Flora with the blog Lexiophiles discusses the auditory similarities between Hungarian and Finnish in this post from last week.  She argues that native speakers of a language within the Finno-Ugric group, such as speakers of Hungarian and Finnish, can often detect a resemblance in the spoken language of the other group members without prior knowledge.  She proceeds to look closer at the sentence structures of both languages to make further comparisons:

“But just how closely related are these languages really? We cannot understand each other, but this sentence (from Wikipedia) is a fairly good example of how similar the language structures are.  Of course, this is an illustration of the best case scenario – in most cases, only a hardcore linguist could detect any similarities.

English: Live fish swim under the ice in the winter.

Finnish: Jään alla talvella elävät kalat uiskentelevat.
Hungarian: A jég alatt télen eleven halak úszkálnak.”  

Flora concludes her post with two music videos, one in each language, encouraging the reader to see if they can notice this resemblance.

Photo Courtesy: The Los Angeles Times

Sunday’s L.A. Times featured an interview with Russell Harvard, lead-actor in “Tribes,” a current play at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum.  Harvard (also known for his role as the adult HW in P.T. Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”) is cast in the lead role as Billy, a young deaf man who must convince his dysfunctional family to approve of his relationship with Sylvia, a woman losing her hearing.  Among the topics discussed with Harvard are growing up in a deaf family, the sense of community among deaf individuals and his appreciation for ASL (American Sign Language).