How does that compare to the other languages in the Bantu family? Long ago I studied Ichibemba, and think it had something like 18 noun classes, too.
IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.
IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.
Finnish (and other agglutinative languages) use suffixes to express many concepts that in English are expressed with prepositions: imagine if instead of "in my room" you would have to say "room-my-in" and you would call this the noun case of "containment" or something similar, the number of cases would go up pretty quickly.
It's not actually that complicated, most are simple suffixes - so for example, instead of on the table in Finnish you say table-on (pöydällä). Once you learn the rules of vowel harmony and consonant mutation it's a pretty regular, straightforward language.
As for cases: I am learning hungarian which is related to finnish and also has more than 20 cases.
The problem, in my personal experience, is that learning such an agglutinative language is slightly harder than others because when you are learning you don't know all the suffixes and at the same time you don't even know enough vocabulary to understand what's what. Especially once you consider that suffixes stack up.
I see something like "ccddee" and it's hard to understand where I should break up the thing (<ccd,dee>, <cc,dd,ee>, <cc,dde,e> etc). YMMV :)
hungarian is not related to finnish, rather to turkic languages. i am a native hungarian speaker, and i know hungarian grammar is logically closer to turkish than to finnish. the story how they became related is purely political, and references easily found on this subject and i do not intend to get into. in hungarian literature class we studied finnish words that were similar, grammer, and a few poems.
"" The Uralic languages ( /jʊˈrælɨk/) (sometimes referred to as Uralian languages) constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt. ""
i will not comment any further on this thread. my view is based on extensive research of turkish, finnish, hungarian, english, german, spanish, and russian grammers.