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 languages published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date. Up to the beginning of the 19th century, knowledge on the Uralic languages spoken in Russia had remained restricted to scanty observations by travelers. Already Finnish historian Henrik Gabriel Porthan had stressed that further progress would require dedicated field missions. One of the first of these was undertaken by Anders Johan Sjögren, who brought the Vepsians to general knowledge and elucidated in detail the relatedness of Finnish and Komi. Still more extensive were the field research expeditions made in the 1840s by Matthias Castrén (1813–1852) and Antal Reguly (1819–1858), who