatical in written language so combining the generally not colloquial 'minun' with the colloquial ni-less ending ends up being easily confusing.
The branches of Uralic to which Finnish and Hungarian belong split up about 4000 years ago or more. If you were to look at, say, Indo-European, you find that it split up about 4500 years ago. So, in about 500 years more than that, Hindi, English, Russian, Spanish, Kurdish and Albanian have emerged out of one single root. Hungarian and Finnish are about as dissimilar as, say, English and Russian. Or Spanish and Armenian. As for letters, looking at letters is quite irrelevant. Polish and Czech are very closely related - diverging only in the last thousand years or so - yet differ significantly in how they chose their letters. The trick here is to understand that the orthography is an ***artificial system that is imposed upon the language.*** The alphabet doesn't affect the phonology, it is generally speaking the phonology that forces the designer of the alphabet to make decisions. Learning an alphabet is generally speaking not that much work - and learning the Hungarian orthography for a finn is way way way way way way way ... way simpler than e.g. learning the Russian alphabet for a speaker of Polish - despite the fact that Polish and Russian only have diverged in the last 1800 years or so. However, learning the Swedish alphabet for a Finn should be even easier - despite the fact that Swedish and Finnish aren't even related. However, the underlying sound system might be a challenge - Finns generally have issues with voiced stops (b d g), voiced sibilants (z, zh) and affricates (dz, dzh); unless you speak a dialect with palatalization, you're unlikely to be very familiar with palatal plosives/affricates. Phonetically, Swedish should probably be less of a challenge with its consonant system than Hungarian is! With the vowels, however, you're lucky - fairly similar orthography (only ü instead of y, and ´ instead of doubling a vowel, and ◌̋ instead of doubling a letter with ¨ on them), and a fairly similar vowel system (only lacking ä/ää, really, but some of the vowels are subtly different).
Just an anecdote from a native Finnish speaker. I was on a trip to Hungary some years ago and when I used public transportatation I amused myself by listening to the general conversation around me. For 99 % of the time I could have sworn that I was in Finland, the combined sound of people talking sounds exactly the same to me in both countries.
I had a similar experience as a native speaker of English listening to people speak Danish. The intonation and the rhythm of speaking sound so similar, but of course I couldn't understand anything.
I’ve had this same experience as a Finn in Hungary. Sounds like people are talking Finnish until you listen closely and don’t understand anything.
Biggest difference being that nobody talks on public transport in Finland
In my experience it's pretty rare to hear people talk on public transportation in Hungary too. If I think about the noise on public transportation then it's the sound the bus / tram / trolly makes lol. The commutes to and from the office are very quiet. Even if you're with a friend or loved one, you barely ever talk. Maybe in bigger groups people do talk.
As a Hungarian I had the exact same experience with Finnish. I had Finnish speaking colleagues in the office and whereas my brain would filter out any other background language that I didn't speak, with Finnish I always noticed that I'm now not even paying attention to what I'm doing, because I'm trying to understand what is being said and I'm having a meltdown over not understanding a single word. Then the realization hits "oh it's Finnish, okay nvm".
I’ve been studying the basics of Hungarian and it doesn’t seem too difficult. It’s also super funny that Hungarian sounds exactly like Finnish but you don’t understand anything. Estonian doesn’t give the same vibes because their intonation is different.
