Finnish as a world language? | Hacker News Reader

Finnish as a world language?

hagen-schmidt.de

379 pointsJetSetWilly504 comments

I feel the need to defend Finnish cases. Yes, they have a gazillion, but unlike other languages you might know (eg Latin or German), there’s nothing difficult about Finnish cases.

Most cases are simply used where English would use prepositions. In Finnish those are postfixes instead, a bunch of letters tacked onto the end of a word. It’s a case and not a word because there’s no space between the two, that’s it.

Eg “talo” means house. Talossa means “in the house”. Talon means “of the house” (actually, “the house’s” - omg English has cases too, super difficult). Talolla means “on (top of) the house”. That’s not harder than prepositions is it?

I did cheat a bit, because with some words you first got to find the root before you can tack on “-ssa”. The root of talo is also talo, but for some words you got to apply a (simple, purely letter-based) rule. Eg the root of “ankka” (duck) is “anka” so “the duck’s house” becomes “ankan talo”. There’s a bunch of rules to find the root of a noun and you can learn them in half an hour or so.

There’s plenty stuff that’s harder about Finnish (notably the vocabulary), but the cases are peanuts.

The difference between Finnish case markers and separate words is deeper than whether it's written with a space: case markers have to agree in vowel harmony with the stem whereas separate words don't.

It's still incredibly easy compared to the fusional case systems in languages like Latin or Russian.

Ahyes forgot about that.

Just to continue the explainer, vowel harmony means that “in the house” is “talossa” but “in the forest” is “metsässä”. Notice that it’s “-ssä” and not “-ssa”. This depends on which vowels are in the root. There’s two groups of vowels and Finnish words helpfully never mix the two in a single (non compound) word.

In other words, “vowel harmony” sounds fancy, but it’s a single

    if root.match(/a|u|o/) then “ssa” else “ssä”

If you are a non native English speaker you will notice shifts in how things are pronounced when put together, some of whiicht are just not written down, like pronouncing "a" as "ei" or "a" or "an" (this one written down )

That sounds like a pointless rule that can be dropped immediately to make the language easier.

> The difference between Finnish case markers and separate words is deeper than whether it's written with a space: case markers have to agree in vowel harmony with the stem whereas separate words don't.

That is not evidence that they are case affixes rather than separate words. The English articles adjust their pronunciation based on the word that follows them, but they are considered separate words rather than inflectional definiteness markers.

There is a special term for lexical items which are independent words in a syntactic sense without simultaneously being independent words in a phonological sense; they are called clitics, not affixes.

The Finnish case markers are not clitics. Clitics are distinguished in that they modify phrases, not words. For example the English possessive “‘s” is a clitic because it can modify a whole phrase in something like “[the Queen of England]’s hat” although it cannot appear as a word on its own. In contrast, the Finnish case markers are bound phonologically and syntactically to a single word and so they are affixes, not clitics.

What does "fusional" mean here?

Fusional means that, in the morphological system of a language, a single wordform encodes multiple parts of the meaning in a way that is opaque and can't be predicted from the parts.

That's very abstract but an example makes it clear. Consider some Latin words with their English translations:

mensa -- table (singular, nominative)

mensae -- tables (plural, nominative)

mensae -- to the table (singular, dative)

mensis -- to the tables (plural, dative)

There are two parts of meaning (whether it's singular vs. plural, and whether it's nominative vs. dative) which are expressed in these forms, but the way this is done is opaque. You can't look at "mensis" and break it into a part that corresponds to plurality, and a part that corresponds to dative: the suffix -is conveys both of those features simultaneously. That's a fusional language.

Compare with the Hungarian equivalents: (Finnish is similar, but I know Hungarian and not Finnish)

asztal -- table (singular, nominative)

asztalok -- tables (plural, nominative)

asztalnak -- to the table (singular, dative)

asztaloknak -- to the tables (plural, dative)

Here you can identify that the suffux -ok corresponds to plural and the suffix -nak corresponds to dative. So the Hungarian paradigm here is agglutinative, not fusional. The upshot is that the Hungarian paradigm will be easier to learn and to extend to a very large number of cases compared to the Latin paradigm.

Finnish is ranked as category 4 language out from 5 as how hard it is to learn, for English speakers

https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/languag...

Where a higher category means harder to learn, just to be clear. (44 weeks for Finnish, according to your link.)

The asterisk shows that Finnish is in category 4.5. That's harder than Russian!

Curious that Icelandic should be category 4--I don't know it all, but what I have seen of it looks to me a good deal like Old English or Anglo-Saxon, call it what you will.

Huh, I guess I didn’t make it easy for myself by trying to learn only category 4-5 languages.

This list is ridiculous, Japanese is nowhere that hard to learn.

I totally agree that the cases themselves aren't so bad conceptually (as you say, most of them are basically just prepositions turned into post-positions/endings); I don't think it's any worse than German or Russian. But I have to say that the mechanics of calculating consonant gradations etc. is decently painful—I think you might be overselling the lack of difficulty haha.

I enjoy studying languages and have learned enough Finnish to get midway through the Harry Potter series, and even just getting to the point where I could smoothly look up words, let alone remember them, took a fair amount of practice. (The form you see on the page often needs to be un-consonant-gradated before you can find it in the dictionary, and the rules are somewhat complicated, though very regular.)

One funny aspect of Finnish pronunciation is that the ubiquitous long sounds give it a bit of a herky-jerky rhythm. It's always sounded to me as if the speaker is trying to figure out the grammar too :)

I don't know German, but in Russian, the case endings also change depending on the grammatical gender of the word, whether it's singular or plural, and then on top of that there are three different categories with different declensions. It's not entirely orthogonal, since e.g. categorization is itself guided by gender, but still, that's a lot of different variations that have to be memorized for each case.

Russian cases are worse because they also apply to people's names. Finnish ones, as far as I know, don't.

Well, "talolla" can actually mean "at the house" or "the house has", depending on context. "On the house" would usually add "on top" or "talon päällä", or possibly "on the roof of" or "talon katolla". In theory you're right, but in practice the clarification is added. If it was table (pöytä) it would be correct and common

I forgot to include a link to blog post that demonstrates the ease, simplicity, beauty and clear logic of Finnish, so here you go.

https://depressingfinland.tumblr.com/post/65222506844/what-d...

Ah yeah thanks. My Finnish is super rusty but I still like to geek out on its grammar every once in a while.

That said, but this sort of contextual stuff happens with languages with prepositions too (eg “on the table” vs “on the job”). It’s not special about Finnish.

There's more. It can also mean "with the house" or "using the house" (as an implement to a verb). Such as "heitän sinua talolla", "I throw a house at you" (e.g. Monopoly house piece).

> Well, "talolla" can actually mean "at the house" or "the house has", depending on context.

Finnish is pretty weird and unique (at least among the languages I know) in that it doesn't have a separate word for "to have". I suppose the closest it gets is "omistaa", for "to own".

Well, that seeming ambiguity basically just means that English and Finnish prepositions don't match up 1-for-1.

(We have the same between English and German. Most of the time, you can translate the prepositions with a simple lookup table, but they aren't completely 1-for-1.)

I want to add to it that Finnish doesn’t actually have cases.

It’s just the equivalent of cases which takes the shape of suffixes.

Note that our personal pronouns also take the shape of suffixes in Finnish:

taloni (my house) talossani (in my house)

They’re really not cases.

In "talossani", there's clearly two suffixes after "talo":

-ssa is the suffix that marks the case

-ni is the first person possessive suffix (not a case)

The first person singular pronoun would be "minä" and its genitive case "minun" - not a suffix but including the suffix -n that marks the genitive case.

My house => Minun taloni (the possessive is visible in both words in formal Finnish: the genitive case in the pronoun, the possessive suffix in the noun)

My house => Mun talo (less formal Finnish shortens the pronoun and does not use the possessive suffix)

The fact that the possessive suffix is not a case does in no way indicate that there wouldn't be actual cases in Finnish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_noun_cases

Why shouldn’t they be considered cases?

> Most cases are simply used where English would use prepositions. In Finnish those are postfixes instead, a bunch of letters tacked onto the end of a word. It’s a case and not a word because there’s no space between the two, that’s it.

Unless linguistics has advanced since I learnt this (which is quite possible), the theory is that case (and conjugation? I can't remember) came from disambiguating particles that later fused into the base noun (/verb). And of course languages can subsequently go the other way (like English or French which have been shedding conjugation for a few hundred years and case for even longer, and gender too (French still has two but abandoned neuter a while ago).

