The Hungarian language is totally different to the dialects spoken by its neighbours, which usually speak Indo-European languages. Hungarian comes from the Uralic region of Asia and belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group, meaning its closest relatives are actually Finnish and Estonian, which are two other really difficult languages for foreigners to learn because they are pretty alien compared to any other languages.

I'm guessing the words you mentioned are all close because they are modern. In the same way that many words that have entered Japanese in the last 200 years are actually English or Portuguese words brought in by foreigners and adapted to the local pronunciation. You can cheat so much in Japanese by simply learning to read katakana and finding all the English words.

> meaning its closest relatives are actually Finnish and Estonian

Hungarian’s closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi. While Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are indeed in the same Uralic language family, they were at the very opposite ends of the dialect continuum that ultimately produced that language family, and they no longer bear any close relationship.

"paradicsom" just goes to show that this article is confidently incorrect:

> Exceptions: Italian uses pomodoro, and some other languages use a word similar to the Italian one. Mandarin Chinese is another exception!

"paradicsom" is not similar to pomodoro, in either pronounciation or meaning.

And if the author has made one so simple mistake, we have to assume there are many more with the more exotic languages.

Another example of this article being confidently wrong about tomato is Czech, where the word used is rajče or rajské jablko, the latter meaning "apple of paradise."

Same in Austrian German (Paradeiser) so perhaps something to do with it the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Hm, that's an interesting thought which never occurred to me until now. I didn't know about the Austrian German expression, but paradicsom in Hungarian can mean either tomato or paradise! Please chime in if you're familiar with other languages of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Edited to add: According to Wikipedia [0], the original Hungarian expression was also "apple of paradise," which then got shortened to just paradiscom. It also points out that the Italian pomodoro is literally "apple of gold." I guess the far-flung origins were thought of as paradisical...

[0] https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradicsom_(n%C3%B6v%C3%A9nyfa...

https://64.media.tumblr.com/d6de5bcddb77eae9d76d370e5f62bce7... the "paradise" area seems to roughly align with the extent of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Yeah, pomodoro means "golden apple", paradicsom/Paradeiser comes from "paradise" (looks like Hungarians really like tomatos!), so nothing in common except that they start with "P" and the countries they are used in are roughly in the same region. Also, in Romanian a tomato is simply a "roșie" ("red") - Romanians apparently like to name fruit by their color, eggplants are called "vinete" ("purples").

well, we used to like them, but then the fantastic "long shelf life" variations came...

"Taxi" is quite different in Chinese and Arabic for a start. I'd guess it's likely to be almost universally understood among all humans that have had exposure to the concept though.

so no winner then?

I think taxi (spelled differently) is in Russian, Greek, and Spanish

Taxi in Russian is indeed pronounced the same and is written Такси.

If said Starbucks is in Germany, you might well be able to order some Kaffee and Schokolade, though!