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Funny. I thought it must be a Sanskrit word, it doesn't sound too Finnish to my untrained (albeit Hungarian) ears.

Sanakirja is compound word: sana meaning word and kirja meaning book.

The "Finno-Hugric" family is a bit controversial. That said, I speak several indo-european languages, and Farsi still sounds very exotic to me.

AFAIK there is no controversy that Finnish and Hungarian are distantly related. There is however ongoing debate whether the Samoyedic branch should be considered equally related as the Finnic and Ugric branches within the group (meaning whether Finno-Ugric and Uralic languages are synonymous or not.)

Nonetheless, in casual usage modern Finnish and Hungarian are completely different. The similarities are revealed only by an advanced study of the grammar and the comparison of the entire vocabularies. (Dis)similarity of an individual term is meaningless.

Thanks! My understanding was that even these grammatical similarities (between Hungarian and Finnish) could be somewhat coincidental.

This sounds like a peripheral viewpoint whose proponents have nevertheless been active on Wikipedia!

They are very different but same time very similar as native Finnish speaker it was allways pretty surreal when visiting Hungary I could ask about places like Bajcsy-Zsilinszky and people would undestand me.

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