I feel like calling them cases (while technically correct) make them more complex than they are.

I had the same experience with Turkish, which also has the same "issue" with cases. As long as you try to learn them cases, you'll give up. If you learn them as "this ending means at, this ending means in", you'll learn them in half a day.

Turkish case system is more complex than that actually: it has 7 morpho-syntactic (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative-directive, locative, ablative, instrumental) cases along with 11 derivational cases (commitative, associative, semblative-equative, privative, possesive, familial, diminutive, modal, temporal, benefactive, modal-final).

So... Then you've learnt cases in half a day. How could that become any harder by calling it "cases", or easier by not doing so? You're still doing and learning the same thing. Would it become easier or harder to learn by calling it "strawberry jam"? Or "greedlebeflurp"?

Informally cases can be thought of as groupings of adpositions that produce the same word form. So instead of remembering a bunch of 1:1 mappings from all the adpositions to endings, you first do a 1:N mapping to cases, and then 1:1 from cases to endings.

Whoa, that's like the exact opposite of Filipino languages (and, Austronesian in general, to my understanding). In Visayan, 'Sa' is a general preposition, it is a kindness to add whether that is over/under/around/inside/far from/near from the object it references.

Verb conjugations are where things get super interesting.

That's not how the terminology works. Nobody is out there claiming that Latin should be considered to have conjunctive and disjunctive cases (-que, -ve) in addition to its actual cases. They're especially not claiming that we should recognize an "interrogative case" (-ne) that isn't even restricted to nouns.

I know exactly one phrase in Finnish, but it’s likely sufficient for my purposes.

That phrase is “Hakkaa Päälle!” It’s best when shouted, immediate prior to an act of sudden violence.

kthxbye

It should be Japanese, of course!

Japanese can be written using either the Latin alphabet, or Chinese characters. The two most common writing systems in the world. It can also be written with its own elegant and purely phonetic writing system. There's even Braille, Morse code, and sign language encodings. It is truly media agnostic.

Japanese has a regular grammar. From a linguist's perspective, aside from the politeness system, it's really quite normal for a language. Very little in it to surprise a Finnish, Turkish or Korean speaker. (Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.)

Finally, some 40% of Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese, and Chinese and Japanese technical terms flow freely between the languages to this day. Another ~20% of Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from European languages like English or Portuguese. The majority of the world already speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don't even know it! For this reason, Chinese, European, and American, alike, usually find it quite easy to learn.

> speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don't even know it

Only for a very loose definition of "speaking"

A Chinese without knowledge of Japanese reading it or vice versa would be like a English speaker reading French or vice versa. You'd recognize some vocabulary, but the grammar and pronounciation is significantly different and most of the overall sentence is still foreign.

Even English loanwords are significantly altered by shortening and mapping to Japanese tones. Most English speakers wouldn't recognize "terebi" (television) or "konbini" (convenience store) for example.

Not to mention some words like パターン (pataan/pattern) have either very specific meanings that an English speaker would not understand naturally or other words like テンション (tenshon/tension) have completely different meanings that an English speaker would not recognise as English.

> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.

English is a mess because it is a mixture of languages from different ethnic groups: Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, and Norman. It's been used for cross-cultural communication ever since it was identifiable as English.

Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme -- resulting in suggestions like that we all start speaking Toki Pona -- but the reality is that human communication is messy and the most practical languages tend to be messy ones. Some linguists have observed that trade pidgins develop English-like morphologies, even when English is not one of the contributing languages.

(And even Scheme got messy; see R6RS and R7RS...)

As for Japanese, I love it, it's beautiful, but as even any weeaboo knows, Japanese language is very bound up with Japanese culture. You can't simply ignore or elide the politeness bits; where you stand in society very strongly influences what you say. The fact that English is largely free of this baggage helps make it an effective language that people around the world pick up and use for trade, especially when different ethnic groups are involved.

Domination of English has more to do with British empire bringing it to large swaths of the world (India, Africa), and the US being the principal winner of WWII and expanding its industrial, scientific, and cultural might around the world.

English language is like Chinese: while simple structurally (no cases, constructive verb forms, etc) has a terribly complicated writing and pronunciation system, where there sort of are rules, but you never know when you hit an exception. Despite that, people take it up, because the important communication happens in English. (People who study areas like ML, or who work a lot with industrial production, likely pick up some Chinese, out of the same necessity.)

> Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme

I see we have met. My ideal computer language would be Scheme in Ido. :) I guess to do real work one needs a ~980 page spec like Common Lisp which consumes half of their available neurons--in English, which consumes the other half. The R7RS spec is ~98 pages, for reference. A few extensions do not remove that much cognitive availablity (see Jaffer's Slib and the SRFI suite). As a matter of fact, speaking of minimalism, I was using MIT Scheme Version 7.4 Edwin today, an Emacs compatible editor written at R4RS (with a few extensions).

Seriously though, I really wish like the universal translator in Star Trek that I could understand all human language with deep context--but my puny U.S.-public-school-trained brain limits me to a few.

> Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme -- resulting in suggestions like that we all start speaking Toki Pona -- but the reality is that human communication is messy and the most practical languages tend to be messy ones.

"So stop ragging on C++, you meanies!"?

A world were everyone could speak scheme is a beautiful idea. Like if we were cyborgs. I'd hope there is still value in learning the thought patterns of Scheme 1.0.

I think Koran is quite interesting. The symbols were designed from scratch iirc. and they are extremly logical. I'd argue that most people will be able to read and correctly pronounce Korean in a couple of days (even if they don't understand a single word the are saying) which is quite astonishing. I was pleasently surprised at the logical structure. When I first saw the symbols my western brain said "oh my, this is complex and hard". I was shocked how wrong I was.

In the 15th century, the Korean king at the time decided to revamp the entire alphabet. It's consistent and phonetic. There are 24 basic "letters" and 27 complex "letters" that are a combination of the basic letters.

You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language

I've been tempted to learn Korean since I discovered this factoid, but haven't found a program or the time that I can stick to.

Anecdotally, I'm learning Dutch right now to prepare to move overseas next month, and the basics haven't been that difficult. I feel pretty confident that I can order food and exchange daily phrases after only a few dozen hours of practice. Lucky for me, the Dutch also speak excellent English, but I'm trying to learn anyway!

I agree! Hangul is the most interesting writing system I’ve studied so far (I’m also fluent in Japanese and can read/write kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana) and it only took me 2 hours to learn. Being fluent in Japanese already made learning Korean a lot easier too, since the phonetics and grammar structures are so similar.

I think Korean is being learned at far greater pace, zoomers think Korea is cool and want to live that ideal kpop world. No need to learn kanji which means its a lot more approacheable.

I would say hebrew is also another interesting alphabet system

> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.

English grammar is actually very regular. It has lost most of the complexity of its Germanic substrate due to the repeated historic pidginization. For a learner, the lack of grammatical gender is godsent and a turbo hack to producing grammatically correct sentences.

You're right that English grammar is fairly simple in terms of things like morphology and grammatical gender.

Where I think English would be surprising, if discovered as a new language, is the phonology: we have lots of extremely unusual and hard-to-pronounce consonant and vowel sounds. You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.

English verb and noun morphology are simple. English phonology and syntax are extremely complex. This is why people say “English has simple grammar”: they’re thinking only about morphology, which is the hard part of Latin, Greek, Russian, etc.

Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.)

Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.

Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."

English word order is janked, though.

It's really annoying that we're modifier-modified when it comes to adjectives but modified-modifier when it comes to relative clauses. We say "the red car", but "the car, which is red,".

Also we sometimes use modified-modifier for adjectives for poetic effect, in constructs such as "painter extraordinaire", "minister plenipotentiary", or "court martial".

And then we have questions, where English goes from normally being SVO to being OSV. We say "That is John." but ask "Who is that?", and if we say "That is who?", it's usually an expression of abject shock. Or sometimes we dip into our Germanic heritage and bring out V2 word order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Mode...).

Now I need to know if this is also satire or if I need to start learning Japanese

Japanese grammar is starkly minimalist. It's not hard to learn at all, the basic structure is almost purely agglutinative, and the word order is consistently head-final in all cases (e.g. SOV for sentence and modifier-modified for not only adjectives but also relative and appositive clauses), and it helps that Japanese doesn't grammatically track several things that other languages do, such as person, number, or gender.

