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
Finnic languages harmony (lost in Livonian, generally also in Estonian and Veps) is also an important process. Historically, the "erosion" of word-final sounds (strongest in Livonian, Võro and Estonian) may leave a phonemic status to the morphophonological variations caused by the agglutination of the lost suffixes, which results in three phonemic lengths in these languages. The original Uralic palatalization was lost in proto-Finnic, but most of the diverging dialects reacquired it. Palatalization is a part of the Estonian literary language and is an essential feature in Võro, as well as Veps, Karelian, and other eastern Finnic languages. It is also found in