Comment by mltony | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mltony | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that what constitutes a word is not uniformly defined across all languages - every language has its own set of rules that is partly justified by its grammar, and sometimes by historical reason.

Let me give you an example in English: a dog, with dog, to dog, behind dog, inside dog, ...

I can continue this list forever. But you would tell me that's not interesting, because I'm just using prepositions Well, then we'll have to ask what is a preposition. In English you write preposition as a separate word because you can insert something in between: a red dog, with blue dog, to tall dog, behind quick dog, inside my dog, ...

But what if in finnish you canot squeeze anything between preposition and noun? Oh, I rather meant postposition, but same difference. I don't speak a word of Finnish, but I suspect that's the case, and you are supposed to put your adjectives either before or after that word concatenated with all its postpositions. Maybe that's why the word is written together with its postposition.

Some languages add markers to the words, such as gender markers, tense markers, evidence markers (dog that I see vs. dog that I've heard of) in a similar way. Now just compute a cartesian product of all the possible prepositions times 3 gender markers times 3 tense markers times a few evidence markers and times 2 plurality markers. You get a scary number in the end, especially if you have to learn this language.

And as about Finnish, I have a friend who learnt it as a second language, and he told me that it's not as scary as it seems, because despite the shear number of declension forms, it all follows patterns with relatively few exceptions. That is not to say that Finnish is a simple language, but it's not as complicated as you might think after reading this story.

P.S. I'm an amateur in the field of linguistics with no knowledge of Finnish, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My example about cartesian product wasn't about Finnish in particular, but rather how gigantic numbers of declension forms may arise in other languages.

Native Finnish speaker here. Those are not postpositions but rather declension suffixes to the same stem word (koira, dog). It's still one word, and you discern it as such in speech. Though in speech, if the combination of suffixes you are using is particularly complex or unusual, you might need to make extra effort to speak particularly clearly to ensure intelligibility.

In English, you say "together with my dogs", in Finnish you could say "koirieni kanssa" (with-my-dogs together), or cram it all to "koirineni" (with-my-together-dogs), but you would pronounce the latter word clearly to ensure understanding as the -n- suffix in this context is uncommon in modern spoken Finnish.

Using a similar suffix method as Finnish uses to build declension, we could in English build from stem dog -> dogish (i.e. dog-like) -> dogishness (i.e. quality of being dog-like) -> dogishnessism ("ideology advocating the qualities of being dog-like"). It's clearly one word, but it might be hard to imagine a real everyday context to use it in.

Finnish is hard but not impossible. One great thing is the orthography is practically perfectly regular - something which English gets horribly wrong.

I'll add that Turkish is also like this.

"with my dogs" is köpeklerimle, dog-s-my-with.

You can make large variety of "word"s based on köpek, dogishness would be "köpeksilik" which would win you some strange looks if you used it but Google turns up what appear to be a few thousand legitimate usages.

It's not quite fair to call köpeksilik or köpeklerimle words though, it's not like you have to memorize them to learn the language. Just as you can build the phrase "with my dogs" out of words you already know, you can quickly construct or understand köpeklerimle from the suffixes it's built out of.

And just like the end of this list reaches forms which a couple Finnish-speakers have said aren't very meaningful, Turkish also allows for some extreme "words".

Here's the longest Turkish word: muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine

It means something like "As if you are those whom we may not be able to easily make into people who make others unsuccessful". It usually takes a native speaker a while to actually understand this word.

Yes, this property of a language is called agglutination, and it is not at all uncommon even in completely unrelated languages.

It is possible that declension suffixes once upon time were postpositions. At least I remember this was a theory behind Indo-European declension suffixes. If a postposition is used often enough after a noun, people quickly learn the pattern, and think of the pair as a single word. Although this must have happened before writing was invented, so probably people didn't think of what constitutes a word. Now every now and then it happens that a word dies in a language. A postposition could have died as a standalone word but was preserved as a declension suffix. And now we might only think of it as a suffix.

As far as I know, all languages in the Finnish-Ugric family use a similar system of declension suffixes. Usually, the different declension cases are similar in number and their functions, but the actual suffixes used may vary from language to language. Proto Indo-European is indeed believed to have had a suffix-based complex inflection system, which the modern Germanic prepositions either have replaced or developed from.

English orthography is great for Middle English. Not so hot for the various modern Englishes.

Reminds me of elementary when someone pulled out the word Disestablishmentarianism.

They missed out on antidisestablishmentarianism?

I think your mostly right. Finnish language has prepositions like "below", "over", "above" but lot of prepositions just happen by conjucating the word. Also prepositions appear in few different ways based on the sound of the word, so "(to) dog" is "koira(lle)" but "(to) home" is "koti(in)".

It gets more complicated when you start mixing other attributes like ownership, so "(our) dogs" becomes "koira(mme)", then you can combine both of them saying "to our dogs", so it becomes "koir(illemme)". Then you can add in time references, conditionals, a question and you get lot of those others forms, like "koirammeko" which translates to "our dogs?"

>Also prepositions appear in few different ways based on the sound of the word, so "(to) dog" is "koira(lle)" but "(to) home" is "koti(in)".

There's a subtle difference between those. Perhaps the latter would be better off translated as "(in to) home", or perhaps the former as "(for) dog".

I was going to suggest that English has a lot of postpositions if you count some of the suffixes such as -side and -wise. ie. fireside or lengthwise

After attempting to double check this, it looks like the siffix is not considered a postposition and the suffixed words are simply prepositions themselves. ie fireside chat.

The usual thing that would make you call a thing a declension, is that it actually mutates the root word somehow, instead of just agglomerating onto it.

> Let me give you an example in English: a dog, with dog, to dog, behind dog, inside dog, ...

updog...

What’s updog?

Nothing much. Whats up with you?

This is HN not Reddit but it seems okay on this thread, so I’ll allow it, especially since it made me laugh on a Friday evening.

If you allow it, just allow it, don't kill the mood. Otherwise state clearly that you allow it but want it to stop.

rofl

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