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Comment by inkyoto

2 months ago

Finnish and Hungarian, despite being spread well apart from each other, are from the same Uralian language family.

Both (and other languages in the family) share one distinctive feature – an excessively large number of noun cases (by Indo-European language family standards).

However, these languages do not have prepositions, i.e. the 16-20 odd noun cases replace them, so it makes it somewhat easier for a new learner.

The noun cases can also be thought of as postpositions despite obviously not being them, but it is a good and simple mental model.

The real outlier is Icelandic, which has a notoriously irregular grammar, multiple noun declension and verb conjugation groups, prepositions and postpositions despite a small number of noun cases.