Languages

[GuyNwah]

I always thought the Hungarian and Finnish languages were blended between the invaders and the natives so fell within the Indo-European realm. Gives me something to look into.

They picked up loanwords. But their structure is still very much unlike Indo-European languages. For example, very few Indo-European languages are agglutinative, but these, like most Uralic languages, are.

(Agglutinative languages tend to have suffixes stacked on suffixes like the layers on a Dobos torte, allowing a single word to contain, say, a complicated relative clause. There's a widely quoted joke example in Turkish, Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışçasına, a train wreck of a word that translates, "as if you were one of those whom we could not make resemble the Czechoslovakian people".)

 

[vongraudenz]

They picked up loanwords. But their structure is still very much unlike Indo-European languages. For example, very few Indo-European languages are agglutinative, but these, like most Uralic languages, are.

(Agglutinative languages tend to have suffixes stacked on suffixes like the layers on a Dobos torte, allowing a single word to contain, say, a complicated relative clause. There's a widely quoted joke example in Turkish, Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışçasına, a train wreck of a word that translates, "as if you were one of those whom we could not make resemble the Czechoslovakian people".)

And with that, I'm off to learn something, accompanied by large bowl of ice cream. Thanks