Talk:Cast/@comment-5288784-20150723121901/@comment-5288784-20150723232656

There are different stages of languages' relationship. Hungarian and Finnish are related to some degree, but that doesn't mean they are related as much as Italian with French or Danish with German. Hungarian and Finnish diverged hundreds of years ago and had little contact with each other since then, not necerserarily in vocabulary (you can compare it here), but in some grammar elements, like the large amount of grammatical cases, vovel harmony and so on. Check out this article if you are curious for more.

As for the question about double spelling (and Slavic languages), that's a matter of individually developed orthography, so it's natural people in different countries conveyed different spelling. In Slavic languages there are two main Latin script orthographies. One is Polish, the other is Czech and all the variants developed from it (Croatian is a mix of both with some of its own elements, but more Czech than Polish inspired).

And of course there is Cyrillic alphabet, which you would have hard time figuring out how to read if you don't know it, and even Cyrillic has its national variants with their own characters. And guess what, in Ukrainian and Russian there is a certain pair characters with swapped pronuncation. And while I can't certainly say I can understand everything from, let's say, Russian, Slavic languages still have quite some shared vocabulary.

PS: According to certain linguists, the language relationship reaches so deep, that even Japanese is related in a very distant way with European languages.