Indo-Uralic languages Finnish verb conjugations and pronouns are much more closely related to Indo-European than they would be expected to be by chance; and since borrowing basic grammar is rare, that this would suggest a common origin with Indo-European. (Finnish is preferred for this argument over Saami or Hungarian because it seems to be more conservative, i.e. to have diverged less than the others have from Proto-Uralic. But even then, similar suspicious parallels have been noted between Hungarian and Armenian verb conjugation.) Given that the morphemes involved are short and the comparisons generally concern only a single phoneme, the probability of accidental
Uralic languages part of Uralic. Meanwhile, in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, a chair for Finnish language and linguistics at the University of Helsinki was created in 1850, first held by Castrén. In 1883, the Finno-Ugrian Society was founded in Helsinki on the proposal of Otto Donner, which would lead to Helsinki overtaking St. Petersburg as the chief northern center of research of the Uralic languages. During the late 19th and early 20th century (until the separation of Finland from Russia following the Russian revolution), a large number of stipendiates were sent by the Society to survey the still less known