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
Uralic–Yukaghir languages linguistic science may yet be able to resolve some of these seemingly intractable issues (cf. Vajda 2008). Häkkinen (2012) rejects a genetic link between Uralic and Yukaghir, arguing that the grammatical systems show too few convincing resemblances, especially the morphology, and proposes instead that many apparent Uralic–Yukaghir cognates are really borrowed from an early stage of Uralic (ca. 3000 BC; he dates Proto-Uralic at ca. 2000 BC) into an early stage of Yukaghir, while Uralic was (according to him) spoken near the Sayan region and Yukaghir near the Upper Lena River and near Lake Baikal. Aikio (2014) agrees that Uralic–Yukaghir