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 the expression, as "*ne e-m mene" 'not be-me go' etc. What made it possible to drop the negative particle was that there was no morphological or syntactic possibility of confusing the expression with the positive verb, which had the form 1s. "*mene-m", 2s. "*mene-t"; 1p. "*mene-me", 2p. "*mene-te" (still preserved without change in Finnish, except for final "*-m" > "-n") 'I go', etc. The dropping of the negative particle is well-attested by such expressions as French "pas", "personne", "rien" and Old Norse "engi", "eigi" (ib.). Pedersen’s argument implies that the Uralic negative verb is very ancient, for three reasons: (1)