Like even the concept of languages being related seems to not be something most people are even aware of. And if they are they might say things like, "English and French are both Romance languages, right?"
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
I only took one semester (and am no linguist) so I’ll take your word for it. It was so hard to learn, three months as a college student and I never learned to pronounce sör (beer) in a way that was communicable.
Do you know if it’s part of the language group to have the thing (I don’t know the name) where you don’t have e.g., good, better, best? Or is that a uniquely Hungarian thing?
I'm definitely not super well-read in the Uralic languages, so I wouldn't be able to tell you. I know some about the history but not much about the languages themselves.
Yeah, I think the current theory is that they migrated down from the Urals in like 1000 BC or so onto the Pontic Steppe and then eventually invaded the Carpathian Basin
We went to somewhere in Hungarian speaking Romania for a folk festival and I remember sitting on the top of a small mountain and looking down at the valley and thinking, “and that’s a really good place for the horse people to come in off the steppes”
It happened to me in Iceland too, because I was asking a German reporter if they felt like they could read any of the Icelandic signs and they looked at me like I asked if they could read hieroglyphs. And I pointed out they're both Germanic languages, and some similar words, and they seemed confused
I guess it's especially obvious to me because I was learning Icelandic on my own the same time I was taking German in college, so I learned a lot of those cognates around the same time. And I also speak some Norwegian and Swedish now, which makes them stand out even more.
I (German) watched Katla in original language with subtitles and it's really weird when every 10th word or something is understandable :D
Reading icelandic is more of a "i could read it in a German pronunciation often" but the similarities are better heard in spoken language imo
I remember a family vacation in Denmark when I was around 10 years old. I was surprised how much of the written & spoken words were recognisable & I didn't understand why my parents spoke English with these people & not german. Surely, Danish can't be so different than Swiss German, i thought
Comments
Reading icelandic is more of a "i could read it in a German pronunciation often" but the similarities are better heard in spoken language imo