You’ll find some cognates in Slavic languages, but not like with Germanic or Latinate languages, of course. For an English speaker, you might find 5-ish% of words recognizable. Like (using Polish): restauracja, edukacja, musyka, komputer. You might also know apteka (pharmacy) or dach (roof, from German) and some other words if you have a little French and German under your belt. Meanwhile, in Hungarian, we have, for those words: étterem, oktatás, zene, számítógép, gyógyszertár, tető. That language is a doozy. There are cognates few and far between, but essentially you’re starting from scratch. The Slavic languages are at least Indo-European, so there’s some skeletal similarity and familiarality with them in a way Finnish and Hungarian lack.
Yup, really long words with too many vowels.
At some point the ancestral Finns raided Wales and stole all their vowels, just leaving them with a crapton of Ys.
I also spent some time in the USSR, but all I took away from there was CTON (stop), Pectopah (restaurant), da and nyet. Picked up a bit of Polish, the usual please/thankyou/beer/good morning words.
Anyway, sorry for the hijack. I’ll go away now.
These comparisons are always interesting to me. I have heard Thai and Vietnamese people say similar things, that it’s a really uncanny feeling that the sounds and cadences are the same, they should understand the other language, but cannot.
This is how I feel when I hear someone speaking Scots. But Scots and English are basically sister languages, whereas Thai and Vietnamese aren’t really related at all except for a few borrowed words.
Has circles = Korean
Complex = Chinese. I’m not sure I can 100% say Simplified vs. Traditional
Mix of complex and either swoopy or sharp = Japanese
Has æ ø = Norwegian or Danish. Unless you happen to run into Faroese…
Has þ ð = Icelandic. Or you’re talking to an ancient Anglo-Saxon.
Swedish and Finnish both have å ä ö but are clearly different. I doubt I can do Estonian except say the odds are more in Finnish’s favor.
Has ő ű - Hungarian
I’ve occasionally had to interpret Scots for Anglo companions.
Those doubled consonants (especially kk) are what does it for me.
Can you tell Finnish from Estonian (they are supposedly mutually intelligible)?
Turkish is said to be in the same language group, but it looks totally different–and equally characteristic.
There was a Finnish curling player named Markku Uusipaavalniemi. He said that even in Finland he was generally referred to as M15. He had a brother whose first name was Uusi.
Likewise, I have read that Maltese is basically Arabic with a different alphabet.
Me? Probably not, I’m not aware that I’ve ever come across Estonian, except we did just get this tip in this thread:
So I don’t think I’ve ever seen Estonian, but if I do, now I’ll know.
That’s the most distinctive. Looking at the two alphabets I also see that Estonian has a Ü that Finnish lacks, and Finnish has an Å that Estonian doesn’t have.
I have the same issue when I see printed Dutch. I studied German some decades ago, and while I have forgotten a lot, I remember enough that written German looks “right” to me, and Dutch looks “Germanish - but wrong.”
You flatter me. The only Finnish word I know is “suomi.”
I see a couple of false friends from German in there, though. “Ja” and “mutta” very much do not mean what I would figure from German.
What @pulykamell and a few others said: õ = Estonian; a surfeit of acute accents = Hungarian. Finnish, by contrast, is quite judicious in its use of diacritics. It’s rather Zen-like.
Hangul, despite being alphabetic, is arranged into single-syllable characters to, AFAIK, resemble Chinese logograms. Before I was familiar with it, I could only distinguish it from Chinese or Japanese the same way @thelurkinghorror did: circles and lots of them.
It’s interesting that there seem to be areas where languages sound like each other regardless of their language families. Mongolian sounds really Slavic to me and, oddly, some Alaskan indigenous languages sound European somehow. I think German might sound a lot more like English than I can perceive myself as an English-speaker, being sister languages and all.
Obviously you can recognize written Finnish because it says “The End”, and there’s no more writing on the pages after that.
Hungarian’s easy, because it sounds like Klingon. And no, that’s not a joke: Hungarian is closer to Klingon than it is to any Earthly language.
The native Israelis I’ve met have had accents that sounded to me almost like Irish.
The one that would sometimes get me is Dutch. Every so often, if I was half-paying attention, I could swear bits of Dutch sound like English or English being spoken backwards or something. I don’t get the same effect from German, just Dutch. It’s as if I’m listening to “Prisencólinensináinciúsol” (the nonsense English song by Adriano Celentano. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s worth looking up on YouTube.) It’s like just at the edge of making sense, but it doesn’t ever get there.
As is this heartbreaking short film:
Ah, I haven’t seen that one in ages and had completely forgotten about it. Yeah, that conveys how Dutch comes across to me, though with a stronger American accent.
That’s interesting.
Around 1999, I went to an exhibition on the Inuit peoples with a Finnish friend. There were a few sentences written in one of the Inuit languages that were projected on a wall. She stopped in front of one and said “This is weird. It really looks like Finnish, but I don’t understand a single word.”
I’ve just found this sample dialogue on Wikipedia, and indeed there’s some similarity in syllable structure.
Piitaup paliisi takuvauk?
Aakka, paliisinik Piita takujuq.
To me, Portuguese sounds like Russians speaking Spanish.
Yes! I was just about to write pretty much the same thing — that Portuguese sounds almost like Russian crossed with a Romance language.
I think it’s the combo of frequent /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ sounds, and palatalized consonants that does it for many people.