Regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and other Uralic languages The relationship is most obvious when comparing all Uralic languages together, for then individual idiosyncrasies are averaged out, but here we will just compare Hungarian with Finnish and Estonian (two Finnic languages). One important innovation of Hungarian is the lenition of the stop consonants *p *k in initial position. The third stop inherited from Proto-Uralic, *t, did not undergo such a change. In the middle of words (note that due to the loss of the word final vocals in the Old Hungarian period these are now at the end of the words), Hungarian has also lenited original stops, but in
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)