Are the Finno-Ugrian languages related to other language families? What about Finnish and Turkish?
Most Finno-Ugrists would answer: we don’t know, at least nothing has been proved yet. Some linguists have proposed a relationship between the Finno-Ugrian and Indo-European language families, but it seems more probable that the Indo-Europeans are simply our old neighbours: the FU languages have some really ancient IE loanwords. Some other hypotheses have also been proposed (Uralo-Altaic, Uralo-Dravidian, Finno-Basque, Hungaro-Sumerian etc. etc.); as a rule, these are either based on antiquated ideas or created by (lay) people with no expertise on one (or both) of the language groups in question. The Ural-Altaic hypothesis still survives in some parts of the world as a common belief that “Finnish and Turkish are related”. However, as pointed out earlier, the structural similarities between Finnish (or other Finno-Ugrian languages) and Turkish (or other Turkic or “Altaic” languages) are of a typological character: these languages belong to the same type. The basic vocabulary in these lan
