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.
Uralic–Yukaghir languages linguistic science may yet be able to resolve some of these seemingly intractable issues (cf. Vajda 2008). Häkkinen (2012) rejects a genetic link between Uralic and Yukaghir, arguing that the grammatical systems show too few convincing resemblances, especially the morphology, and proposes instead that many apparent Uralic–Yukaghir cognates are really borrowed from an early stage of Uralic (ca. 3000 BC; he dates Proto-Uralic at ca. 2000 BC) into an early stage of Yukaghir, while Uralic was (according to him) spoken near the Sayan region and Yukaghir near the Upper Lena River and near Lake Baikal. Aikio (2014) agrees that Uralic–Yukaghir