The Evolution of English

@Stephie yes, neighbouring languages often have wide similarities.

from your studies, can you say anything about the purported similarities between Finnish and Hungarian?

@sarabee1995 yes, this thought did cross my mind...

@Yulianna Funny that you might address Hungarian. I do speak a few words of Hungarian and my latest travel to Budapest a few weeks ago reminded me that the language is awfully difficult to speak properly and to understand, just like Finnish.

I do not speak a single word of Finnish but both languages share some common grammatical similarities because they apply suffixes to the words, just like Russian does. Sorry but I don't speak Ukrainian but I would assume that the grammatical structure is similar to Russian, thus to Hungarian, Finnish or Korean, a so-called agglutinative language.

I do remember a word I learned in Russian, the word "table" (стол). By the table would translate "за столом" and on the table would be "на столе".

I don't have the pretension to want to teach you anything. It was purely an observation.

During my last vacation, my travels also took me to Bulgaria. The language is also written it Cyrillic letters yet it shares little in common with Russian in terms of a complex case system. I could however decipher a word or 2.

@KiwiBird mandarin?

Well the Port of Darwin....the main port in Northern Australia was leased for 99 years in 2019 to a Chinese company so we should all learn Mandarin. The current centre left government wants it back in Australian hands. Have no idea how he will accomplish this. Tariffs?