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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Finnish and Hungarian are the two European languages that I can't make any connection to and after reading this article I feel a little bit better about the Finnish part of that, and I'll take consolation in the fact that Finnish and Hungarian are related.

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Hungarian is regarded complicated, but in fact it is quite regular and even simple in some aspects - there is no grammatical gender and modern Hungarian has only three temporal forms, of which only one is a combined form (future).

Among the unusual things in Hungarian are agglutination (Turkish has it too and even Esperanto) and vowel harmony (mostly found in Turkic and Uralic languages).

Agglutination example: House is ház, apple is alma. Inside the house is ház[ban], inside the apple, almá[ban]. Inside [my] house is ház[am][ban], inside [my] apple almá[m][ban]. And so forth. It's kind of like postfix notation.

Don't forget negative concord. "I haven't eaten nothing all day" makes a lot of sense in Uralic languages.

I learned Hungarian as a Mormon missionary, and by far this agglutination (I'd never seen that term before) is my favorite part of the language. It's like being given a set of word legos and told "go nuts!" And it always seemed really regular to me; I was never as frustrated learning Hungarian as I was with German in high school.

We taught English classes there, which helped me realize just how capricious the language can seem to an ESL student.

So "Hungarian notation" is a language joke too?! Damn, so many years and I never made the connection.

Not only are Finnish and Hungarian related, but they are (as far as historical linguistics can tell) completely unrelated to every other language of Europe. Going by family resemblance, you'd expect English speakers to have an easier time learning Persian or Sanskrit than Finnish.

> but they are (as far as historical linguistics can tell) completely unrelated to every other language of Europe

You are forgetting the Sámi languages and Estonian.

And Mari, and Mordvinic, and Komi, and Udmurt, and Karelian, and Veps, and Vodic (though the last two are, sadly, more or less moribund).

I spent a few years in Estonia and Learned the language while I was there. It's almost like a Spanish to Portuguese difference between Finnish and Estonian. Estonian has like 14 cases. It took me a long time to learn, and that was speaking it every day.

Also Estonian is part of the same group

You're absolutely right but I've never been exposed to it. I've been exposed plenty to Hungarian and Finnish though, and have failed to make any appreciable headway. Frustrating.

I'm not sure if it's a good Hungarian text, but the one I got the most out of was called "Learn Hungarian"[1]. It's out of print but you may be able to find a used copy on Amazon. To be fair, by the time I got my hands on a copy I already had a decent grasp on the grammar, an OK vocabular, and had been living in Budapest for a few months.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Hungarian-Zolt%C3%A1n-B%C3%A1nhi...

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