It depends. You can generally say that Estonians are better at Finnish than vice versa, but this is because they can watch Finnish television to a much larger extent than Finns can watch Estonian television. On the other hand, meän kieli, the Finnish dialect in Northern Sweden, is linguistically closer to Estonian than mainstream Finnish as both languages have preserved features that have disappeared in Finland and they have also adopted many Germanic loan words.
Good point, psychonaut. I was hoping somebody would catch that. If you go back early enough in the history of the Hungarian language, at one time long ago it did not have articles or conjunctions. It developed them later, a secondary development, maybe because the Indo-European languages surrounding it used them. The definite article a/az was originally the demonstrative pronoun meaning ‘that’ (which is how the article developed in other languages too, like English, Romance languages, Arabic and Hebrew).
The place where the Hungarians originated is thought to be in the central Ural mountain range, where the republic of Bashkortostan (or Bashkiria) is in the present day. From there the Khanty and Mansi moved northeast to their present location by the Ob river. The proto-Finnic peoples seem to have originated in a nearby area of eastern or central Russia; the people of Finland got there by migrating west maybe 2,000 years ago. The Magyars first moved south and east to the steppes between the Don and the Dnieper where they hung out with the Turks, before moving west to their present location in 896.
I seem to recall from some reading I’ve done that there is a connection between the Magyars and the Khazars, some suggesting that the Magyars were Khazars who migrated west after Khazaria was conquered.
Thank you yomo mojo.
This are nice insights in some strange languages, from the Indo-European point of view.
Rusalka, one of your original questions has not been touched yet: Similar modus operandi for Huns, Magyars and Mongolians.
It looks like this just comes with the steppe.
Before the Altaic/Uralic people won the supremacy over the south Russian plains, starting about 100-150 post Christ, there had been several Indo-European people with just the same modus operandi coming down from the plains to harass the Mediterranean civilisations:
The Kimmerians (900-700 BC), the Skytes (700-200 BC) and the Sarmates (200 BC – 200 post Christ.) (Times roughly, as far as I remember.)
And there were probably two or three people before that, again Indo-European, but because than even their “civilised” neighbours did not yet have written history, their existence is clouded by the mists of time.
At earlier times however, the horses had not yet been strong enough to ride.
1800-1200 BC is the age of the chariot – remember the battle of Troy movies?
And one of this early charioteers, the Hyksos, had even been aggressive enough to conquer Egypt, the superpower of that days and very probably the most people in this region.
So, even in that early times, there had been technological inventions that could overcome the power of sheer numbers.
But, as indicated already, very often it was sheer aggressiveness, that made the difference.
MummyCave
Mummycave, I think you’re confusing the development of the horse with the development of the stirrup. The stirrup made it possible to fight from horseback.
qts: lot’s of people fought on horseback loooong before stirrups came along. Hannibal had a very effective cavalry for example. But the earliest major use of horses in warfare were with chariots. The earliest domesticated horses were quite small, like Viking ponies. Could be ridden but usually dismounted to fight. Over the centuries horses got bigger, fighting on horseback became practical, etc.
I heard that the Latvians are CULTURALLY closer to the Estonians, than the Lituhuanians, even though their language is related to Lithuanian.
Similar to the Czechs being more culturally closer to the Germans, then they are to the Slovaks, even though Czech and Slovak are similar.