Well found, Europe!

Sep 23, 2004 09:10

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Comments 6

pphaneuf September 23 2004, 09:05:40 UTC
Heh. Now I'd like to see a Turk/Finnish translator. ;-)

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denizsarikaya September 23 2004, 09:08:26 UTC
Actually, that's not necessarily so far out of the realm of probability. Depending on how you set up your language family trees, Turkish and Finnish are related. :)

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dcoombs September 23 2004, 09:35:53 UTC
In that both are languages spoken in Europe, yes. But that's going pretty far up the language tree. :)

Regardless, I will agree that a translator between any two arbitrary languages *is* possible, but certain ones will surely be more difficult than others.

My understanding is that Finnish is related to Hungarian and Estonian, but not much else. How close to Turkish is it actually? I'm ever curious...

Have fun,
-Dave

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denizsarikaya September 23 2004, 10:00:56 UTC
Ehh... by saying they're both spoken in Europe, you're not saying much, seeing as neither language is Indo-European.

If you believe in combining the Uralic languages and the Altaic languages (forming the Ural-Altaic grouping), then they most definitely are related. The languages in both these groups express vowel harmony, are agglutinative (slapping pre/post-fixes onto roots like mad), and have no grammatical gender.

But their vocabulary base is very different, so finding common root words has been mostly futile.

Here is where I started looking for information, as I can always remember they all follow vowel harmony, but forget the other shared traits.

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