[thechat] Shyness linked with Internet research

[Jonathon Isaac Swiderski]

Friday, the cows mooved Bob Davis to write:

> Hmmm...sounds nasty. I've heard that Hungarian and Finnish are the
> most difficult languages to learn, since they aren't related to
> anything else (they're vaguely related to each other though).

According to http://www.hungary.com/corvinus/lib/hunspir/hsp05.htm . . .
Finnish and Estonian are derived from the same family as Hungarian.  From
linguistic evidence, the "Finno-Ugrian" peoples lived on both sides of the
southern Ural mountain range, which divides Europe from Asia.  The Finns are
believed to have broken off around 2000 BC to settle in the Baltics, while the
Magyars (now "Hungarians") remained in western Siberia until about 500 BC before
moving west.

Other theories have more anthropological and archaeological evidence behind
them, but this is the strongest *linguistic* case, and the most widely believed.
See the above-referenced page for some of the other theories. . . Try also the
links on http://infodome.sdsu.edu/research/guides/hungarian/language.shtml


In any case, they are related to the rest of the Indo-European tree of
languages, albeit rather distantly.  This is in marked contrast to Basque, as
was pointed out earlier, which is still not known to be at all related to any
other European language. . .


--
Jonathon Isaac Swiderski       jswiders at cs.oberlin.edu
cs.oberlin.edu/~jswiders \\ members.evolt.org/jswiders

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