Thread by @BogataTimar

Have you ever wondered HOW exactly is Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language?
How it is actually related to Finnish and Estonian?
Well friend this is your lucky day! Buckle up and let's find out! 🧵

First, let's start with how languages can be similar.

In this picture, language A and language B have words with similar sound and meaning.
Language A is Greek.
Language B is Hawaiian.
The reason for their similarity is called coincidence. About 1-2% of any two given languages will have such similaities.

This FB page claims Slovakian is a particular version of Hungarian, supported by the image below.
What we are seeing are loanwords. Either from Hungarian to Slovakian, or Slovakian (or other Slavic) to Hungarian, or German to both, etc.
This has nothing to do with relatedness.

So there is no point in building our research on words like castle or king (or kummimadrats). We only take words which reflect the basic life of a probably stone age person.
Such as: body parts, natural phenomena, kinship terms, maybe numbers, basic verb such as live, die, eat...

Looking at these words, we can assess if they look any similar.
If they do, then we may be off to a good start.
We may assume they were once the same language, which, over time, developed into two separate languages because their speakers drifted apart.

The beauty and thrill of etymology though is seeing not the similarities but the regular differences.
If word-initial P in Finnish is F in Hungarian, that might not be a coincidence. That might be a regular sound correspondence.
The backbone of the historical-comparative method.

With this method, even not at all similar-sounding words can be discovered as related.
Kunta and had may not sound similar, but if we know what Finnish k is h in Hungarian (before a velar vowel), and how nt in the word becomes d, etc, it reveals its secret to us.

It is very important that Hungarian did not "develop from Finnish" or vice versa etc. Both developed from a common proto-language (Proto-Finno-Ugric, dissolvd around 2000 BC maybe?) which no longer exists.

But language, of course, is not just words. It's a grammatical system which is much harder to change than vocabulary.
In that, Hungarian and Finnish etc. are quite similar. All are so-called agglutinative languages, meaning they express grammatical relations in affixes.

NB agglutinative languages are very common. The Turkic languages are also agglutinative. But the specific particularities and often etymological connection of these affixes links Hungarian to other Finno-Ugric languages.

Something I find cool is that although basic vocabulary is not a huge % of the entire system, it's still the most common, most used part of our language.
Marked in green are the Finno-Ugric words and affixes of a 2014 Hungarian rap verse.

These are the main parts of the DNS spiral of languages.
The regular sound correspondences, and
The grammatical system.
Both have to match for a language to be related to the other.
Hungarian has much of both to be linked to Finnish and Estonian.

Footnote 1: Note that Hungarian and Finnish/Estonian are distantly related.
Like Norwegian and Greek. Distantly, but still related. It is like meeting your 7th cousin. You may look very different, but you are still related because you have a common ancestor.

Footnote 2: This is enough reason to assume Hungarian is NOT related to Turkic etc. languages. There is just not enough evidence in the basic vocabulary and the grammatical system to entertain such a thought.
Believe me, they tried. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternati…

Footnote 3: Linguistic relatedness does not depend on other fields of science. Genetics is showing amazing results, as does archeology, but they will not overturn the verbal inflection. Sorry not sorry.

Footnote 4: Can the Uralic theory be "disproved"? Well, hardly. If we suddenly discovered a ton of data about old, now extinct languages, we may add new branches or dig deeper in the "root" of the tree. But it wouldn't negate the existing conclusions.

Footnote 5: Current historical-comparative linguists are concerned with the nitty-gritty of the Uralic language family: did Proto-Ugric exist? Is there enough evidence to assume a separate Proto-Finno-Ugric and Proto-Uralic? Such stuff is still up for debate.

Footnote 6: What then? I always tell people that knowing our relatives is an opportunity. Like finding your distant cousin. You can reconnect or not. You can add it to your identity or not.
The facts stay facts, the rest is up to you.

Anyways there you have it!
Of course you are free to ask! This was a very, VERY basic introduction, and I don't blame you if you have further questions.
Sincerely, the Proto-Uralic Unicorn

UPS SORRY language 1 is Hawaiian and language 2 is Greek sorry sorry!