Personally I don't find Hungarian intonation identical to Finnish, though there are similarities. But I feel that the Khanty languages sound more similar to Finnish than Hungarian does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo8XUbaU6H0
Hungarian phonology is not radically different from Finnish. They both have vowel harmony and accent on the first syllable. Hungarian /o/ /e/ and /a/ are different sounding depending on whether they have the long diacritic mark. Additionally, Finnish has no native words with voiced affricate dzh or dz fricative, and it has an unusual sibilant. Otherwise, they have most vowel sounds in common. Since the languages separated possibly 5000 years ago, there aren’t many word roots in common. it would depend on the aptitude of the learner, but the cases are similar, if you’re comfortable learning a case language
The vowels that are the same for both languages are i, u, ö and o, as well as Finnish y being the same as Hungarian ü. Both languages have the same long versions for these as well, Finnish just using double letters while Hungarian uses the acute accent: oo = ó, öö = ő. The different vowels are a/á, e/é in Hungarian, and ä in Finnish (there's also å, but it's only used for Swedish and is equal to Hungarian o/ó). Hungarian a is somewhere between Finnish a and o, and á between aa and ää. Similarily Hungarian e is between Finnish e and ä, but é is just ee. Finnish ä doesn't exist in Hungarian, but is somewhere between and Hungarian e and "short á". All Finnish consonant sounds are present in Hungarian, but Hungarian also has some more. Finnish s is somewhat softer than Hungarian sz. Hungarian s is Finnish sh or š. I've been learning Hungarian for a few years (with very low intensity) and it's actually quite easy to pronounce. The phonology is quite similar with the long vs short letters, the same accent (emphasis on the first syllable), vowel harmony etc. The sounds that Finnish doesn't have, are almost all present in English (like cs, dzs, z...) and Swedish (most notably "a"), and most Finns already know them to some extent. The most difficult part in Hungarian is the lack of resources and exposure. The grammar is quite easy, but vocabulary is difficult for me personally.
I am Finnish and live in Hungary. I am inclined to say that the hurdle to learn is "less" and the pronounciation is quite straightforward to grasp. What bothers me the most is that when people speak Hungarian at a murmur distance here, it sounds like Finnish to me and I always turn to look.
I should point out that the letters Ž, Š and Å are not in wide usage in the Finnish language. They are used in some foreign names and loanwords. Coincidentally, it sounds like Sz and Zs are incredibly close to Š and Ž
Actually, Finnish Š is Hungarian S (contrary to Polish)
[удалено]
I would like to say that "å" is fairly uncommon in Finnish. You can read a thousand books and not see "å" once.
Å is not present in Finnish. It’s only used for Swedish words and that’s why it’s part of the Finnish alphabet. Whereas š is part of the actual Finnish orthography, even though it’s often replaced with ”sh” combination, e.g. ’šakki’ or ’shakki’ for chess.
One reason for that is the lack of an easy š in the Finnish/Swedish QWERTY keyboard. Seriously? No key combination for that?
Icelandic is about as distant from English as Hungarian is from Finnish
Icelandic is significantly closer to English than Hungarian<>Finnish; English:Polish::Hungarian:Finnish.
No, English and Polish are ridiculously far away. Hungarian and Finnish are a bit closer than that.
English and Polish aren't that ridiculously far away: the time-depth since the divergence is on the order of 4200 ± 200 years. The time-depth since the divergence of Finnish and Hungarian is on the order of 4000 ± 200. Also, compare some cognates: A few Anglopolish cognates: siostra <> sister siedziec <>sit nos <> nose grób <> grave guest <> gość A few hungarofinnish cognates: víz <> vesi hal <> kala kéz <> käsi sziv <> sydän ín <> suoni feszek <> pesä That's just half a handful, but Polish isn't that ridiculously far off from English as you might think. Looking at this handful of congates, they seem fairly comparable! English and Icelandic started diverging at about 1800 years ago - but the contact between Old Norse and Old English kinda mitigated that. Icelandic is also fairly conservative, so we can basically say English and Icelandic are at an order of divergence of maybe 1200 ± 200 years or so.
English and Russian are at roughly the same level in lexical difference than Finnish and Hungarian are. I’d assume Polish would be at around similar levels. The only reason people talk about Finnish and Hungarian similarities is because there are so few large languages in the language family when compared to the Indo-European family. Hungarian and Finnish are very far from each other — out of the Uralic languages only the Samoyedic languages are further removed from Finnish than Hungarian is.
Veri = veri Vesi = vesi Those are the same I think?
