Back in Cleveland in the old days, the radio Station of the Nations had all kinds of ethnic programming. I loved listening to the Hungarian program, because the rhythm of DJ Kathy Kaposi’s speech was a gentle soothing staccato like rain on the roof.
I heard a talk by Marc Okrand in person, and he explained how he intentionally designed Klingon to not sound like any known human language, by juxtaposing phonemes that are normally never found together, while deleting half the expected ones, leaving strange gaps in the phonological structure. So the verdict is a definitive no, Klingon is not based on Hungarian at all.
Take it from me, who has studied languages from all over the globe. The way linguistic features are distributed, Hungarian is not dramatically stranger than human languages on the whole, which resemble each other deep down more than is visible on the surface. Hungarian seems especially bizarre to Indo-European speakers mostly because there aren’t many non-IE languages nearby to compare with - but if you pull out and take the global view, they’re not so far apart.
Hungarian still has identifiable subjects, verbs, and objects, just like familiar IE languages. Many American Indian languages lack those features. Sometimes the “object” is inseparable from the verb itself. Sometimes a given “noun” only exists in verbal form. Of all the languages I’ve studied, worldwide, most of them are really not that different - except Navajo. The grammar and word-formation rules in Navajo are so unlike anything else I’ve seen, that’s my candidate for outer-space-seeming language on earth.
More so than Basque?
Brian
I think of Dutch as “German, but silly”. I mean that as a compliment.
That is what I have read as well. Unfortunately, that makes it hard on the human actors who have to speak it. Just last night, I watched a Klingon episode of TNG with my friend and and I think Patrick Stewart was trying to say Qapla’ ( /q͡χɑpʰˈlɑʔ/ success, often used as an exclamation or greeting/farewell), but I could only ever make out the last syllable.
I think most other actors mostly just say kuh-PLAH [kəpʰˈlɑ]
Douglas Hofstadter once described Dutch as “the German of German.”
Estonian has a lot more vowels (or does Finnish have more consonants?).
What else could it be?
There is an old legend about Basque. The Devil came to Earth to tempt humans, but he landed in the Basque country. Studying the Basque language to be able to tempt humans, he got frustrated because it was too hard and he gave up, thus sparing humanity.
I think of Dutch as “less aggressive German” or, if I’m thinking in Dutch, “mooi Duits” (pretty German).
Personally, I know what Finnish looks like because it resembles transliterated Quenya.
Thanks, I didn’t know that.
The only possible connection between the languages of the Old World and the New World that I was aware of is the Dene–Yeniseian family. I had no idea there were other credible claims.
By the way, @Johanna, I always enjoy reading your posts on languages. Being a linguist by training myself (but not by profession, alas - one of the great regrets of my life) I usually do not learn much in that field here, except through your contributions. They’re always highly informative, thank you.
I think of it as boneless German. Which doesn’t sound like much of a compliment…
German with catarrh.
(One thing as a non-expert I think I’ve noticed - but am happy to be corrected - is that in Finnish the spelling more closely replicates the sound than in English or French, maybe because it hasn’t a heritage of different language origins combining…? If you see it, you say it, down to doubled vowels and consonants. Or am I wrong?)
Yeah, the thing with English and French spelling is that it was codified a long time ago and the spoken languages have evolved a lot since then. That, and there’s also a good dose of voluntary conservatism at least for French. Some people think it important that spelling reflects the etymology of the word, so you get a word like doigt /dwa/ which has 5 letters but only 3 sounds. And you can’t even guess how the -oi- bit is actually pronounced.
I don’t know when Finnish spelling was established but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was significantly more recently.
The same applies to other languages.
Last week, I noticed that I could pick up the words of an Indonesian song just by literally transcribing exactly what I was hearing, though I’ll concede that knowing the basics of the language helps.
Thank you! That really means a lot to me. 
There needs to be a British English one.
Well, almost.
Ресторан, I get, but Останавливаться? How did you get “Ston” from that? Unless you mean “СТОП”; that’s pronounced “Stop,” but it’s a loan word for stopsigns, because try fitting “Останавливаться” on one. A lot of countries (Over 100, I have read) use red octagonal traffic signs that literally say “Stop,” sometimes transliterated, sometimes not, for the same reason.
Voila:
Thank you! 
I think they might be thinking of стой, which I do see some Russian stop signs use, and that is the imperative of “stand/stop/halt.”
I wasn’t old enough to drive when we lived in Moscow, and don’t honestly remember what the signs actually said, just that it was a 4-letter word that begin with C, and wasn’t the word babushky shouted at children to cease whatever they were doing. (Any children, including me.)