There are only two real problems:

1. The writing system is ridiculously complex, and even if you just vow to only write in romaji you also have to deal with the problem that kanji acts as a huge source of both puns and compound words. You can invent new compound words just by jamming together the on readings of a couple of kanji and most Japanese people will understand you. It's also not unheard of in, for example, songs, to pronounce a word one way when singing but write it in the official lyrics sheet using kanji that's normally associated with a completely different word. The closest I can compare to this in other languages would be like if you were talking and using sign language at the same time and you were deliberately signing different words than what you were speaking in order to add subtext.

2. Because a) so many features aren't grammatically tracked and b) Japanese is aggressively pro-drop, a lot of sentences are extremely ambiguous without context. For example, you often can't tell just from hearing the words if someone is saying "I go", "you go", "they go", "he goes", or "she goes" (in Japanese these are all just iku/ikimasu... unless you're going out of your way to put a pronoun in there, but most people don't); you have to parse the sentence in the context of what else is being said in the conversation or by what's going on around you.

It's a language with over 2k common characters of which most have two pronunciations, and the language is immensely context-dependent.

If that doesn't scare you, go ahead.

Japanese uses Chinese characters heavily, but they're obviously pronounced nothing like they are in Mandarin, and their contextual meaning has drifted over the last thousand years. Japan and China have also made many different choices in technical loanwords-- Japanese tends to transcribe loanwords directly but English is often lightly mangled by Japanese phonology: you can puzzle over キーボード (kiiboodo) for a while but unless it's in context the English word "keyboard" won't jump out.

It is literally the hardest language to learn for English speakers. Regardless of what you hear about the elegance of its grammar, this is a real fact backed up with evidence from past learners. Know what you're getting yourself into.

So You Want To Learn Japanese

http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm

Japanese is a very high context language which instantly disqualifies it in my opinion.

Korean is like japanese, minus the kanji.

Hangul is a marvel of an alphabet, especially when you realize it was created from scratch six centuries ago.

Japanese is a language with no future tense and a very choppy system of plurals (many of which have to be inferred). I don't think it's a good candidate.

Not having a future tense is an advantage, not a disadvantage.

There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/verb conjugation. It's simpler to denote something happening in the future with a phrase describing when it happens, which often needs to be included anyway. Fewer tenses means less to learn.

'I go tomorrow' vs. 'I will go tomorrow'

'I go later' vs. 'I will go later'

Note that I don't speak Japanese. I'm basing this off of my very limited understanding of how Mandarin denotes the future. It's very possible I misunderstood what you mean by "no future tense".

English lacking a future tense hasn't stopped it from becoming the international language.

There's one reason (of many) that Japanese still uses kanji: it has a lot of homophones due to the lack of different sounds in the language (relative to Mandarin, which still has a lot of homophones). Even more, it has pitch intonation which differs the meaning of words. The simplicity of the sounds and grammar belies the difficulty of the language. There have been movements to try and romanize the Japanese language, and for the most part, none have caught on.

Korean has a much simpler writing system, but similarly suffers from a lot of homophones, and in addition with no characters/kanji to differentiate them. Neither of these are magically simpler languages: like any language, there's a lot of legwork that goes into learning them, particularly if you come from a language with little in common

(Edit: I'm not a linguist, I just happen to like both of these languages as a hobbyist; feel free to point out any inaccuracies)

> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.

+1 Funny because it's true.

I find it inelegant. Two alphabets and a borrowed character system from chinese which is entirely different.

An elegant language that is easy to learn should be based off of consistent primitives. Similar to math where an entire mathematical language can be derived from a few axioms. For a language you should have a single alphabet and consistent grammar rules.

Such a language is not only more elegant, but much more practical to learn as well. And Practicality is by far more important then elegance.

The grammar is very elegant but yes the writing system is very complex.

A lot of Finnish people learn Japanese for some reason.

Both the grammar and pronunciation of Japanese are much closer to Finnish than to English. (Not close, mind you, but closer.)

> Japanese has a regular grammar.

Except for all the exceptions. Also, the millions of different ways you need to manipulate your verbs based on what comes after/what you are talking about.

Oh, and that you cannot read/write contemporary Japanese without knowing at least 3 writing systems (with a minimum of 54 characters each).

Japanese grammar was pretty easy for me to learn. There are only three verb groups in Japanese (i.e., Godan, Ichidan, and irregular verbs). The irregular verb group only has two verbs する and くる. The others are pretty consistent in following a few simple rules that map quite cleanly into a spreadsheet. There are 14 conjugation forms, which seems like a lot at first, but again, the rules are pretty consistent and easy to learn. At least I think so.

The hardest part of learning Japanese for me was Kanji (which I still forget all the time if I’m not using an IME or a dictionary).

Not that it makes a huge difference, but hiragana and katakana have 46 characters each.

> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.

Right, because what's a West Germanic language very similar to Frisian doing all the way over in New Guinea?

Japanese, the language that has an entire sub-alphabet dedicated to segregating gaijin words - lest they somehow taint the original language.

My understanding is that katakana I used for tons of other uses like providing emphasis.

The reason borrowed words are written in katakana is too provide a clue that the word may have a non-standard pronunciation.

It functions similarly to how italicization does in English

Japanese, the language that has an entire sub-alphabet of broken Chinese letterforms dedicated to segregating native Japanese particles and inflections - lest they somehow taint the original kanbun.

Katakana are used for far more than loan words, loan words is just the first example you learn when you first start learning Japanese.

Among many other stylistic uses, katakana are often used for native onomatopoeia and are used to write native words all the time (usually in cases where the kanji is either not well-known or to give a different feeling to the sentence -- ズルい is a good example of this).

Latin fonts also have italic forms, sometimes materially different in shape from the straight forms.

This is largely similar.

幽霊文字

A beautifully simple language with the world's hardest writing system.

You got me until the first point

"It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions."

"except exceptions?!" whoa..! the brought back memories from learning German.

perkele!

There’s extremely few exceptions though, very much unlike other languages.

Pronunciation is extremely systematic too. You could record the sound of each character as an audio file and put each file in order of a word/sentence and it’ll sound like (bad, robotic) Finnish.

This also means that you can hear a spoken word (or a name!) and just know how it’s spelled, even if you have no idea what it means. Compare that to English!

This article is clearly satire, but it’s a delightful language, especially for nerds who think learning consistent grammar rules is easier than endless lists of exceptions (Hi there, French!)

The only practical downside is that just about every word is unique to the Finnish language group, except recent imports (eg bussi, teatteri). Eg “mom” is a word with an “m” in every other language I’m familiar with, but it’s “äiti” in Finnish.

This is something I really like about Finnish. Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v, or the always silent h). But the letters are not always pronounced the same. For example, c and g are pronounced differently, depending on what the following vowel is. Even worse, u is silent after a q, or when between a g and an e or i. I mean, I don't have any problem with all of this, since I've been dealing with it for all my life :) . But I can understand how annoying it can be for a foreign learner, even if it's not as infuriating as English.

Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular. Each letter is pronounced always the same, no matter the context or the letters surrounding it (there aren't even consonant groups like ch). The grammar might be more complex, and the vocabulary might be difficult because it lacks the indo-european roots from all the other languages I know. But phonetics? Yeah, it's one of the simplest languages out there, in this sense. I love Finnish because of that, and I actually listen to a lot of Finnish music (despite not understanding almost anything), just because I love the way it sounds.

Still, I with I had fewer issues with a and ä... I can pronounce both separately, but when I hear someone speaking, I still have trouble when I need to differentiate between these two.

A competition like Spelling Bee basically makes no sense in Finnish. As long as you know the alphabet you can spell any word you hear

There's an amusing way to quantify just how systemic the language orthography is: train an ML model to converts words to phonemes and back, and then see how many mistakes it makes. With similar sized training corpus in different languages, you get numbers that are directly comparable. Of course, it's a very rough estimate, but still interesting:

https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/

Finnish scored 98% accuracy on "writing" (model converting phonemes to written words) and 92% accuracy on "reading" (written words to phonemes) in this study. The only other languages with both scores above 90% in their comparison are Esperanto - which is explicitly designed for that, of course - Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. I'd say that's a very good result for a natural language.

For comparison, Spanish is 70% writing / 85% reading, French is 28% writing / 80% reading, and English is at dismal 36% writing / 30% reading.

> There’s extremely few exceptions though, very much unlike other languages.

