arthaey wrote:Chung wrote:Personal experience: Trying to learn Finnish with a base in Hungarian comes off as about as sensible or logical as trying to learn Russian with a base in Greek. The divergence or mutual unintelligibility seems about as great.
But aren't there more grammatical similarities between Finnish & Hungarian, compared to English or Spanish?
(That said, it again comes down to material quality too.)
I'll go out on a bit of limb and say that while Finnish and Hungarian are more similar to each other grammatically than English or Spanish are to either of Finnish or Hungarian, I doubt that the intra-similarity is that useful to a learner considering the differences in the details. Part of the problem is how you define or evaluate the relevance of these similarities for a learner, and the details anyway reduce the intelligibility and force the learner to stop "cheating" by looking for shortcuts. Better to learn each language on its own terms when the divergence is that great.
I suspect that you're alluding to the broad grammatical (and typological) similarities between Finnish and Hungarian. I even think that their significance is at least slightly exaggerated because outsiders (i.e. speakers of the neighboring Romance, Germanic and Balto-Slavonic languages) find Finnish and Hungarian so alien to begin with.
For example, it's true that Finnish and Hungarian are remarkable for being agglutinative from the perspective of native speakers of the neighboring Romance, Germanic and Balto-Slavonic languages who don't rely on so many suffixes or infixes to mark subject, mood, tense, aspect, case or number. However I'd snicker at a Finn or Hungarian who'd tell me that it's striking that Spanish and Bulgarian have elaborate verb conjugation and are analytic (i.e. don't rely so much on endings to show how elements of sentence relate to each other), and then tacitly imply that these grammatical similarities somehow make it easier than supposed for Spaniards and Bulgarians to learn each other's language. Furthermore, Finnish and Hungarian don't apply agglutination in the same way nor does each language even make the same distinctions in the first place.
1a) "Come
eat!"
FI:
Tule syömään!HU:
Gyere enni!1b) "I want
to eat"
FI:
Haluan syödä.
HU:
Enni akarok.What a Hungarian thinks of as the infinitive (
enni "to eat"), the Finn has to use a specific variant of it depending on what is meant. In Finnish pedagogy,
syömä- is the "3rd infinitive" of
syödä which is called the "1st infinitive". In turn,
syömä- takes the ending of the illative singular (here
-än), and so in a certain way, you could translate
Tule syömään! as "Come into the eating!"
2) "I like travelling / I like to travel."
FI:
Pidän matkustamisesta.HU:
Szeretek utazni.i) Let's look at the verbs
pitää* and
szeretni "to like". By agglutination, one predictably marks the tense, mood and subject by suffixes. The conjugational stems of the verbs are
pitä- and
szeret-, and these stems take on suffixes. In Finnish and Hungarian, the indicative present tense (present tense of factual statements) has no suffix, and so you're left with indicating the performer of the action. The relevant suffix for the 1st person singular is
-n and
-ek in Finnish and Hungarian respectively (i.e.
pidän and
szeretek). This concept shouldn't surprise neither the Finn nor the Hungarian. However, Finnish also adheres to consonant gradation, meaning that under some conditions, the quality or quantity of certain consonants or consonant clusters that begin a stem's final syllable change because of the addition of a suffix. Hungarian has no such characteristic. In this example, Finnish
pitä- becomes
pidä- when you add that
-n ending of the 1st person singular. Saying
pitän is ungrammatical while
pidän is grammatical.
ii) Rather like in the first set of examples, the words referring to "travel" are expressed differently.
Pitää in the meaning of "to like" governs elative case. Furthermore, its complement is more like a "true" abstract noun than an infinitive even though in Finnish pedagogy, the form
matkustami(nen) is called the "4th infinitive". A literal translation of the Finnish sentence could be "I like out of travelling" or "I'm fond of travelling". In Hungarian, there's just one infinitive, and so
szeretek utazni closely matches "I like to travel". I note that in less formal Finnish, it is grammatical to say
tykkään matkustaa which translates more closely to "I like to travel". The Finnish first infinitive translates best to the English infinitives (i.e. to-infinitives and bare infinitives) (cf.
Nyt on aika matkustaa "Now is the time to travel.")
*
pitää means "to like" among other concepts such as "to hold"
3a) "I'm peeling a banana"
FI:
Kuorin banaaniaHU:
Hámozok egy banánt3b) "I'm peeling the banana"
FI:
Kuorin banaaniaHU:
Hámozom a banántHungarian verb conjugation reflects whether a direct object is definite or not and so we have
Hámozok... versus
Hámozom.... Furthermore it even somewhat resembles English or Spanish by using articles (
egy "a; one",
a(z) "the"). These traits are alien to a Finn.
