Video Fix: A Hungarian perception of language family estrangement

 If you heard or read Hungarian for the first time, and then encountered Finnish, would you then expect Hungarian and Finnish to be related languages? Probably not, because even if you study and understand one of these languages, it does not give you full access to the other. On the other hand, when you learn both of them, you will definitely come across some similarities. What connects these languages in a more tangible way than the hypothesis about Proto-Finno-Ugric communication in the Urals, before “the Finns” departed to the north, developing branches like Estonian and Karelian on the way?

Is it the melody and the intonation? …if we ignore further phonetics and just listen from a distance…

Is it the words that (almost) sound alike (such as víz-vesi, veri-vér, perse-persze* etc.) …if we ignore the amount of loanwords that Hungarian has from Turkish and Slavic languages, as well as the Swedish borrowings in Finnish…

Is it the grammar (maybe the least variable part of a language), which fuels the feeling of relatedness? Whilst learning both languages and diving into both grammars, one might start to wonder how much relatedness can there be between two agglutinating languages that have possessive suffixes, locative cases, as well as vowel harmony; that do not use plural forms after numbers, and lack grammatical gender as well as a verb that would literally mean “to have”?**

At the end of the day, some Finns and Hungarians are fed up with being compared to one another. This perspective is quite understandable, considering how a Finn and a Hungarian cannot naturally understand each other´s mother tongue. If you are a native speaker of a language called Danish, how does it feel to you that it is related to another Indo-European language called Albanian? And every time you mention your mother tongue, people ask you about your linguistic relative, far away in the south, whom you cannot understand.

For some Hungarians, the idea of their mother tongue being related to a language spoken in a faraway northern country, of which one cannot understand a word, evokes the feeling of being misunderstood – for example by a professional gardener, who shows the scientific proof that there is a significant genetical resemblance between a banana and a raspberry; apparently, they are both berries…

The phonetic, visual, and conceptual creativity that some Hungarian enthusiasts display through these videos show an exaggeration of the lack of feeling of “belonging” to a language family. The videos are meant as funny and are solely based on phonetic resemblances heard by non-linguistis.
Still, these videos can evoke serious conversations about the language family estrangement that Hungarians experience when the Finnish language is mentioned.

* “persze” (HU) means “of course” and   “perse” (FI) is a swearword

** in both Finnish and Hungarian the sentence formation looks more like “with me is” or “to me is” when translated literally – instead of Indo-European form “I have”.