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makach

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!

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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.

> 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) […]

And then there is the double l, «ll», which is pronounced as «y» in nearly all varieties of Spanish. But, yes, the Spanish spelling is far more regular and straightforward compared to many other languages.

> Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular.

… at this given point in time and history. The relationship between the spelling and the pronunciation is a notoriously complicated affair due languages being living things that keep on evolving with the spelling and pronunciation inevitably diverging over extended periods of time. There is not guarantee that, for example, either Spannish or Finnish will be pronounced the same way in, say, 200-300 years time as they are spelled today.

Different languages with their respective writing systems have resorted to different ways of dealing with the problem. English and Icelandic, for instance, have retained most of the historical spelling representing the no longer accurate historical pronunciation (with some complications), whilst, for example, Tibetan (being one of the more extreme examples) and Burmese languages have retained the archaic spelling in its entirety – both are spelled today using the pronunciation that existed hundreds of years ago. Other languages have resorted to regular historical revisions of spelling rule to purge obsolete spellings or even purge the disappeared sounds, e.g. Russian.

On the opposite side of the spectrum we have Chinese characters that have remained [mostly] unchanged over a very extended period of time, however, the pronunciation has changed several times, i.e. 越 as /*ɢʷaːd/ in Old Chinese -> as /ɦuɑt̚/ in Middle Chinese -> as /yuè/, /yuht/, /yad6/, /oat/, /uêg8/, /hhyq/ in modern Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew and Wu, respectively).

However, the languages evolved much faster historically than they do today. On one hand, the states are now effectively enforcing standard forms of language on populations via universal primary education, and then mass culture and media further reinforce that, often aided by social conventions (where the enforced standard often becomes socially proper "educated speech" that people strive to emulate to present themselves better and/or to not be discriminated against). And at the same time, modern borders significantly reduce migration rates, making it harder for language innovations to spread.

I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, of course. But a phonemic spelling created today is still likely to have a much longer useful lifetime than one created 300 years ago, say.

> like the homophones b and v

They aren't :) where are you from? do you pronounce "vaso" and "baso" in the same way? (in Argentina and Spain at least they are clearly distinct)

In most of Spain they sound exactly the same. I have met a total of one single person who pronounced them differently. Maybe it depends on the region.

I'm from Málaga, by the way.

I stand corrected! I have visited Catalonia quite a few times and never noticed they being homophones. In Argentina, or at least in Buenos Aires, they even teach you in primary school to pronounce the v using your upper teeth and lower lips (it makes it sound closer to f), and the b only with both lips. I'm very surprised to learn this, can't imagine pronouncing vacaciones as bacaciones hahah that's amazing, I wonder where this difference comes from.

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

Indeed. I remember seeing spelling bees in American TV shows and movies (which were subtitled) as a child, before I learned English, and wondered what the point was. It would be trivially easy in Finnish and anyone who knew how to read and write could easily get perfect points in such a competition.

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

That's a digraph, and they're only a problem if they can be pronounced differently. If "ng" is always the velar nasal [ŋ] and can never be the sequence [ng], then you can just treat it as a distinct symbol that happens to be composed of shapes used for other symbols.

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

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

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.

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.

The context is people learning the language though... this sort of efficiency will always come with familiarity, like how you can read 21:00 as 9 without thinking about it

> like how you can read 21:00 as 9 without thinking about it

Well... in French you can totally say twenty-nine instead of just nine (although nine also works). I think that is pretty rare among languages but I'm not sure.

> I think that is pretty rare among languages but I'm not sure.

Not rare among the ones I know, you can do that all over the Nordics and in Germany. So from my perspective you think wrong.

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

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