The Living Fish Swims Under the Water

My Google email account associated with this blog is uszik11@gmail.com.  It is a pun. I took USZIK ELEVEN from what is supposed to be one phrase mutually intelligible in Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian.  “The living fish swims under water.” You can google the phrase for articles dedicated to it.

ISO map of the Uralic languages from Wikipedia

The proposition was offered by Mall Hellam, a scholar from Estonia who has taken on a fight for the cultural traditions of ethnic minorities within western Siberia. In those lands, native peoples speak languages that are similar to Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian.  Over the years, I acquired books and articles about the languages of the Ostyak, Vogul, and others.  I recognized words that I learned in Hungarian, such as “kutya” for dog. 

• Estonian: 'Elav kala ujub vee all
• Finnish: 'Elävä kala ui veden alla.
• Hungarian: 'Eleven hal úszik a víz alatt.
• English: A live fish is swimming underwater.

"Linguistic roots common to both branches of the traditional Finno-Ugric language tree (Finno-Permic and Ugric) are distant. About 200 words with common roots in all main Finno-Ugric languages have been identified by philologists including 55 about fishing …" 

Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages

“The Dying Fish Swims in the Water” in The Economist here: http://www.economist.com/node/5323735

(Article is about the suppression by the Russian central authorities of native cultures in northwestern Siberia .)

Wikipedia articles

Ural-Altaic Languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural%E2%80%93Altaic_languages

Uralic Languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages

Finno-Ugric Languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages

Mall Hellam “European of the Year” here:

http://oef.org.ee/en/news/article/mall-hellam-is-the-european-of-the-year/

Mall Hellam and Human Rights here:

http://www.humanrightsestonia.ee/en/annualconference/conference-2013/program-2013/mall-hellam/

and here:
http://www.icnl.org/programs/global/gf2011/bios/Hellam.htm

Mall Hellam biography (in Estonian) here:

https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mall_Hellam

(The Latin words “Information” and “Institute” are easy to spot. The Finns and Estonians must have had some contact with the Czechs in the distant past, and apparently stole all the vowels from the Czech   language and brought them back to the Baltic lands.)

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