:The OED give the etymology of Ugrian as from Ugri, the name given by early Russian writers to an Asiatic race dwelling east of the Ural Mountains. Uighur, on the other hand is from East Turkish uighur, [from] ui to follow, fit, agree + -gur adj. suffix. Uighur is related to such forms as Wigur, Oygur, Yugor, etc. Maybe connected, maybe not. But the Uighur clearly speak a Turkic language, and Ugrian (whatever the origin of the label) are clearly not Turkic languages.  

 :As for why they're so eager to separate them, there's a long history of using a certain word for "those people", and anyone who comes from "over there" gets the same appelation. So, even if the names are related, it doesn't follow that the people are. (Think of "Indian" in English!) You want to be able to tell how much of that is justified, and for that you need to identify the possible errors. And no one claims that the Magyar, Huns, and Turks "had nothing to do with each other". We just don't know what they did have to do with each other, and until we do (if we ever do), the responsible thing is to at least refute claims based on nationalism rather than on an objective reading of the evidence. (Such as the ridiculous claims that the Hungarian language is unrelated to Ugrian, just because the author would rather have the mighty Turks for relatives.) Such claims have a truly horrible history, which many people do not want to repeat Just because few of them ever produce the atrocities of Aryanism doesn't mean they're any more respectable academically, and they tend to crop up whenever there's ethnic conflict: Serb and Albanian, Jew and Arab, Hutu and Tutsi, Japanese and Okinawan, Latino and Mayan, Greek and Turk and Armenian (the Azeri are genetically Armenian, for example!), Thai and Khmer, etc. etc.  00:38, 2005 July 21 (UTC)