Linguistic musings

[ceebeegee]

I was on Wikipedia and clicked on their featured article abotu the Battle of Midway. At the bottom they have that big "World War II" template with the timeline, resistance movements, etc. including major particpants. I had no idea that the Axis Powers included Finland, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Finland! That really strikes me as odd, for some reason. I guess the pan-Slavic movement fell out of favor after the disaster of World War ! (Although--are Finns Slavs? Not sure about that, although I believe Bulgarians are--just checked, yes, Bulgarians are Slavs but Finns are not. In fact Finnish is one of the few non-Indo-European languages in Europe! Fascinating. Imagine that--we, as English-speaking people, have a stronger linguistic tie with Iranians (Persians) than with the Finns! Take THAT, Hitler!*)

I wonder if Hungarian is Indo-European--I know it's unique in Europe, somehow--its origin tongue is Magyar.

WELL. Just looked up Hungarian--apparently, it's related to Finnish. Ah, the circle comes round!

*The Nazis co-opted the term Aryan which originally was a value-neutral linguistic term referring to the body of languages now called "Indo-European" (and also the proto-Indo-European people)--that is the body of languages including Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Persian, Slavic, etc. The Nazis thought that a body of people linked by language (the Aryans) must also have been linked racially, decided they were superior, and came up with their ridiculous theories (although not in a vaccuum--late 19th century scholarship could be pretty racist) about "Aryans" including my favorite one, that "Aryans" were descended from blue-eyed GEESE! God, I love that--you couldn't make that shit up. I don't know about y'all, but this blue-eyed blonde does not have any geese in her ancestry and I can trace it back to at least the 1200s.

**A common error, BTW--this is why "Arab" used as a racial term annoys me. It's imprecise. Arabs are a people defined by a language, not by color--there are blonde Arabs.

Comments

[minstrel70.livejournal.com]

Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are Finno-Ugric languages. Finnish and Estonian are close enough to be mutually intelligible to a limited extent (like Dutch and German, say). Hungarian is the distant cousin, about as close to Finnish as Russian is to English.

[ceebeegee.livejournal.com]

Finno-Ugric--I'll have to look that up. So I wonder where the Finns, Magyars, etc. (the Finn-Ugric people) came from originally? Are there any other Eastern European languages in that family?