Finnish vs. Hungarian

Facts

As anyone knows, Finnish and Hungarian languages belong to the Finno-Ugric family of languages, i.e. they are distant relatives. The vocabularies don't have too much in common, only some old words that have survived with little changes from the proto-Ugric. The list appears everywhere where the relation of these two languages is mentioned. Some words that come into mind (Finnish/Hungarian): "voi"/"vaj" - butter, "mit"/"mitä" - what, "vér"/"veri" -blood, "hal"/"kala" - fish, "menni"/"mennä" - to go, "jég"/"jää" - ice, "meny"/"miniä" - daughter-in-law, "szarv"/"sarvi" - horn, "víz"/"vesi" - water, "alatt"/"alla" - under, "kéz"/"käsi" - arm.

The sentence that is always used as an example is "Hal úszkal elevenen víz alatt"/"Kala uiskentelee elävänä veden alla" -- "Fish swims alive under water" in English.

The grammars of the two languages have more similarities than the vocabulary. Both are agglutinative languages, i.e. what is made with prepositions in English is obtained by putting suffixes to words. That results to the "olemattomuudessansakaan" -words whose parsing is impossible when learning the language.

Both languages follow the vowel harmony, Finnish more strictly than Hungarian. A single word can not contain both back and front vowels.

Neither of the languages have the verb "have". Possessing things is expressed with a structure like "(there) is (on/to) me". That was the most difficult thing for me in the basics of Hungarian. "Why in hell did those stupid Hungarians make it so illogical? There's nothing like this in any other language I've had to study! ... oops, except in Finnish." Btw. Hungarian has only one past tense. Finnish has picked the other two from German I guess.

Knowing Finnish does not make it easy to learn Hungarian. It makes easy to accept some concepts of the grammar, and that's it.

Less Useful Facts

Below's a list of words that exist in both Finnish and Hungarian, and happen to look the same. The list is by no means complete. There are not too many such words since the orthography of Finnish and Hungarian is different. For example, long vowels are denoted by acute accent in Hungarian, and by doubling the vowel in Finnish. Another difference is in the letter "s": the Hungarian "sz" corresponds to Finnish "s", and the Hungarian phonemes "s", "z" and "zs" have no equivalent in Finnish [1]. That leaves the most important Hungarian word "PERSZE" out of the list. In Hungarian it means about "of course". In Finnish the word with same pronunciation, "PERSE" means "ass".

Thanks to Áron Tóbiás for the second half of the table!

Word	Meaning in Finnish	Meaning in Hungarian
villa	wool	fork (noun)
te	you, plural	you, singular
hallat	frosts	let hear
halotta	without (stick of) firewood	(his/her) corpse (not necessarily the own one)
kanalat	henhouses	spoon (accusative)
satu	fairytale	vice(bench)
rokka	soup	spinning wheel
karja	livestock, cattle	(his/her) arm
napot	scoops, ladles	day (accusative)
kanala	henhouse	(his/her) spoon
turista	to talk shit	a tourist
vajat	sheds	butter (accusative)
Katalin	the most wily	girl's name
Homonnai	marries-a-gay	a last name
kuka	who	dumpster
hapsi	hair	bastard
kurva	a bend	bitch
kun	when	Kun (name of an ancient people)
harsona	as a veil	trombone
ne	they	don't (imperative)
terve	hello	(his/her) project
testi	a test	bodily
vasat	elk calves	iron (accusative)
illat	evenings	scent
kelta	yellow	celtic
kivi	stone, rock	kiwi
kova	hard	flint

Some Finno-Ugrian links

[1]^ Actually, the Finnish language does have the letters š (s with caron) and ž (z with caron), but they are normally not listed among the Finnish alphabet. These two letters only appear in some loan words and foreign names, like "šakki" (chess), "maharadža" or "Brežnev". The research institute for the languages of Finland tells more (in Finnish). ^

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