Uralic languages the loss of *x and alteration of *ï. Finnish has even preserved old Indo-European borrowings relatively unchanged as well. (An example is "porsas" ("pig"), loaned from Proto-Indo-European "*porḱos" or pre-Proto-Indo-Iranian "*porśos", unchanged since loaning save for loss of palatalization, *ś > s.) The Estonian philologist Mall Hellam proposed cognate sentences that she asserted to be mutually intelligible among the three most widely spoken Uralic languages: Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian: However, linguist Geoffrey Pullum reports that neither Finns nor Hungarians could understand the other language's version of the sentence. No Uralic language has exactly the idealized typological profile of the family.
Uralic–Yukaghir languages has vaguely implied the existence of a Uralic–Yukaghir genetic node, and in this he seems to have been followed by Ruhlen and Greenberg, followed in turn by Bomhard. The actual relations of these languages remain to be scrutinized in detail. No work of synthesis of a definitive nature has appeared on this subject. As in several other cases of this sort (see Ural–Altaic languages), that Uralic and Yukaghir are related has been argued for in some detail, but how they are related remains uncertain. It is therefore not surprising that, at the present time (2009), the validity of the Uralic–Yukaghir