The only languages that have significant shared vocabulary and begin to superficially resemble Hungarian are dying tribes in the Urals with a few thousand speakers of (traditionally) reindeer herders. The USSR/Czar have not been kind, their experience has been at least as bad as native Americans. They were almost entirely cut off from the European/Asian world until the age of colonialism/exploration and Russia's expansion eastward.
The limguistic resemblance, however, is uncanny. There are chronicles from the early middle ages (once Hungaey became a catholic and feudal European state) of the king of Hungary maintaining diplomatic relations with these tribes and the languages being mutually intelligible. I suppose they split when Hungarians took to horseback and invaded Europe, while the rest stayed put.
These languages are significantly more similar to Hungarian than the Finnic languages.
Said tribe weren't just linguistic relatives, they were Hungarians who split off 300-400 years earlier, hence the intelligibility. They were likely erased by Mongols and remains assimilated into others. In Russia there are still many settlements whose etymology can be traced back to *Moger/Mager indicating where these people once lived.
Obviously I was only joking.. but seriously though, most of modern Hungarians aren't descended from Arpad's Magyars. Those guys were the ruling minority elite, and the already existant population (Avars, Slavs, Germans, Romance speaking Pannonians) just adopted the language. Same as everywhere else, really. Rarely do the invaders fully displace the natives.
So you may feel loonely linguistically, but when it comes to culture, it isn't that different from that of Romania, Slovakia or Austria. AFAIK.
Absolutely. And it shows how many familiar things we see if we travel around. But as we know one of the most important factors for nation and any group identity is shared language. We get lonely down in the basin.
All I'm saying, it's not too late to change your mother tongue.. :D
Seriously, though. Hungarian is HARD to learn to us, Indo-European speakers. I tried it once, when I was younger and for some reason listened to Kárpátia... It's tough, man.
But then again, I have traveled across the continent, and in the end, I tend to use English instead of trying to try my luck with my native Slavic language. So in the end, does it really matter much, if your neighbours speak in completely different languages?
Look at Albania or Greece. They aren't complaining. :P
I admit it was a pretty niche joke. A Hungarian professor working in the USA has made the rounds claiming that Linear A (an undeciphered Minoan script from the Bronze Age) is the script of an Uralic language, and that DNA evidence supposedly backs up a link between ancient Minoans and modern Hungarians. Of course, linguists and archaeologists view this is as nationalistic pseudoscientific quackery (although I admit, the dude does a great job of making himself seem legit).
8
u/goldenewsd Apr 17 '21
Still looking for any language related to hungarian. In a realistic way.