Yeah, I was all "Which exceptions"?!?

the 'ng' sound is problematic. Kuningatar (queen) is an example of a word that is pronounced differently than written.

German exceptions are nothing compared to French exceptions. French is basically all exceptions and no rules! And some math (in French when you want to say 99, you literally say four twentieths and 10 and 9).

People make a big deal about "quatre-vingt", but no French speaker thinks about that word as anything except "80". No one is doing multiplication in real time.

Let's rather talk about German adjective declensions, a much more pregnant problem in German than having to memorize a weird number.

Speaking as somebody who moved to Finland, and struggles with the language, that's some good satire.

As native speaker it is perfectly logical and sane compared to English. Then again I suppose that is not exactly high bar.

Come on, English is not that bad. No real verb conjugation in response to gender, person, or (to an extent) number. There are irregular verbs, sure, but due to a simpler conjugation you have to memorize way less than for eg Spanish or French. Simpler morphology - no significant agglutination, prefixes or suffixes. Only 26 glyphs. One downside is complicated phonetics though. Not just the sounds, but all the inconsistencies (like “dough”, “through”, “rough”, or “head”, “heat”, “read”).

English is the superior language because of its infinite number of states.

It will beat and humiliate the learner, leading them to feel accomplished when they have finally attained proficiency.

By the master, English can be beaten and humiliated into submission and used to accomplish amazing feats of literary insanity.

Think rules matter? In some languages grammar rules (and their exceptions) are strict. When you start to mess around, things fall apart. Meaning evaporates. People don't understand you.

In English? Verbing weirds language.

Logic and reason are the refuge of the unimaginative and dispassionate. The people who don't understand or appreciate the satirical nature of the above article.

The insanity of English is what makes it awesome.

> It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions.

I love it! except exceptions.

Spoken Mandarin would be a great basis for a logical world language. Although it shares roughly zero words in common with English or other European languages (aside from the occasional loan word, like coffee or sofa), the language itself is concise, expressive and grammatically simple: no conjugation, no inflection, consistent pronunciation and minimal “politeness”. The only ”weird” parts are tonality and those darned counting words.

Too bad the written language is a disaster for learners. 10000 unique characters to learn (30000 for literary fluency), and inconsistent and often unpredictable pronunciation.

> Spoken Mandarin would be a great basis for a logical world language.

Grammatically, yes (with a few caveats). Phonetically… perhaps not so much. Mandarin has a pretty poor phonetic inventory having lost a large number of sounds (including finals) throughout the history of its development. Words in Mandarin tend to be longer (as in having 3 syllables on the average) compared to other Chinese languages that have retained more sounds.

> The only ”weird” parts are tonality and those darned counting words.

There is nothing specifically weird about them. English has them too, they are called «collective nouns», i.e. «a flock of birds», «two shivers of sharks», «an ambush of DevOps engineers», «three pandemoniums of webdevs», «murders of Deloitte consultants», «a dazzle of Rust developers» or «a pitying of enterprise architects». Flock, shiver, ambush, pandemonium, murders, dazzle, pitying are your «darned» counting words.

I don't know about Mandarin, but Korean counting words are very different from English collective nouns.

English: one animal, one person, one book

Korean: han mari, han myeong, han gweon.

Where 'han' is one, and the other three words are the counting words specific for counting animals, people, and books respectively.

I'd say you're off by a factor of 3 to 10?

1000 characters suffices for basic literacy. HSK 6 (the highest level of the Chinese as a second language exam) includes fewer than 3000 characters. A highly educated person allegedly knows 8000+ characters, though I'd take that with a grain of salt.

I’ve heard the lower stats, but I’m not sure I agree. I’m learning Mandarin and have gone through the entire HSK6 character list - and I’m still having to look up lots of characters when I read the newspaper, novels, etc. 10,000 might be a bit high, but I think a typical literate Chinese person knows a lot more characters than you’d expect.

I love chinese and its grammar/expressiveness is fantastic, but having lived in China and now Taiwan, I have a hunch that for even for native speakers Chinese is actually harder to "make out" than English.

For instance all Chinese movies/shows have subtitles that everyone reads along with (even in Beijing/Taipei). At first I thought this was for people that have poor Mandarin (minorities, old people that only speak a local dialect etc) but it seems even people that only speak standard mandarin also "need" subtitles to make out all the words. Without them a lot of words aren't distinct enough to make out over speakers/headphones. In every day speech as I understand it's common to not make out words as well and to kinda guess along what the other person said. It's possible to speak clearly, like a tv announcer, but as soon as you get a bit lazy or speak to fast it's easy to become unintelligible

I'd be curious to hear some native speaker's thoughts on this

I think you miss typed a zero for literary fluency. There are only 2500 most frequent used characters and 1000 second frequent characters (from 《现代汉语常用字表》, frequent standard Chinese characters list)

Moreover, they are not unique, but composed from common radicals, like prefix/suffix in English.

> The only ”weird” parts are tonality and those darned counting words.

Tonality, which is famously hard for speakers of non-tonal languages to pick up?

Eh, it's not that hard if you have a good teacher to give you feedback. I'd put it on par with learning proper French pronunciation.

As a speaker of Mandarin and knowing phrases from inside mainland China and the phrases outside (ex: Taiwan), there’s already phrases and words of the same spoken language that’s mutually unintelligible: [credit card, ice cream] - completely different phrases used for the same ideas/objects.

And the only way to express these ideas is with phrases (combination of characters), as Chinese characters (spoken) on their own already are overloaded.

The comment you are replying to isn't claiming that letters/characters (字 zi4) correspond 1-1 to words/terms (词 ci2, what you call phrases)

One way to "solve" the tonality issue with Mandarin would be to increase the number of permitted phonemes or phoneme pairs and turn as many monosyllabic words as possible into polysyllabic ones. To some extent, the latter process has already taken place in the real world with the transition from classical Chinese. Pair this with a Hangul-like script or Bopomofo redesigned from the ground up and you've indeed got yourself a hypothetical tool of communicative beauty.

Amusingly enough, English has its own tonal-equivalent learning problem in the form of phoneme stress. One of the final bosses for non-native but highly fluent speakers is the ability to never mess up the stress on certain words.

For an extremely logical language, I would nominate Hebrew. The way that verbs are conjugated from three-letter roots and those same roots can become related nouns with regular patterns of adding suffixes is just amazing.

The Rabbinic tradition is that the original language before Babel was Hebrew and after my studies of the language in college, I can totally buy that.

I second this motion.

"The Complete Dictionary of Hebrew Language" has about 35,000 words in total. I bet that over a half of that aren't used, and would sound completely new to anyone except Hebrew linguists.

Hebrew is a "tabular" language that can be represented as a (sparsely populated) table with the roots as rows and "morphemes" (construction patterns) as columns. If a word exists, it will be in its proper place at an appropriate row and column.

Here's an example of a construction pattern for the category of "tools":

maXXeXa

The X denotes a place to put the root letters. Most of the roots are composed of three letters, and so there are three places.

When you combine it with the root S.R.T which has a meaning of "ribbon" (and also, film), you get "maSReTa" — "a tool for making films" (video camera).

If you combine it with the root Ts.L.M which has a meaning of "image", you get "maTsLeMa" — "a tool for making images" (still camera).

Even if you never heard the word "maVReGa" but are able to separate it into the morpheme of "tools" and the root V.R.G (which has a meaning of clock-wise motion), you can use that to understand the word as "a tool for making clock-wise motion" — a screwdriver.

Arabic, like all Semitic languages, has this feature as well and I agree it's amazing! There are a few examples on wikipedia for those that haven't encountered this before [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfix

Yep, either Hebrew or Arabic would be my choice. Both are relatively well-structured and have existed for a very long time. Arabic has the advantage of having a larger number of users/speakers.

Although, as I understand it, not all dialects of Arabic are mutually intelligible so, e.g., an Iraqi and a Moroccan might have difficulty understanding each other.

The other challenge with Arabic is that the script is considerably more complicated since most letters have distinct initial, medial and final forms whereas Hebrew only has special final forms for three letters. That said, I know almost no Arabic so I can’t speak with much authority on its learnability.

Hebrew has the ridiculous feature of changing the sounds of those three letter roots in a such a way that they sound like _completely_ different words to someone who is not already fluent - e.g. kaf and khaf, bet and vet.

The lack of vowels also trips up non-native speakers/readers.

