>Pretty close, it's pretty easy to understand the basics of what an estonian is saying if you speak finnish
Or so you might think, some words are exactly the same in finnish or look similar enough that you can connect the dots, but often enough those similar looking words might have completely different meaning in estonian. Not mutually intelligible.
I can understand main points when I hear Estonian speaking and communicate.
An Estonian guy told me that older Estonians can understand Finnish, but not younger Estonians. He said this was because Estonians used to listen to a lot of Finnish radio during the Cold War. This could be bullshit, however.
Hungarian not at all, Estonian a little
I found a Champions League stream with Estonian commentary last year and I roughly understood what they were talking about most of the time. They sound like alcoholics from Turku who mostly use made up words.
I've heard the same thing but also TV, not just radio.
Estonians during soviet rule had nothing else than soviet Television so they tuned in and watched finnish television instead.
>most of it is loaned
Wrong Ill spill your vér all over the place if you make such accusations my testvér
>So we have words like: veri-vér (blood) käsi-kéz (hand) vesi-víz (water), mitä-mit (what, acc.), sarvi-szarv (horn), that are similar enough that dialects give a bigger variation in their pronunciation than the one between the "official" ones, if we disregard the ending vowel.
>The list further extends if we allow a bit bigger difference: me-mi (we), te-ti (you, pl), millainen-milyen (what kind of), neljä-négy (four), elävä-eleven (living) and many more.
>Then comes the biggest group where the similarity is only clear to linguists as systematic consonant changes have to be taken into consideration. Words like: kala-hal (fish) pää-fő/fej (head), kuu-hold/hó (moon) etc.
>Finally there are some extinct words that remain in some form in the language, even though people don't normally know their meaning, like muna-monyó (egg), mesi-méz (honey).
>In addition there are also those words that look totally different, but the other relatives reveal their common origin like viisi-öt (five).
It's cool when there are visible similarities in those very first basic words, like various bodyparts, sun, moon, we, you, water, blood.
feels desu
>testvér
>test
???
>vér
I guess that is supposed to mean blood, in Finnish "veri"
yes