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Hungarian Explained – Such Long Words, Such An Isolated Language

• 26 Feb 2018 9:06 AM

Why is Hungarian so isolated in Europe, surrounded by unrelated languages that don't share its long words?

An animated linguistic take on the history and grammar behind Hungarian's uniqueness.

This video tells two stories that intertwine.

First, how Hungarian got to be such a lonely language island among Indo-European languages.

Second, how Hungarian uses a long-word-building strategy that's "foreign" in a European context: agglutination with vowel harmony.

At the end, the two come together as linguists trace its words back to a common ancestor called Uralic.

The Uralic family explains Hungarian's uniqueness, but also its distant relations to Finnish and Estonian within Europe and its closer shared prehistory with Uralic languages in Russia that suggest a long, long migration from Siberia.

More: NativLang


Photo: Pixabay  - Free for commercial use - No attribution required

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