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
Indo-Uralic languages to their south or west, including possibly their words for "ox", "*gʷou-" (compare English "cow") and "grain", "*bʰars-" (compare English "barley"). In contrast, basic vocabulary – words such as "me", "hand", "water", and "be" – is much less readily borrowed between languages. If Indo-European and Uralic are genetically related, they should show agreements in basic vocabulary, with more agreements if they are closely related, fewer if they are less closely related. Advocates of a genetic relation between Indo-European and Uralic maintain that the borrowings can be filtered out by application of phonological and morphological analysis and that a core of