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Comment by saosebastiao | Hacker News Reader

IIRC, basque has a lot of grammatical parallels with both Hungarian and Finnish, both of which also have no nearby related languages, and both of which are nearly impossible to learn proficiently as a second language. I'd love to read more about these languages' histories. Are there any introductory reads on the subject?

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Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are Finno-Ugric languages, part of the Uralic language family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages

No, it doesn't. The idea of Basque being related to Finno-Ugric is widely discredited.

Is Finno-Ugric a magnet for this kind of speculation? I've talked with Koreans who are adamant about the existence of a relationship between Korean and Finnish.

That idea seems to be discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural%E2%80%93Altaic_languages

The remaining connections of Korean still fascinated me when I first heard about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

> Various versions included the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic and sometimes the Korean and Japonic languages.

I was surprised of a kind of "UEH-ll" sound that you can hear in both modern turkish (their goodbye) and Korean language (don't have an example) and wondered if they had some kind of connection. Apparently they do!

Turkish ü is similar to German umlauted u and the French u. Here the theory that Turkish is part of a big Altaic-Uralic family that may include also Korean, Mongolic and Japanese is taught at schools. IANAL but AFAIK the general view is that Altaic and Uralic are separate, and Korean and Japanese are not Altaic languages.

Note that Uralic-Altaic and the like have been the fruit of an Anatolian Turkish nationalism and tend to speculate for nobilising the language.

>Is Finno-Ugric a magnet for this kind of speculation?

Oh my yes.

> both of which are nearly impossible to learn proficiently as a second language.

Citation needed.

Nor nori Nork https://nereagaite.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/nor_nori_nork...

What's impossible about that? Many languages have complicated inflection patterns like that.

I'm not certain this is a "whoosh", but.. they are "joking".

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