Well, the UK study didn't say magyar was
hard just that it was the most challenging/difficult/took the longest to learn of all the languages they looked at. Finnish presumably would be similar. There is a lot in common between English and other Germanic languages, and between French and even the other romance languages. To the best of my knowledge, Slavic langauges are not as heavily inflected as Uralic and my parents said that they found Russian to be simple and straight forward with few irregularities. Of course, their grammar is also I-E. From the English point of veiw, among the Languages in Europe, Fn, Ee, Hu are the ones with the least amount of common ground (possibly except for Maltese, Gaelic languages, and isolates like Basque).
So it's not so much that we're inherently harder, but that English speakers have less of a head start when begining with an Uralic language. If their understanding of Uralic grammar were as good as their inherent understanding of Germanic grammar I'm sure they'd have no problem, but the gap must be bridged.
maeng wrote:az ember háza = the man's house
a házam = my house
a házad = your house
While Finnish does it the way I-E does it. Well, we do have more cases than them, and we are closer to Altaic languages than they are. Though they have some 14 infinitives while we only have 7...grrrr.
What exactly is this I-E way? You’re right about the first structure hu. az ember háza ~ fin. ihmisen talo, no suffix there unlike in hu. But about the other two: hu. a házam, házad ~ fi. taloni, talosi (apart from the fact that Finnish obviously lacks articles) these structures are formed in a similar way, that is by adding a possessive suffix at the end of the noun. Btw having articles looks pretty I-E to me ;D What do you mean here by infinitives? According to my knowledge there are 3 infinitives in Finnish (this might be due to terminology employed, like it is with Hungarian cases).
then what is the meaning of 'talon'? I thought this was the genitive and that you didn't use our style of genitives. If i'm wrong, sorry abotu that.
I'll check the verb infinitives for you (I asked a finnish guy a while ago and he had no clue either, and I didn't know magyar had "conjugated infinitive")
I Infinitive
Base form - mennä
II Infinitive
Active inessive - mennessä
Active instructive - mennen
Passive inessive - mentäessä
III Infinitive
Inessive - menemässä
Elative - menemästä
Illative - menemään
Adessive - menemällä
Abessive - menemättä
Active instructive - menemän
Passive instructive - mentämän
IV Infinitive
Nominative - meneminen
Partitive - menemistä
V Infinitive
menemäisilläni
maeng wrote:So while the similarities are usually visible, as long as you knwo that ä is purley finnish and áéíóőúüű are purley magyar, and that we don't double our vowels, you shoudl have no doubts as to the origins of the word.
What do you mean exactly?
When learning two languages, (like when I mixed german dutch and afrikaans) a lot of the problems come from (to me) rememebring a word but forgetting where that word comes from, i.e. what language it is from. Because of our special characters, a lot of words could NOT be confused for the other language since we only share Ő. This should help with keeping them straight.
maeng wrote: And we do have a lot of notable differences in our grammar, think finnish+turkish=magyar.
Finnish and Hungarian indeed have notable differences in their grammar. Saying that by mixing Finnish and Turkish you get Hungarian just isn’t true and is not very accurate, since consonant gradation is very typical and very central in Finnish morphology and both Turkish and Hungarian lack it.
I meant that magyar is far closer to turkish than finnish, so that if you think of a continuum with finnish on one end and magyar on the other it would be between the two. Alas, Fn Ee and Hu are the only Ural languages in major usage and Turkish was the only thing I could find to compare to.
Note that the lack of consonant gradation is as you say lacked in both magyar and turkish helps underine the point that were're closer, or rather that finnish is further away form turkish than we are.