Excerpt from The Kalevala, Vol. 1 of 2: The Epic Poem of Finland, Into English

It may be interesting to note in this connection that Canon Isaac Taylor, and Professor Sayce have but very recently awakened great interest in this question, in Europe especially, by the reading of papers before the British Philologicalviii. The Kalevala.

Association, in which they argue in favor of the Finnie origin of the Aryans. For this new theory these scholars present exceedingly strong evidence, and they conclude that the time of the separation of the Aryan from the Finnie stock must have been more than five thousand years ago.

The Finnish nation has one of the most sonorous and ¿exible of languages. Of the cultivated tongues of Europe, the Magyar, or Hungarian, bears the most positive signs of a deep-rooted Similarity to the Finnish. Both belong to the Ugrian stock of agglutinative languages, t.e., those which preserve the root most carefully, and effect all changes of grammar by suffixes attached to the original stem. Grimm has shown that both Gothic and Icelandic present traces of Finnish in¿uence.

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