RE: Drive Vol. 7: NORWAY (part 2)
That's some impressive photography right there! Though I guess you'd really have to suck to mess up shots of those mountains, ay? ;-) I love your discourse on the difference in Scandinavian (driving) cultures. It made me laugh.
Of course, I know the Finns aren't considered Scandinavian, and whether they are some far-out finno-ugric relatives of us Hungarians is up to debate. At least whenever I heard Finnish spoken I never understood a single word. Turkish sounded to be much closer. However, there seems to be a couple of things we have in common: no genders, not even gender pronouns, and those fun agglutinative nouns. As for noun cases, we only have three, but on the other hand we have 18 case particles, or suffixes to decline nouns (instead of prepositions).
Thanks! Impressive views certainly help for making a good photo :P
The thing to keep in mind is that languages can have their own relations and then people's genetical relationship their own relationship. Because while Finnish definitely is a Finno-Ugric as a language, the Finnish people are genetically very similar to Scandinavians, although some component in (some) Finnish people's genome can be traced back to East, to the Ural mountain or Siberia. Could be that some Hungarians' can be too. But like you said, Finnish and Hungarian have similar things going on on a grammatical level for why they can be traced to the same origin. Though because Hungarian migrated so far from the Ural mountains, the vocabulary is very different because of language contact with other languages, I imagine. Mostly the similarities with Finnish lay in some ancient words that were used during hunter-gather era.
I couldn't understand Hungarian either when I heard it :D
Oh certainly, talking about genetics opens up a whole new can of worms. After all, each individual has their own genetic makeup, which could come from anywhere. In only a couple generations those genetic traits become part of their surrounding region. And although this happens in each region, it doesn't happen uniformly.
As for Hungarians, what I like to point out, are the roughly 1000 years preceding the last 1000 years of living in the Carpathian basin. During that time they were living a nomadic culture, along with Turkic peoples, in the plains north of the Caspian and Black seas. So while they may be originally Finno-Ugric, they are certainly Turkic as well. One thing doesn't exclude the other.
As for the Finnish language, I've had a couple of experiences where I heard a song (in some place far away from Hungary) that sounded like I should understand it. Upon closer listening, I still couldn't manage to grasp one singe word, but the intonation of the whole just had such a familiar ring to it. Of course I wrote it down, and eventually got the song myself... in fact, I'm listening to it right now, and still I keep having the same feeling. The group is called Loituma, maybe you know them.
How's the debate going regards the relatedness to Basque, would you say?
There is such a debate? And I thought everyone agreed that no one is related to the Basque language, period!
Though I did hear about certain extreme cases, where a linguist came up with a weird theory of pointing out similarities between Basque, some tiny language in the Caucasus mountains, and a third, equally minor one in the Himalayas.