4 ms·

how are Finnish and Japanese fairly similar? i'm curious what you see that would make them so.

• angiosperm 3y ago
  The phoneme mix is uncannily similar.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• postexitus 3y ago
  Also Turkish and Hungarian. There are too many similarities between Uralic and Altaic languages that at some point in history they were considered a single language family by some experts (conveniently named Ural-Altaic). According to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages "There is general agreement on several typological similarities being widely found among the languages considered under Ural–Altaic: head-final and subject–object–verb word order in most of the languages, vowel harmony morphology that is predominantly agglutinative and suffixing zero copula non-finite clauses lack of grammatical gender lack of consonant clusters in word-initial position having a separate verb for existential clause which is different from ordinary possession verbs like "to have""
  • kyazawa 3y ago
    Lots of interestingly similar words between Japanese and Turkish. For example, yabanjin meaning barbarian in Japanese, and yabancı meaning foreigner in Turkish. The word for "good" is basically the same in both languages (ii/iyi), and the particle -de at the end of a word means "at" in both languages.
    • resolutebat 3y ago
      This is one of those traps the article cautions about. Yabanjin 野蛮人 is not native Japanese, but a borrowing from Chinese yemanren, which is a composite word (barbarian+person) and sounds nothing like yabancı ("yabanjuh"). It's actually even more complicated than that: yabanjin is a kan'on/Tang dynasty era borrowing, so it came from the Middle Chinese spoken in Chang'an/Xi'an around the 8th century, which would have been quite different from the modern Mandarin yemanren.