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Mokotow posted:One of the most fascinating EE things for me is the Finland-Estonia-Hungary connection. They share a language group but Hungary is ten million km away from both Estonia and Finland. I guess it kinda makes sense they’d get involved into each other’s poo poo at some point. I'm not a linguist, but I think both Finnish and Estonian are the last surviving members of (a certain branch of) Finno-Ugric languages, while Hungarian is a bit further away. Historically there were lots of languages in that language family, but over time people speaking Slavic languages ended up taking over those geographical areas, so that only a few (big) spots of Finno-Ugric are left. Estonia and Finland are both kinda remote and semi-isolated which makes sense in this context. There are also several tiny spots of almost-extinct Finno-Ugric languages, mainly in what is now Russia. I saw a very interesting paper on some nerds trying to classify languages (i.e. creating a family tree of languages) on a computer, where they were looking at indo-European languages vs Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, and concluding that Finnish and Estonian are in their own branch (or whatever) somewhere to the side, all indo-European languages are on the opposite side, and Hungarian is somewhere in the middle. This more or less agreed with the linguistic consensus; the paper was about using data compression as a programmatic clustering method, which is an interesting application (!) of Kolmogorov complexity. Non-edit: to be clear re Hungarian, according to Wikipedia the common ancestor of both Finnish-Estonian-etc and Hungarian existed something like 3000 years ago, which is why those two branches are pretty distant. In the history since then (almost) everything else that was in that tree disappeared, and I don't think there has been very much large-scale interaction between Finland or Estonia and Hungary in the last 3000 years either, so the distance persists
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Feb 15, 2022 10:46
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 19:14 |
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