The lack of (written) vowels is less of an issue than most people think as the vowels tend to come in predictable patterns. Likewise the differences of pronunciation for ב, פ and כ are again predictable. It’s not unlike how in Czech, a consonant in a cluster takes on the voiced/unvoiced quality of the following consonant so that kde is pronounced as if it were written gde. I really think that Hebrew is the most beginner-friendly language of all the languages that I’ve learned.

I mean, that doesn’t sound too far off from what happens in Celtic languages like Welsh or Irish where the ending of one word mutates (softens) the beginning of the next word

At the other extreme, there's Yiddish, it is full of idioms and it's more fun for that!

> what case? Nominative, accusative, genitive, essive, partitive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative or instructive?

Jesus... I studied Latin in high school and this triggered some PTSD. And Latin only has 6 cases!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#Latin

Why not bring back Latin? The alphabet is already in wide use, many languages evolved from it making it easy-ish for them to learn, and Latin was already in wide use as the lingua franca for academia and the church up until the 1700s.

Latin never went anywhere! Carpe Diem, ad hoc, et al. I love learning more about Latin, and while it would be cool to be as fluent as possible as a speaker, I really love parsing and consuming Latin texts, I learn so much not only about history or religion but also just about our current society and language habits.

The answer with Latin is obviously the cases, imho Spanish would be my vote for a lingua franca – simple, phonetic, sounds beautiful with any accent sung or spoken, and already has massive influence and history.

Seriously though. I found myself once on Interlingua TikTok and had a shocking experience of understanding the speaker almost entirely but not recognizing the language. Vocabulary was close to Spanish (that I have basic knowledge of), but declension and overall flow was more like Italian (that I do not speak). I also could speak French long ago, but not anymore so that may have helped as well.

If you want to try your luck with Latin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk . Or you could head straight to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09L7bge0w4Q or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7hd799IznU&list=PLU1WuLg45S... !

I'm a British guy living in Finland and am of course learning the language. I'm not sure if this article is a joke, but Finnish is quite a difficult language to learn quickly. However, it is true that Finnish has some great features, and I'm very lucky to be learning this than some other language.

I'm also a fan of auxiliary languages and think some of these constructed languages are a much better choice for a "world language" because of just how fast one can learn them. My personal favourite being Interlingue (aka Occidental). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingue

Related to both these points, there is a savant called Daniel Tammet, who is a polyglot amongst other things. I hear his favourite language is Finnish and he has constructed a language based on it (and other Finnic languages) called Mänti. I haven't checked it out yet, but it sounds appealing to me at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet

I think it’s supposed to be satire

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

https://i.imgur.com/ixEBdwf.jpg

"Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again"

That's part of an old joke:

What do you mean Finnish is difficult?

English: A dog

Swedish: What

English: The dog

English: Two dogs

Swedish:

Swedish: En hund, hunden

Swedish: Två hundar, hundarna

German:

English: No, go away

Swedish: No one invited you

German: Der Hund

English: I said go away

German: Ein Hund, zwei Hunde

Swedish: Stop it

German: Den Hund, einen Hund, dem Hund, einem Hund, des Hundes, eines Hundes, den Hunden, der Hunden

Finnish: Sup

English: NO

Swedish: NO

German: NO

Finnish:

English:

German:

Swedish:

Finnish: Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again, koirassa, koirasta, koiraan, koiralla, koiralta, koiralle, koirana, koiraksi, koiratta, koirineen, koirin German: Swedish: Finnish: English: Finnish: Aaaand... koirasi, koirani, koiransa, koiramme, koiranne, koiraani, koiraasi, koiraansa, koiraamme, koiraanne, koirassani, koirassasi, koirassansa, koirassamme, koirassanne, koirastani, koirastasi, koirastansa, koirastamme, koirastanne, koirallani, koirallasi, koirallansa, koirallamme, koirallanne, koiranani, koiranasi, koiranansa, koiranamme, koirananne, koirakseni, koiraksesi, koiraksensa, koiraksemme, koiraksenne, koirattani, koirattasi, koirattansa, koirattamme, koirattanne, koirineni, koirinesi, koirinensa, koirinemme, koirinenne English: Swedish: German: Finnish: Wait! then theres koirakaan, koirankaan, koiraakaan, koirassakaan, koirastakaan, koiraankaan, koirallakaan, koiraltakaan, koirallekaan, koiranakaan, koiraksikaan, koirattakaan, koirineenkaan, koirinkaan, koirako, koiranko, koiraako, koirassako, koirastako, koiraanko, koirallako, koiraltako, koiralleko, koiranako, koiraksiko, koirattako, koirineenko, koirinko, koirasikaan, koiranikaan, koiransakaan, koirammekaan, koirannekaan, koiraanikaan, koiraasikaan, koiraansakaan, koiraammekaan, koiraannekaan, koirassanikaan, koirassasikaan, koirassansakaan, koirassammekaan, koirassannekaan, koirastanikaan, koirastasikaan, koirastansakaan, koirastammekaan, koirastannekaan, koirallanikaan, koirallasikaan, koirallansakaan, koirallammekaan, koirallannekaan, koirananikaan, koiranasikaan, koiranansakaan, koiranammekaan, koiranannekaan, koiraksenikaan, koiraksesikaan, koiraksensakaan, koiraksemmekaan, koiraksennekaan, koirattanikaan, koirattasikaan, koirattansakaan, koirattammekaan, koirattannekaan, koirinenikaan, koirinesikaan, koirinensakaan, koirinemmekaan, koirinennekaan, koirasiko, koiraniko, koiransako, koirammeko, koiranneko, koiraaniko, koiraasiko, koiraansako, koiraammeko, koiraanneko, koirassaniko, koirassasiko, koirassansako, koirassammeko, koirassanneko, koirastaniko, koirastasiko, koirastansako, koirastammeko, koirastanneko, koirallaniko, koirallasiko, koirallansako, koirallammeko, koirallanneko, koirananiko, koiranasiko, koiranansako, koiranammeko, koirananneko, koirakseniko, koiraksesiko, koiraksensako, koiraksemmeko, koiraksenneko, koirattaniko, koirattasiko, koirattansako, koirattammeko, koirattanneko, koirineniko, koirinesiko, koirinensako, koirinemmeko, koirinenneko, koirasikaanko, koiranikaanko, koiransakaanko, koirammekaanko, koirannekaanko, koiraanikaanko, koiraasikaanko, koiraansakaanko, koiraammekaanko, koiraannekaanko, koirassanikaanko, koirassasikaanko, koirassansakaanko, koirassammekaanko, koirassannekaanko, koirastanikaanko, koirastasikaanko, koirastansakaanko, koirastammekaanko, koirastannekaanko, koirallanikaanko, koirallasikaanko, koirallansakaanko, koirallammekaanko, koirallannekaanko, koirananikaanko, koiranasikaanko, koiranansakaanko, koiranammekaanko, koiranannekaanko, koiraksenikaanko, koiraksesikaanko, koiraksensakaanko, koiraksemmekaanko, koiraksennekaanko, koirattanikaanko, koirattasikaanko, koirattansakaanko, koirattammekaanko, koirattannekaanko, koirinenikaanko, koirinesikaanko, koirinensakaanko, koirinemmekaanko, koirinennekaanko, koirasikokaan, koiranikokaan, koiransakokaan, koirammekokaan, koirannekokaan, koiraanikokaan, koiraasikokaan, koiraansakokaan, koiraammekokaan, koiraannekokaan, koirassanikokaan, koirassasikokaan, koirassansakokaan, koirassammekokaan, koirassannekokaan, koirastanikokaan, koirastasikokaan, koirastansakokaan, koirastammekokaan, koirastannekokaan, koirallanikokaan, koirallasikokaan, koirallansakokaan, koirallammekokaan, koirallannekokaan, koirananikokaan, koiranasikokaan, koiranansakokaan, koiranammekokaan, koiranannekokaan, koiraksenikokaan, koiraksesikokaan, koiraksensakokaan, koiraksemmekokaan, koiraksennekokaan, koirattanikokaan, koirattasikokaan, koirattansakokaan, koirattammekokaan, koirattannekokaan, koirinenikokaan, koirinesikokaan, koirinensakokaan, koirinemmekokaan, koirinennekokaan Swedish:

German:

English: Okay, now you're just making things up!

Finnish:

Finnish: And now the plural forms...

> That's part of an old joke

No, what you showed is a lame/inaccurate transcription of the countryball gag, which came first. Source: KC hivemind

Haha, haven't laughed out loud in a while, thanks for sharing! Don't know why I haven't seen this before

Czech/Slovak word for ice cream is "zmrzlina" not "zrmzlina".

https://translate.google.com/?sl=sk&tl=en&text=zmrzlina&op=t...

