You know you're been in Sweden to long when ...

[Simon F]

...
Curiously, a Finnish friend of mine says that the Finnish and Turkish are somehow related - bizarre.

I believe Finnish and Turkish belong to some same linguistic family (Uralian something), along with Hungarian (and others?).
But a Finnish speaking doesen't understand a word in Turkish or Hungarian (or vice versa). They may sound similar mainly because of the use of vowels (might be other similarities, but I don't know any Turkish)

I think he meant in structure - not that they sounded the same!

 

[chavvdarrr]

...
Curiously, a Finnish friend of mine says that the Finnish and Turkish are somehow related - bizarre.

I believe Finnish and Turkish belong to some same linguistic family (Uralian something), along with Hungarian (and others?).
But a Finnish speaking doesen't understand a word in Turkish or Hungarian (or vice versa). They may sound similar mainly because of the use of vowels (might be other similarities, but I don't know any Turkish)

Finnish and Hungarian belong to "Finno-Ugrian" group, Turkish is in turk-languages group afaik, and definetely is not more common with Finnish than any other european language. ( for finno-ugrian - http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/langua.html)

frogs say â€￾kvack, kvackâ€￾ and roosters say â€￾kuckelikuâ€￾

yay, never thought swedish&bulgarian frogs use same language

 

[MfA]

Finnish and Hungarian belong to "Finno-Ugrian" group, Turkish is in turk-languages group afaik, and definetely is not more common with Finnish than any other european language.

A little quick googling turns up that this seems to be a contentious point in linguistics, some say Uralic (of which Finnish is part) and Altaic (of which Turkish is part) groups should be considered one ... some disagree.

 

[akira888]

I believe the "general consensus" among linguistic anthropologists now is that Finno-Ugric, or Uralic, and Altaic are as seperate from one another as either is to Indo-European. The evidence of their "interconnection" was some common vocabulary, however at a structural level there are clear differences. Anatolian Turkish, as I am told from speakers of both languages, has many, many "loan words" from, of all languages, Armenian , so common vocab. != deep relation. However, the three aforementioned families are all much more similiar to each other than they are to any other language, suggesting perhaps an even more ancient common ancestor; some say in ancient Sumeria.

NB: There was one other element of connexion. Both families are agglutinative, meaning that the compounding of morphemes (mini-words) together is the primary derivative source for new vocabulary. However, German to my (limited) knowledge is very agglutinative and so is Japanese from what I know, and attempts to tie either language to either family have all ended in failure.