December 26, 2005

The Udmurtian code: saving Finno-Ugric in Russia

The Finno-Ugric family of languages contains Finnish, and its close relative Estonian, and Sami (the language of the Lappish people of the far north), and various related languages languages in Russia (Komi, Mari, Udmurt), along with a distant southern relative, Hungarian. It's actually not that easy to show with clear etymologies and sound changes that Finnish and Hungarian really are cousins. There are maybe 200 solid cognates. (A cognate is a word showing in both its pronunciation and its meaning or grammatical properties that it was ancestrally shared by the relevant languages, and was transmitted in altered phonological form down the centuries rather than being directly borrowed between modern languages.) The Economist (December 24th, page 73) has a very interesting article about the way Finno-Ugric languages are dying in Russia. In connection with the discussion of linguistic relatedness, it cites Estonian philologist Mall Hellam as having come up with a sentence that should be intelligible to Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian speakers alike:

Finnish:Elävä kala ui veden alla.
Estonian:Elav kala ujub vee all.
Hungarian:Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt.

The translation is "The living fish swims in water." Looking at the examples (which are in the standard spellings for the three languages) set me to wondering if there is indeed mutual intelligibility here, as opposed to just full cognate status for all words. It seems rather implausible to me that a monolingual Hungarian would be able to understand even one sentence of Finnish unless they took it on as a puzzle-solving exercise. I guess I know how to find out: I can pronounce Finnish well enough, and I have Hungarian friends who don't read Language Log. I'll do some work on the question.

[In fact I have already heard from a Finn living in Hungary, Vili Manula, who says no Hungarians understand the Finnish sentence, and certainly no Finn would understand the Hungarian one. So the experiments are done, and my suspicions are justified. And a thread on the discussion forum sci.lang pretty much demolishes the mutual intelligibility claims; it seems the sentences have a long history in the Finno-Ugric world, and calling them mutually intelligible was always way, way exaggerated.]

Talking of things being far-fetched, one member of the Finno-Ugric movement headquartered in Talinn (Estonia), fearing that publishing things like a slim volume of poetry in Mari was not going to be enough to ensure the survival of Finno-Ugric in the Russian area, remarked to The Economist's reporter that what they really need is The Da Vinci Code in Udmurt. Which set me to wondering whether you would need to translate it into bad Udmurt to get the feel of the original.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at December 26, 2005 11:29 AM