3c) "I'm peeling a banana. I'm not peeling an orange."
FI:
Kuorin banaania. En kuori appelsiinia.HU:
Hámozok egy banánt. Nem hámozok egy narancsot.3d) "You're peeling an orange. You're not peeling a banana."
FI:
Kuorit appelsiinia. Et kuori banaania.HU:
Hámozol egy narancsot. Nem hámozol egy banánt.Finnish uses a negative verb
e-. The personal endings are placed on the negative verb rather than the main one. In Hungarian, you place a negative adverb (i.e.
nem) before the verb. Hungarian conjugation doesn't change just because the action is negated.
3e) "I'll peel a banana. I won't peel an orange."
FI:
Kuorin banaanin. En kuori appelsiinia.HU:
Meghámozok egy banánt. Nem hámozok meg egy narancsot,In Finnish, if the action is meant to be completed, will have a clear result or will affect the entire direct object, then the ending on the direct object will be the nominative or genitive (in this example it's
-n or the ending of the genitive singular). Otherwise, this ending will be the partitive (in this example it's
-a or the ending of the partitive singular). In contrast, Hungarian doesn't fool around with the ending of the direct object to give clues about the nature or effectiveness of the action. Hungarians instead mess around with the choice of verb (in this instance use a prefixed variant
meghámoz rather than
hámoz) to signify the nuances about the action. The direct object ending of
-t is used throughout.
3f) "Don't peel an orange! Peel a banana!"
FI:
Älä kuori appelsiinia! Kuori banaani!HU:
Ne hámozz egy narancsot! Hámozz meg egy banánt!3g) "Don't peel the orange! Peel the banana!"
FI:
Älä kuori appelsiinia! Kuori banaani!HU:
Ne hámozd a narancsot! Hámozd meg a banánt!An additional wrinkle in Finnish is that a countable direct object looks like the nominative (~ basic form) when it complements an affirmative command. Here we say
Kuori banaani! not
Kuori banaanin! (I guess that it's possible to say
Kuori banaania! but that means something like "peel (part) of the banana!" or "peel the banana in a half-assed way" and just comes off as weird compared to
Kuori banaani!) For a negated command, that countable direct object is in partitive (
-a ending in this example). In Hungarian, there's no such worry with the direct object but as usual the verb conjugation must change to show the definiteness of the direct object (
hámozz vs.
hámozd in these examples). For its part, Finnish doesn't do such a thing with its verb conjugation,
These examples should give some taste of my skepticism over making that much about the similarity of Finnish and Hungarian because of their being Uralic. The grammatical details work against the shortcuts one might be tempted into thinking about. It's all well and good that we have a couple of agglutinative languages that rely heavily if not totally on postpositions (Finnish has some prepositions and a lot of postpositions, Hungarian has just postpositions) and have no grammatical gender but for the average language learner, so what?
See
here for some more comparisons between Finnish and Hungarian.
Another thing that works against whatever discount you think that you get by looking for grammatical similarities is that the vocabulary is very different. English vocabulary is a lot more Latinate than one might suspect for a Germanic language because of all of the Latin influence through Norman French, and importation of Latin terminology. Lo and behold, Latin (or rather Vulgar Latin) is a predecessor of Spanish. Proto-Uralic probably fragmented such that by 1000 BC the speakers of Proto-Hungarian and Proto-Finnic were already about 2000 km from each other (basically distance between St. Petersburg and Ufa, Russia). There was practically no contact between these languages starting then. On the other hand, Proto-Germanic (predecessor of Anglo-Saxon and later English) and Italic (predecessor of Latin and later Spanish) probably emerged as separate languages around 500 BC and then there was the longstanding influence of Latin through Old French on English from the Dark Ages, not to mention English and Spanish being covered by
a Sprachbund. The difference between Finnish and Hungarian grew also because of how the neighbors' vocabulary established itself. Finnish has a lot of Germanic (or rather Old Norse) loanwords whereas Hungarian has a lot of Slavonic loanwords.
I like "Gramática italiana para estudiantes de habla española" especially. There are also great materials that show you the connections and influences, such as "Spanish vocabulary: an etymological approach", "You already know Italian" (French, Spanish).
