Uralic languages the loss of *x and alteration of *ï. Finnish has even preserved old Indo-European borrowings relatively unchanged as well. (An example is "porsas" ("pig"), loaned from Proto-Indo-European "*porḱos" or pre-Proto-Indo-Iranian "*porśos", unchanged since loaning save for loss of palatalization, *ś > s.) The Estonian philologist Mall Hellam proposed cognate sentences that she asserted to be mutually intelligible among the three most widely spoken Uralic languages: Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian: However, linguist Geoffrey Pullum reports that neither Finns nor Hungarians could understand the other language's version of the sentence. No Uralic language has exactly the idealized typological profile of the family.
Proto-Finnic language Proto-Finnic language Proto-Finnic or Proto-Baltic-Finnic is the common ancestor of the Finnic languages, which include the national languages Finnish and Estonian. Proto-Finnic is not attested in any texts, but has been reconstructed by linguists. Proto-Finnic is itself descended ultimately from Proto-Uralic. Three stages of Proto-Finnic are distinguished in literature. The sounds of Proto-Finnic can be reconstructed through the comparative method. Reconstructed Proto-Finnic is traditionally transcribed using the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. The following UPA and related conventions are adopted in this article for transcribing Proto-Finnic forms: The Proto-Finnic consonant inventory had relatively few phonemic fricatives, much like that of the modern