Linguistics

Fun text, the language trivia is interesting!

One note, regarding #3:

Finnish is a linguistic freezer.

Got to be a tiiiny bit careful with claims that some language is a "linguistic freezer", "conservative", "innovative" etc. This sort of claim is often prone to cherry picking, because it depends a lot on the weight that you give each linguistic feature.

Here's an example from the Romance languages. People often claim that French is "innovative" or evolved "aggressively", while Sardinian would be "conservative" or "closer" to Latin. Right? Well, look at the fate of Latin /pl fl kl/ - it's usually intact in French, but either rhotacised to /pɾ fɾ kɾ/ in Sardinian or iotated to /pj fj kj/.

And regarding Finnish this does apply a bit. A few examples from Wikipedia:

• Proto-Uralic / Hungarian / Finnish / English //comments
• *jäŋe / jég / jää / ice // Hungarian devoices /ŋ/ into /g/, but keeps it; Finnish simply elides it
• *mi / mi / mi-, mikä / what // Finnish doesn't preserve the isolated form

Another factor to consider is that Proto-Uralic is usually rendered with an orthography considerably closer to written Finnish than to written Hungarian.