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Comment by aaroninsf | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

Not even gendered pronouns?

Nope. Even better: Many dialects of Finnish use "it" for everything in informal speech, so we're not just ahead in gender equality, but animal rights as well.

How do you say it was a "he-said-she-said argument" then? ;) Actually it's often occurred to me pronouns didn't need to be gendered but we should have different pronouns for "the 1st aforementioned person" and "the 2nd aforementioned person". Not sure if any languages do.

Edit: maybe ASL? https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

There are languages like that---the distinction is referred to as "proximative" vs. "obviative". (Though strictly speaking, it differentiates between "more topical" and "less topical" third persons, which might not necessarily correspond with the order in which they're mentioned.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative Apparently, there's even an Algonquian language which has a "further obviative" too, thus distinguishing three different levels of topicality.

Not Finnish, but in Turkish (another language without gendered pronouns) I'd use something like "o ne dedi bu ne dedi" (what did that say, what did this say)

I'd guess Finnish has more than one demonstrative pronoun, too :)

> (what did that say, what did this say)

> I'd guess Finnish has more than one demonstrative pronoun, too :)

One of the most common ways to do that in Finnish is talking about how "One (did something) and the other (did something else)"... With the only tiny little problem being that the Finnish for both "one" and "the other", in this context, is "toinen"!

It's very informal and I'm not sure how widely spread it is outside of the Helsinki region, but at least least here in the Helsinki region, you can also use demonstrative pronouns (tää (= this), toi (= that)) as third person pronouns in certain specific circumstances to further specify how the people referred to in the conversation relate to you, the speaker, and whoever the listener happens to be. So you can have people A,B,C conversing, with D present but not participating in the conversation, and E not present but being discussed, and A can tell B "this told that that it/he/she did something" and it will be understood as "C told D that E did something". Not the exact distinction you were asking about, but it's another related axis of distinction in pronouns that I thought might be interesting enough to mention here.

English definitely needs better pronouns, but I have no idea how you can introduce them. We can't even agree on what cases you can use "they/their/them" for an individual person! One thing you do occasionally hear people doing if they don't want to repeat full names and need to disambiguate pronouns is to refer to people by the first letter of their name ("John told Adam J wasn't the right person for A"), but obviously that won't work if you don't know their names.

I would use the idiom "sana sanaa vastaan", i.e. "word against word" for that situation.

Because it's a bug, not a feature.

>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/

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

>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.

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