Indo-Uralic languages Finnish verb conjugations and pronouns are much more closely related to Indo-European than they would be expected to be by chance; and since borrowing basic grammar is rare, that this would suggest a common origin with Indo-European. (Finnish is preferred for this argument over Saami or Hungarian because it seems to be more conservative, i.e. to have diverged less than the others have from Proto-Uralic. But even then, similar suspicious parallels have been noted between Hungarian and Armenian verb conjugation.) Given that the morphemes involved are short and the comparisons generally concern only a single phoneme, the probability of accidental
Uralic–Yukaghir languages World's Languages" by Merritt Ruhlen (1987). Uralic and Yukaghir are listed as a language family, forming a subgroup of a higher-order family called "Eurasiatic", in Joseph Greenberg's "Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives" (2000–2002). However, Greenberg did not present a discursive argument for this subgroup, presumably leaving it to the reader to work it out from the data on grammar and vocabulary he presented. The Uralic–Yukaghir family has been accepted by the American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard (2008:176, citing Ruhlen 1987:64–65) but without presenting any argument for it, and Russian linguist Vladimir Napolskikh. Collinder summarizes his case for, not merely a relationship