Page "Uralic languages" Paragraph 8

By 1770, all the languages belonging to the Finno-Ugric languages had been identified, almost 20 years before the traditional starting-point of Indo-European studies.

Nonetheless, these relationships were not widely accepted.

Hungarian intellectuals especially were not interested in the theory and preferred to assume connections with Turkic tribes, an attitude characterized by Ruhlen ( 1987 ) as due to " the wild unfettered Romanticism of the epoch ".

Still, in spite of this hostile climate, the Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics suggested a relationship between Hungarian and Sami ( Lapp ) in 1770, and in 1799, the Hungarian Sámuel Gyarmathi published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date.