If they wanted to find an example of a word with highest density of consonants, there is a Russian word “взбзднуть“ (“vzbzdnut’” meaning approximately “to fart unexpectedly a tiny bit”) with one vowel, seven consonants and one letter that palatalizes the last consonant.

That's a great word. You might enjoy the Czech word for "fart" - it also has no consonants and it's almost onomatopoeia: "prd"

prrrrrrrrrd

I'm gonna strike right back with the Czech, perfectly valid, words "vchrstls" and "smrskls" (roughly "you have splashed/thrown/hurled" and "you have shrunk", respectively).

Or the Polish chrząszcz [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrz%C4%85szcz

For this I thing Welsh wins, I have seen some of their words and I cannot even begin to pronounce the words I have seen.

There's a difference?

My eyes can tell, gotta use diff.

Written Czech/Slovak language is like Polish language where someone deleted all the vowels.

When I studied syntax as part of linguistics at the college level,

Finnish was often a go-to example because it more or less had every feature enabled.

Case and declination? Sure. Tenses? Yes. Agglutinative? Yes.

It was asserted that there a disproportionate number of linguists are Finnish because their language is a superset of many others, and by necessity almost all Finns are multilingual, and that when they are, the language families they tend to learn (Germanic, Romance, and Slavic) are all distinctly different. So by the time Finnish academics get an advanced degree their language faculties can be extraordinary.

EDIT oh yeah gender was the exception to the feature flags

Polish _actually_ had every grammatic feature known to man, and as a bonus tons of inconsistenties andere exceptions (which Finish does bot, at least that's my impression from here).

Does Polish actually have articles? I know Bulgarian does.

Finnish does not have grammatical gender.

Because it's a bug, not a feature.

Not even gendered pronouns?

>had every feature enabled

Is there any list for what those features can be? (Not constrained to Fin.)

Not a complete list of every feature and language, but WALS [0] would probably be of interest to you. It has a decent list of language features you can browse and read about, shows you a map with the occurrence of each feature with languages placed on that map for each feature, and lists which languages have each feature (to the extent that is recorded in that particular database).

[0]: https://wals.info/

>It was asserted that there a disproportionate number of linguists are Finnish because their language is a superset of many others

Finnish isn't Indo-European. It's a Uralic language of which their are only about 25 million speakers collectively, mostly in Finland, Hungary, and Estonia.

ADDED: Perhaps the intended point is that the language has many language features. But the language itself isn't a superset.

The weirdest thing about Finnish cases is the counter-intuitive nature (to a speaker of almost any indo-european language). For example: "dog" is "koira", "I like" is "pidän"; "I like the dog"? — "Pidän koirasta", which is using the "-sta/stä" ending of the elative case, which usually means "from". So, it's "I like from the dog". It doesn't end here...

* Tulin Norjasta — I came from Norway.

* Pidän Norjasta — I like Norway.

* Puhu Norjasta — Talk about Norway.

How come the same case is used in these?!

"Löytyy apteekista" — "Can be found at the pharmacy", literally "Find from the pharmacy". Saying "Löytyy apteekissa", which would literally mean "find at the pharmacy" is grammatically incorrect.

So, yeah, Finnish grammar is nicely structured and consistent, but sometimes it just goes against intuition of speakers of other languages.

> Pidän koirasta", which is using the "-sta/stä" ending of the elative case, which usually means "from". So, it's "I like from the dog".

I find it helps to think of it as "I think highly of the dog".

Or in Swedish, "Jag håller av hunden". Which, come to think of it, is pretty much a literal word for word translation -- because the base meaning of "pidä" is "to hold", not "to like".

"Pidän koiraa" - I am holding (or keeping) a dog (for now). The case roughly translates to: some (of).

"Pidän koiran" - I will keep the dog (for good).

"Pitää" is one of these ancient words that means many things, but primarily: to hold, and Finns apparently think that to like something is to hold that which comes out of it!

You would still say that the man is in the pharmacy (mies on apteekissa) but the stuff he found is from it (lääkkeet apteekista).

I think pharmacy is just thinking different. If something is found at pharmacy and you are buying them you are anyway taking them out from there. "I bought the drugs from the pharmacy" Ostin lääkkeet apteekista. "Drugs are at pharmacy" lääkeet ovat apteekissa.

I'm part of the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, and spent 7 years in school trying to learn Finnish. I spent 3 years learning German, and got about as far with that. Or as a friend of mine said who moved to Germany: German just feels like a dialect compared to Finnish.

Swedish and German are very closely related languages, so you probably had tons of implicit intuition about how Germanic languages work that didn’t have to be studied.

Yep, Swedish and German is as closely related as English and German. It's possible that English and German are even closer as they share the same Germanic branch (west Germanic), which Swedish does not share. I bring this up since it can be easier for the English speaking community of HN to relate to the closeness of German, and for a while consider being "easy as a dialect of English" to understand, in contrast to Finnish which is really difficult.

But you must be immersed with Finnish? Do you struggle with it?

It's reasonable to think I'm immersed with Finnish, but I live in a part of Finland that is Swedish speaking, even by law (https://satwcomic.com/difficult-love). I have a Finnish speaking manager since 6 years back. We've never spoken anything else than English.

> I think I do not misspeak myself by saying that the work of this article should settle the matter clearly and finally.

Perkele, consider the matter closed.

Selvä

Love this satire. Especially the ominous but completely unhelpful "be very, very careful with this one."

Yes, I think some have missed that this is a dig against English being one of the top "World Languages". English, of course, being illogical, inconsistent and hard to learn.

One annoying thing about Finnish is that you have to say the whole year, no shortcuts. 1975 is "one thousand, nine hundred and seventy five" None of this nineteen-seventy-five efficiency nonsense. And, of course, you have to say it in Finnish numerals which are all looooong: vuosi yksi-tuhat-yhdeksänsataa-seitsemänkymmentä-viisi

Saatanan kyrpä, kun saavun numeron loppuun, en muista vitun alkun.

Nah, doesn't work like that in practical (spoken) Finnish. Someone born in 1975 would be "seiskafemma", someone in 1984 "kasinelonen" and so forth. Even spelling the whole word out would be along the lines of "ysitoista seitenviis" (19 75). No-one would ever say "yksi-tuhat..."

> No-one would ever say "yksi-tuhat..."

They do on the TV (and, I assume, radio) news. But even they sometimes stumble over them, which leads me to further assume that the announcers only speak that way on the air.

What dialect is that wilihybrid? "seiskafemma"?

Just a note, you wouldn't say yksi-tuhat, as just tuhat already implies "one". So rather tuhatyhdeksänsataaseitsemänkymmentäviisi or as I'd say it out loud, tuhatyheksänsataaseitkytviis.

Ok, fair point. You are correct. Removing it lets us reduce the monster by one point five syllables: vuosi tuhat-yhdeksänsataa-seitsemänkymmentä-viisi

Yes, you can shorten it, by deploying a kind of semi-sanctified mumbling they call puhekieli: tuhatyhekssataaseiskytviis

I make fun because I love

There are shortcuts, they're just different than those you have in English. 1975 for me would be vuos seittenviis, vuos seitkytviis, or vuos tuhatysiseittenviis. And if I wanted to say in the year ____, I'd just have to change vuos to vuon. The set of shortcuts you could use when writing in the literary variety is more constrained, however.

You can absolutely shorten pronunciation of numbers, including years, when speaking Finnish https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-vocabulary/vocabulary-lists/...

There's a legend that no Finnish ever says what the current year is; by the time they… finish, they're wrong.

Finns do commonly use nineteen-seventyfive, or even seiskaviis or seven-five, when it's clear what year it means. There are plenty of shortcuts. Only if you want to be "official" the whole number is said

You do exactly the same in Italian - I never found it inconvenient or annoying.

Same in French. I agree.

In Mandarin you can just say "one nine seven five"! Though you usually have to add "year" after that.

'Toki Pona' has been slowly making strides as a good world language. Not as a replacement for English of course but as a modern Esperanto.

I found Toki Pona to be way too simple and there's too much ambiguity. It's a neat idea though. I like Esperanto better.

