Finno-Ugric languages: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:25, 30 November 2004

Revision as of 01:31, 30 November 2004

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==Structural features==

All of the Finno-Ugric languages share structural features and basic vocabulary. Around 100 basic words have been proposed and include word stems for concepts related to humans such as names for relatives and body parts. The structural features are seen by linguists as strong evidence for a common ancestry. These include [[inflection]] by adding suffixes (comparedinstead toof [[preposition]]s in [[English language|English]]). The Finno-Ugric languages are also famous for having a large number of grammatical [[Declension|cases]], of which Finnish has at least 15 and Hungarian has at least 24.

Another feature of the Finno-Ugric languages is that [[verb]]s are [[Inflection|inflected]], i.e. [[Grammatical conjugation|conjugated]], by person. and number. (This is the familiar way verbs are conjugated in Englishmost [[Indo-European languages]]; but [[Chinese]], [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]] and other [[isolating language]]s, for example, do not share this feature.)

Finally, the Finno-Ugric languages lack [[possessive pronoun]]s, such as ''mymine'' and ''youryours'', communicating the same information via conjugation[[declension]]. (Although this is not strictly true for Finnish, which is thought to have picked up its possessive pronouns more recently from neighboring [[Indo-European speaking neighborslanguages]].)

==Classification==