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To: Verginius Rufus
The relationship between Finnish and Estonian is pretty obvious if basic words like the numbers are compared, while the relationship between those languages and Hungarian is much more distant and much less obvious.

One point of contact is the word for 100--sata in Finnish, sada in Estonian, and szaz (pronounced "sahz") in Hungarian...all derived from a form similar to the Avestan (Old Persian) word satem meaning "one hundred." Maybe that means the Proto-Finno-Ugric speakers didn't have a word for 100 until they came into contact with the Proto-Indo-European speakers. Or maybe they just thought the PIE word was cooler.

11 posted on 10/04/2010 9:11:34 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: Verginius Rufus

“Finnish contains borrowings from all stages of Indo-Iranian, that is from Pre- and Proto-Indo-Aryan (precursor of Old Indic ~ Sanskrit), from Pre- and Proto-Iranian, from Pre– and Proto- Balto-Slavic as well as Proto- and North(-East)ern Baltic, and last but not at all least from all stages of Pre- and Proto-Germanic development.
The very earliest borrowings appear to come from a dialect close to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) itself. In some of these oldest borrowings speakers of Finno-Ugrian have reproduced so called laryngeal (‘H-like’) sounds of PIE, which later disappeared from all IE languages except Hittite and its closest relatives. Borrowings with laryngeals which appear only in the western Finno-Permic languages, often only in Baltic-Finnic or in Saami (“Lapp”), may also originate from an early Pre- or Proto-Balto-Slavic IE dialect, a dialect which may well have been a very archaic one in comparison to others within the Indo-European language family a couple of millennia B.C.”
http://tcoimom.suntuubi.com/?cat=10
Lexicon of Early Indo-European Loanwords Preserved in Finnish
http://kotisivu.lumonetti.fi/js749/lexicon.htm


27 posted on 04/05/2012 3:08:18 AM PDT by Viiksitimali
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