Re: Article on Finno-Ugric in the Economist

"Marc Adler" <marc.adler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5323735

The article contains several inaccuracies, starting from the very first
sentence: it contains a purported Finnish statement, which however does not
even use Finnish punctuation (we always leave a space around a dash, and
normally use en dash, not em dash) or the real form of the slogan
"Suur-Suomi". It gets worse rather fast, since the "Suur-Suomi" ideology does
not belong to "dying days of the Tsarist empire" but to the 20s, 30s, and
especially early 40s.

Thus, the expectations on linguistic accuracy cannot be very high.

> The sentence that is mutually comprehensible (translated as "The living
> fish swims in water" in the article) is at the bottom of the article.
>
> Estonian: Elav kala ujub vee all.
>
> Finnish: Elävä kala ui veden alla.
>
> Hungarian: Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt.

It's far from being mutually comprehensible. This example has often (at least
from the 60s I think) been mentioned as illustrating similarities between
Finnish and Hungarian, but never before have I seen it presented as an
example of mutual comprehensibility. We can see the similarities if we look
at the sentences (in spoken language, the similarities are more difficult to
observe), but hardly any Finn would understand the Hungarian sentence without
previous knowledge about Hungarian.

Between Estonian and Finnish, there is some mutual comprehensibility, since
the languages are much more closely related to each other than to Hungarian.
But it's hardly _intuitive_ comprehensibility. Rather, Estonians and Finns
can learn each others' language more easily than foreign languages in general
(though there are pitfalls too - common words with quite different meanings).

> Shouldn't this be "the living fish swims _underwater_ (veden _alla_)"?

I don't quite understand the question. What's the difference between
"underwater" and "underwater"?

> And is the last one really comprehensible at first sight to the
> untutored Estonian or Finnish eye?

Certainly not.

> Hungarian: Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt
> Finnish: Elävä kala uiskelee veden alla
>
> Are the verb forms equivalent?

I don't think they are. They are derivations of from a verb of common origin,
but the similarity of anything past the first sound is probably coincidental.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
.

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