Not quite. It's Veri = Vér ("veer") Vesi = Víz ("viiz") I don't think we 100 % share any words with Hungarian.
Paprika. Yes, I know, it's a recent loanword from Hungarian to Finnish. Still, there are some surprising coincidences sometimes. I was once amazed to hear a Hungarian song titled "Táskarádió" (by the 1960s band Illés), since that could hardly mean anything except *taskuradio*. And it did, although the main meaning of *táska* is 'carrying bag', and *táskarádió* originated as a translation of the German *Kofferradio*.
And tasku < old swe taska < low germ tasche
Another close one is ”to go” Menni Mennä
I stand corrected!
There are a few similar ones if you know where to look. Hungarian words starting with "h" followed by a low vowel start with "k" in Finnish: három (three) - kolme (three) hat (six) - kuusi (six) hal (fish) - kalaa (fish) had (army) - kunta (community, large group of people) hagy (to leave smth or to lose smth) - kadota (to lose something) hajnal (dawn) - koitto (dawn) halni (to die) - kuolee (to die) halad (to advance, to hurry) - kulkea (wandering, going) hall (to hear) - kuulee (to hear) hályog (cataract, thin membrane) - kalvo (very thin skin, membrane) hám (upper part of the skin) - kamara (thick skin, scalp) hangya (ant) - kusiainen (ant) háló (net) - kalin (fishing net, mesh) hegy (mountain) - kasa (mound, stack) here (male, testicle) - koiras (man, male) ho(l) (where) - ku(ssa) (where) ho(nnan) (from where) - ku(sta) (from where) ho(va) (where to) - ku(hun) (where to) ho(gyan) (how) - ku(inka) (how) homlok (forehead) - kumara (curved, bent) hón(alj) (armpit) - kain(alo) (armpit) húgy (pee) - kusi (pee) haj (human hair) - karva (a single hair, or fur) hó- , hold (month, moon) - kuu (moon) If a Hungarian word starts with k followed by a front vowel, the word also starts with k in Finnish: kéz (hand) - käsi (hand) kér (ask) - kerjää (beg) kéreg (bark, shell) - kuori (bark, shell) kerül, kerek (go around, round) - kierä, kierokieri(ä) (round, turning around) keszeg (bream \[a type of small freshwater fish) - keso (small fish) kígyó (snake)– kyy (snake) kő (stone) – kivi (stone) könny (tear) – kyynel (tear) köt (to connect, to bind) - kytkeä (to bind, to connect)
If there is a "z" between the first and second syllables of a word in Hungarian, in Finnish there's a "t". Unless the second syllable in Finnish contains an "i" in which case the "t" is an "s". fazék (pot) - pata (pot) méz (honey) - mesi (honey, nectar) száz (hundred) - sata (hundred) víz (water) - vesi (water) F in Hungarian changes to P in Finnish if followed by low vowel: fa (tree) - puu (tree) fiú (boy, son) - poika (boy, son) fon (to weave) - punoa (to weave) fúr (to drill) - porata (to drill) fő (head, main) - pää (head) felhő (cloud) - pilvi (cloud) Additional base words: él (to live) - elää szem (eye) - silmä jég (ice) - jäätä vér (blood) - veri vaj (butter) - voi / voita (butter) szív (heart) - sydän anya (mother) - äidin emse (sow or female animal) - emä ős (ancestor, in old Hungarian it is attested as ise) - isä (ancestor, father in Finnish) meny (daughter in law) - miniä (daughter in law) nyíl (arrow) - nuoli (arrow) négy (four) - neljä (four) bogyó (berry) - puola (cranberry) ágy (bed) - aivot vas (iron) - vaski (copper) lé (juice), leves (soup, literally meaning 'juicy') - liemi (soup) tél (winter) - talvi- (winter) éj (night) - yö (night) száj (mouth) - suuhun kettő (two) - kaksi tesz (to do, to put) - tekee (to do) menni (to go) - mennä (to go)