Do you find Esperanto is closer to a full language? Does it avoid the burden of learning a full language? To me I am excited by the potential to learn a whole language in a day. Like learning the entire syntax of C vs. C++. To at least know the words well enough to enter into a language world and begin writing and parsing programs with the full syntax. Maybe we are not at the '1 day' learning stage yet but the potential seems there.

The big question is really if its possible to 'think' in the language. Have you been able to get into the stage where its like thinking? But then your thought feels limited? I feel like people have proven its possible to think in it though I'm not there yet. I am still at the puzzle stage. Thinking it in unlocks abilities like how AI are now are able to think in terms of human language.

I like Couturat et al.'s Ido even better. I can't "think" in it yet, but it is very regular and easy to learn. The main (irrational, personal) issue I have with it is the monotony of endings, -o is always a singular noun, etc. Plus it is Eurocentric. It does have pan-gender words like lu, saving having to say he/she/it. Tradeoffs.

Fun fact, the creator of TP is a Finnish fan and a fair bit of the vocab is from Finnish words.

mi sona ala e ni. toki pona li toki lili. toki sike li wile nimi mute. toki pona li jo ala e nimi mute. toki pona li jo nimi moku. toki pona li jo ala nimi "consume". sona suli li wile e nimi mute. toki siki li wile ala toki pona.

Sorry, can't translate, toki pona language specs is copyrighted.

"siki" li seme?

Has it? I thought the language was built non-extendable and essentially frozen.

Some people say writing and computers and law have frozen English as well. At least relatively. It really depends on your own goals and opinions of language and what kind of world-wide-web of communication you'd be wanting. I'm thinking in terms of world-wide cyberspace where word-language is just a tiny fraction of the total universal mediums people can communicate it.

English is the Javascript of languages. JS will tell you what market fit is about. Neither will die.

I lived there for a bit over three years. Never spent any time trying to learn the language. I learned more about Finnish from this article then in three years of living there. The language is so hard that I just did not see the point of even trying to learn it. Everybody speaks English and I already learned a bit of Swedish when I was living in Sweden so I figured that speaking one of their official languages was good enough (even though non Swedish speaking Finns hate having to deal with Swedish). At least for official stuff (which you usually can do in English as well), that was sometimes useful.

The need to learn new languages is slowly disappearing. And not because English is so dominant (which it is) but because machines are getting better at translations. That is about to become very disruptive. Right now, using machine translations is nice when you really need them but still a bit awkward and tedious. And they still get a lot wrong.

But that's not going to last very long. Real time subtitles are already a thing in video chats and on Youtube. They aren't necessarily very good yet but improving over time. Once we hit the good enough stage, Having real time conversations with people you don't share any language with also becomes a possibility. Right now you can use your phone for simple stuff but it's a bit awkward.

I think in a decade or so, you'll be able to go wherever and have meaningful conversations with just about anyone you meet. I think that's going to be massive enabler for businesses.

> I lived there for a bit over three years. Never spent any time trying to learn the language.

This feels like the same kind of attitude that makes immigrants from English-speaking countries think they're not immigrants (which you were, if only for a while) but "expats" (see other recent HN threads on that subject).

I'm not actually a native English speaker even. But I get your point. To which I say, so what? It's not a problem for me to not be fluent in Swedish, Finnish, or German even though I've lived in Sweden, Finland, and now Germany for many years. I think it's great that people can move around and lead productive lives like that. There's going to be more of that enabled by tools and automated translations.

It seems to offend people that I don't dedicate a large chunk of my life trying to master new languages; which is something I simply neither value nor enjoy. Sorry, I have more interesting things to do than trying to level up my language skills and my job is taking a lot of energy.

I mastered English and that was a lot of work and it took many years. I use it more than my native language Dutch. It will have to do. Adding a third and a fourth language to that mix is just never going to be a thing for me.

Finnish is a beautiful language, and I love to hear it sung — there's a wealth of Finnish folk groups doing great music that melds tradition and innovation, borrowing from musics from all over the world. But that's the drawback in learning Finnish: what if, understanding the language, I no longer wished to hear the music? The great advantage of Finnish, for me, is that I am unlikely to ruin a song by accidentally becoming aware of its meaning, since it apparently completely lacks cognates with English.

I think that language diversity is important - the more the merrier as far as I am concerned.

I am a Brit. You might know a bit about where I live - a set of islands to the left of mainland Europe, one of which Britain (UK) shares with the Republic of Ireland.

We generally speak one of several varieties of English around here along with roughly 100 other languages - our rather complicated history means that this is a very diverse society nowadays.

Brythonic/Pretonic etc are the languages from before the Angles/Saxons/Vikings rocked up - that's where the modern word Briton ultimately comes from. A greek bloke called Pytheas who circumnavigated these isles called the natives here Pretanike - ie Pretish/British peoples.

We have Welsh, Scottish, Irish and the rest in rude health. Cornish is being gradually resurrected. Cumbric is nigh on dead as are loads of other old languages.

This discussion about a lingua franca (French) is mostly carried out in English for a good reason. English is extremely malleable and not too fussy. It can be complicated or not as required. There are loads of pidgins too. There are no diacritics in English (a few French borrow words perhaps, and that weird double dot over naive that I've left out here). It is also accepted that vowels can wander a bit and consonants can also trot around and find some greener grass.

I would vote for "old tupi", an extinct Tupian language which was spoken by the aboriginal Tupi people of Brazil and in the early colonial period, Tupi was used as a lingua franca throughout Brazil by Europeans and aboriginal Americans. I'm probably one of the last "speakers", and probably the only one in Germany :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_language

I was thinking as I read this. For a world wider lang. we should pick an easy to learn and pronounce extinct lang. That way everyone would have to learn a new language :)

old tupi I guess is as good and any Extinct Language.

The interesting part, is that despite the fact that the language is officially dead, almost all Brazilian geography (mountains, beaches) and partially cities have until today a tupi name.

English is the perfect world language... I wish only words were pronounced as they are written.

Let's just switch to ralli englanti

uuu see vee finns älready soolved it.

If English weren't so arbitrary and complex, it would be exponentially harder to detect scammers.

And don't forget detecting when the lower classes are in our presence. Without arbitrary rules strictly enforced, how are we to know who went to the "right" schools? Besides, what other useful things could kids possibly do with that class time other than learn the rules?

Makes me wonder how hard it would really be to change it. For example. Why can't we use k when the c sounds like a k.

kat, price, cirkle, cirkumference, kick.

And in the places where you left 'c' it sounds like 's'. You could just replace 'c' with either 'k' or 's' everywhere and get rid of letter 'c' entirely.

I just pronounced your comment the way it is written, and I did not like what I heard.

I automatically heard it in the voice of older Finnish politicians speaking english in the 90s

"Be the change you want to see in the world."

Piling on other suggestions, why not Turkish? Admittedly I only ever made it to lower intermediate level (I could read newspapers slowly with occasional look-up) and now forgot most of it, but I don't think I've ever encountered anything difficult or illogical, except maybe the -ki suffix ("of"/"related to", that seems to require experience or memorization to know how to use correctly).

Simple rules, simple writing system, few exceptions and none in pronunciation (that I know of), and piling suffixes sometimes feels like programming, there's suffix for everything and you just add them logically or with simple combination rules: https://trstem.com/en/verb/conjunct/gel/, you can learn entire conjugation in time it would take you to learn 5 verbs in Spanish ;)

Also (like Finnish?) has a political advantage of not being in either of the superpower language families, so every one suffers the ~same amount :)

If there is anyone I would trust on Finnish as a language would be Suussu Lacksonen (blair) A famous finnish translator and movie maker...

Also you should pleasure your ears by listening to this if you think Finnish is a global language...

(ALSO I See Torvalds behind this)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_uq7ypZnc

I have never been so beautifully scolded in a language I cannot understand

Neither Finnish or English is my mother tongue. I spent 8 years in Finland and the rest in the US as an adult. It’s really hard to learn both languages at the same time because of little similarity. My English suffers while I can start conversation in Finnish. Now English is my main language and I couldn’t remember much Finnish.

Overall it’s all about where I call home

"Aseleponeuvottelutoimikunta" is a silly example and frankly won't come up much.

At the same time, (to this ESL person it seems that) a short Finnish expression can express much more complex concepts than a few English words can usually convey. The complete sentence "Juoksutellaan." means something like "[Yes,] we shall[/should/agree to] make them/him/her/it run around[/work hard/be busy]." The "-lla" implies a non-contiguous form of "to make run", where the subject mostly needs to run, but not all the time. Think of exercising a horse, or keeping an intern busy for a day.

