Brunnen

Finno-ugric fellows

Just imagine the following: A Spaniard and a Swede are waiting for a bus somewhere in the deep forests of Sumatra. When the bus finally gets in, the Spaniard, who first steps onto the bus, notices the word "Sverige" (Sweden in Swedish) printed on the T-shirt of the Swede. Keeping in mind that these two travelers both find themselves travelling in the middle of nowhere, far from the European milieu and social and cultural atmosphere, what would you think these two backpackers are going to talk about in the bus?

Now imagine the following: A Finn and a Hungarian are waiting for a bus in similar circumstances somewhere in the exotic jungle of Sumatra. When they step onto the bus, what do you think they will start to talk about, assuming that they know each others' nationality?

The Spaniard (whose native language is Spanish) and the Swede (who at home speaks Swedish) are both members of the great Indo-European language group. They have linguistic relatives in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Greece, France, Portugal, Bulgaria, Russia, Croatia and in many other countries all over the world (excluding natives of Vietnamese, Japanese, Arabic, Estonian, Suahili etc). But they most probably won't talk about their "common linguistic ancestors" in the bus, though. That's what the Finn and the Hungarian are possibly going to do.

It is funny how eagerly speakers of finno-ugric languages actually chase similar words. When I meet some Hungarians, we are very likely to start our small talk by saying a couple of diplomatic ice breakers, such as "käsi" (hand), and "puu" (tree). Almost every Hungarian knows that these words sound very similar in their language. For those who don't know about the bonds between Finnish and Hungarian, I can assure you: Finnish and Hungarian are in terms of vocabulary and grammar probably as close as Danish and Bulgarian! Still, what drives us, VERY distant relatives, to observe the similarities, to hunt for any possible proof of language affinity?

Wouldn't it sound strange if an average American (who speaks English, an Indo-European language, but is not particularly interested in languages) would start his/her first conversations with a Slovenian colleague by saying: "I find the bonds between our languages so fascinating. How do you say 'international' in Slovenian? What about 'baby', or 'mother'?" -- and would then reply: "oh, your word for mother - 'mater' - sounds exactly like ours!! Let's make a list of similar words in our languages!" Or imagine a Frenchman talking to a Portuguese fisherman: "Wow, thousands of years ago our common language-ancestors went on fishing together, and thus your "peixe" sounds ALMOST like our "poisson"!" Does this happen in the real world? Maybe it does, but I have my doubts.

Hungary, Finland and Estonia are the only finno-ugric nations in Europe. There are of course many more finno-ugric languages than these three, but most of them are spoken by small minorities in Russia (Siberia), northern Norway and Sweden. So it might be natural that we are searching for even distant relatives somewhere out there in the diverse world of languages. Good or bad, but it sometimes feels like going back thousands of years to the Ice Age era and the hunters' world where words such as 'hand', 'fire' and 'axe' were essential.

If Finland was surrounded by finno-ugric countries only, I think we would have a very different type of menthality than we have now. After all, it makes a huge difference if you can (or cannot) understand your neighbour without even studying a word of their language at school. Perhaps we would then be like any other European nation and forget about the language brotherhood. Now that most people in Finland don't understand our eastern neighbour talking, and the western one is also a challenge for many, it is still an attractive option to try to find soul mates as far as in Hungary.

In reality, it is impossible for a Finn to even grasp the idea of what a Hungarian fellow talks about, but out of all the languages spoken in Europe, when Estonian does not count, it is the most familiar language with a similar intonation and tone, distantly reminding us of the common past sometime a long, long time ago. But still, isn't it worth giving a thought why Finns continuously call Hungarians their relatives, whereas this is not a very much used concept among Indo-European natives (except of course geographically close indo-european nations, such as Slovakia and Czech Republic).

Or would you not be surprised to hear the Dutch calling Lithuanians their language relatives and linguistic brothers?

posted by Anicko @ 11:29 AM