Uralic languages impetus from the fact that these languages, unlike most of the other languages spoken in Europe, are not part of what is now known as the Indo-European family. In 1717, Swedish professor Olof Rudbeck proposed about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian, of which about 40 are still considered valid. Several early reports comparing Finnish or Hungarian with Mordvin, Mari or Khanty were additionally collected by Leibniz and edited by his assistant Johann Georg von Eckhart. In 1730, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published his book ("The North and East Parts of Europe and Asia"), surveying the geography, peoples and languages
Indo-Uralic languages central contention, agreeing with Rédei's views, is that all of the lexical items claimed to be Indo-Uralic can be explained as loans from Indo-European into Uralic (see below for examples). The most common arguments in favour of a relationship between Indo-European and Uralic are based on seemingly common elements of morphology, such as the pronominal roots ("*m-" for first person; "*t-" for second person; "*i-" for third person), case markings (accusative "*-m"; ablative/partitive "*-ta"), interrogative/relative pronouns ("*kʷ-" "who?, which?"; "*y-" "who, which" to signal relative clauses) and a common SOV word order. Other, less obvious correspondences are suggested, such as