Is it too late to nominate Nadsat?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat

or Newspeak?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

both expressive languages developed by forward thinkers for our modern era.

Nice try, finland

It's part of an elaborate scheme to convince people that Finland exists. We all know it doesn't.

> b. what case? Nominative, accusative, genitive, essive, partitive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative or instructive?

> c. is it possible to avoid using the noun?

And now you know why the most extroverted Finns are the ones who look at your shoes instead of on the ground in front of you!

> It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions.

Then English is obviously more logical, since the rules can be applied just as reliably in all situations as Finnish, and has even more exceptions.

Tongue is in cheek here, as it is in the original article.

> It is a good sounding language; in other words, it is pleasing to the ear. This has to do with its wealth of vowels, which rules out ugly consonant clusters. It was recently suggested that some vowels should be exported to Czechoslovakia, where a shortage of vowels is imminent, and that some Czech consonants should be imported to Finland. However, negotiations collapsed at an early stage. The Finns would not deal with a language that calls ice-cream 'zrmzlina,'

It's always surprising how many people believe that spelling is somehow linguistically significant. There is no real difference between Czech 'zrm' and English 'zerm', but somehow the Czechs are dealing with an unpronounceable vowel shortage.

I opened this up fully expecting it to just be "It's a weird language without many relatives. We'll all be equally miserable learning it except those weirdo Finns. A level playing field for us all"

I'm not all that against it, Finnish is quite beautiful. Practically, however, it is too late. English is already the de facto international language with 1.5B speakers and is the most spoken language on the planet followed by Mandarin with 1.3B speakers. I suspect English's international popularity is mostly due to two factors, namely, 17th century British imperialism and that English has been the international language of aviation since the 1950's.

It's the dominance of the British Empire followed immediately by the dominance of the American Empire.

To make a world language, you need power and control. A cultural invasion and reasons for the language to be absolutely superior to others.

I don't think Finland has the economic or cultural capacity to make that real. China is the next best bet, but they haven't succeeded in the cultural invasion aspect. Japan with anime and Korea with kpop (the cultural export was funded by the S.Korean gov to start) has made better inroads.

Exactly this and soft power is the best. Lot of young Western women moving to Korea to find Korean men. Such is the power of pop culture and unfortunately this means the West's anti-asian posture in films and exclusion of asians in pop American culture is clearly out in the open. We are heavily influenced by media.

nobody is learning Finnish before Korean or Japanese.

Guys. This article is a joke.

So... step one in the plan will then be: make Finland an economic and military superpower.

Let's stick with Greek.

Modern Greek sounds much like Spanish to me. It is interesting, then, that having arisen, one from Latin and the other from Ancient Greek - quite different sounding languages - they somehow converged.

I wouldn't say converged.

Curious on the traits that sound similar to you.

To me they sound pretty different as a native Greek speaker. I can spot the loan words etc and can make some meanings, but that's where that stops. Spanish is pretty different from Latin too, in that it is simplified. Spanish has a really interesting history but a Latin speaker wouldn't be able to communicate with a Spanish native speaker in any way -- i.e. it has deviated substantially.

Why not Esperanto?

Because it's the most popular constructed language, and despite all it's publicity and fanaticism, it still didn't take off.

For me, there was something that just seemed off about the language. I mean it's usable and useful and all that jazz, but I just didn't like using it. In some ways, as a language, it feels unfinished, or unpolished, and it seems stuck in its ways. But then there are those who would argue anything different would not be Esperanto, and I can see their point.

For me, the great international language has still to be invented, or perhaps has existed for many decades, but has yet to go viral.

The whole concept of an international language might just be like religion though. There are some that will never embrace it. There are some that will prefer one over the other and never change, and some that might convert.

The solution to a universal language might be multiple universal languages (lol). For example, Occidental, Oriental and African. As long as they are easy to learn while being precise enough that miscommunication through ambiguity is difficult.

You start with the language that is local to you, thus giving you access to many people and local trading partners. Then if you want, you can branch out to areas that interest you. It should even be possible for someone from the African area to speak with another from the Oriental area if both have learned Occidental, for example.

Your sense of satire is quite evolved.

Finally someone noticed!

I was waiting for it! Thank you. I knew the most educated, elite among us would arise. All hail Esperanto. Duly elected leader of the post industrial, constructed languages =)

I actually like Esperanto and the concept of constructed languages in general a lot. Esperanto's grammar is very logical and easy to learn. Its a shame there's not much online content in it and the community is fairly small in comparison to what is often claimed. They actually have a Duolingo course and Google Translate works with it, so that's something.

yeah but it sounds so horrible

It went for regularity instead of naturality. If you want to sacrifice a little regularity, for naturality, check out Interlingue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingue

It might have been more interesting to watch Aki Kaurismäki's movies, including the Proletariat Trilogy if I understood Finnish. I'd like to know a very different language from my native English like Japanese, too. (Akira Kurosawa?) You just never know what you miss in translation.

I got to thinking about silent movies, like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. I don't think I ever saw another treatment of home ownership quite so apropos as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Week_(1920_film)

It expertly treated its subject matter with great humor--sans verbal language (interstitials aside).

> I'm not sure if this article is a joke

Of course not. There is even a book about it:

https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/master-finnish...

Seems pretty recent, judging from the "If you want to marry cool PM" tagline at the top. (Though I thought ms Marin is married already?)

Heard a bit of a "Newspodd" on Radio Vega, where someone claimed the most common reaction abroad to the recent storm-in-a-teacup news brouhaha was "Are you just jealous because she's hot and cool?"

Ok I understand this is a troll/joke post, but "In order to make things easier to understand, nominative and genitive are called accusative." How does that make sense in any way? Am I missing something in the case conflation here? These are pretty distinct cases.

I think it's in reference to this (minor) controversy between linguists and Finnish teachers https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-grammar/finnish-cases/gramma...

Interesting. Thank you a lot. Can't say that the post referenced makes this less funny of a statement!

I know this piece is tongue in cheek, but I nevertheless bridled at the 'ugly consonant clusters' accusation; I think these add richness and character to a language, and as an English speaker, anyone who disagrees can prise the latchstring from my cold dead hand ...

Torille?

Tortilla avataan?

Reminds me a bit of the classic essay, So You Want to Learn Japanese: http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm.

> Finnish has longer and better swear words than any other language.

Great, trying to sell it as a World Language and they managed to insult 99.95% of the world with one line!

(Well maybe less than 99.95%. We can all agree that English swear words aren't that great.)

I remember a joke question from the conlanging subreddit asking what real language looks the most like it was constructed, and one of the top answers was Finnish.

It really does look like that, it's unnaturally systematic in a lot of ways.

I suppose in many ways it was actually constructed and rather lately for a language. And then very effectively put through education system. With good promotion of one standard in written and publicly broadcasted word.

“Finnish has longer and better swear words than any other language.”

That already makes adoption of the language doomed, hahaha. Swearing also needs no logic, I dun give a fuck. Fuck yeah? fuuuuuuck. “fuck” as the universal language and word.

It is spanish! ;-)

I remember my younger days when Hristo Stoichkov came to play with Barcelona FC. A very aggresive and sweary player, a few years later he left to play for Parma FC, and while playing in Italy, he kept swearing in spanish!

I even saw him doing the same while playing for Bulgaria.

Ha, fantastic to contrast with English as logical and world language :)

Anyway, one thing that the post did not touch on was word stress. Finnish is awesomely simple and consistent! (again, especially compared to English)

Is this satire?

One of the things I love about this community is that satire can go completely over the head of many members here.

https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses/1504/

Seen many funny instances were blatant satire gets hilarious responses from people that treat it as real.

Of course Autistic Savants often takes things far to literally. Took me ages when younger to get the hang of it.

Well done satire will fool any community. That's the definition of good satire. I don't think HN is any more easily fooled than other communities. And frequently HN finds some aspect being ridiculed and shows that in fact it's not nearly as dismissable as the satire would have one believe.

I think the confusion is often because people (like myself) don't read the content past the headline

Yes, there are quite a few tip-offs that this is satire. Some examples:

> The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions.

> Learning Finnish builds confidence. If you can learn Finnish, then you can learn anything.

> and shifts the burden of labour over to the person you are talking to.

More clues can be found higher up in the site. See Something about ... Finnish! [1]

> First let's have fun. There are two texts about Finnish language: the English original and a German translation. Don't take them too serious: