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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

(for the ignorant: these two are otherwise wildly different languages)

I believe Finnish is wildly different from just about every other language. Hindi and English are closerly related.

It's in the Finno-Ugric lanugage group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages which also includes Estonian and Hungarian. But yes, since these are not Indoeuropean languages, they are not as closely related to English as Hindi is.

Finnish, (and Estonian), Hungarian, Japanese and Turkish (which includes the dialects spoken in Anatolia, Azerbaidjan (whose people speak almost the same language that the Persian Azeris speak), Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and the Urumqi region of China) are sister languages. To my knowledge, all of them have gender-neutral pronouns. (And actually I'm pretty sure about Anatolian Turkish :))

> (And actually I'm pretty sure about Anatolian Turkish :))

This is probably a sentence I will hear/see exactly once in my life; at least in a not-contrived manner. Thank you for that.

The Altaic languages eh? That's a very controversial theory you got there. Even those still supporting it today mostly exclude the Finno-Ugric languages from the list, btw.

Strangely enough, Finnish and Hungarian are related, even though they are relatively isolated geographically.

Finnish and Estonian are really close.

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