Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
Thanks - is there any mutual intelligibility between the two?
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Somewhat, as in quite a lot of words are similar, but many more aren't. If a Finnish native speaker has had no previous contact with the Estonian language at all, he/she would probably not understand much, and vice versa. Finnish also totally nativized most of their loanwords in the past (less so nowadays), but Estonians didn't and that makes mutual understanding much more difficult (for example,
phone is
telefon (from
telephone) in Estonian, but
puhelin (from
puhe - speech) in Finnish).