Hacker News Reader

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.

What does "fusional" mean here?

A simple web search can bring you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language

>Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.

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.

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”

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

That would make it easier to grammar, but harder to pronounce.

AOU vowels are made with your tonque low. ÄÖY vowels are made with your tonque high. Mixing vowels from both groups makes tonque movements very awkward and slows down speech.

> AOU vowels are made with your tonque low. ÄÖY vowels are made with your tonque high.

Quite the opposite; /u/ is a high vowel, /o/ is mid-high, and /a/ is low. AOU vowels, assuming the Finnish orthography is anything like the rest of Europe, are made with your tongue pulled back, while ÄÖY are made with your tongue thrust forward.

That's what I mean, tonque movement. Tonque stays still inside the group. High/forward low/back.

Vowel harmony is something that arises frequently in languages as they evolve.

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 )

English or Finnish? English pronunciation is insane, you have to memorize spelling and pronunciation independently because how a word is written is just a vague approximation at best, or an intentional attempt to mislead at worst, of how the word actually sounds.

It's not only not a 1:1 mapping, and not only can wildly different spellings sound the same, but wildly different pronunciations can be written the same. It's crazy.

> 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.

> The Finnish case markers are not clitics. Clitics are distinguished in that they modify phrases, not words.

Except that this is a claim you just made up, which is not reflected in any usage of the term.

SIL ( https://glossary.sil.org/term/clitic-grammar ):

> A clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but shows evidence of being phonologically bound to another word.

Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic ):

> a clitic [] is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase.

The English 'genitive' particle 's is a clitic[1] because it takes its pronunciation from the syllable it follows. Not because it has grammatical functions at a phrase level. Clitic 'm can only ever follow the pronoun I, but that does nothing to stop it from being clitic.

[1] Actually, CGEL prefers to call 's a "phrasal case marker", but I find that absurd.

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.)

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

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

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

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.

Icelandic and English are cousins, but the former has retained a fairly extensive inflectional system that requires a lot of memorization 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 :)

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

What do you mean? Of course you need to use cases with names too.

Pekka's house => Pekan talo (in Finnish)

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.

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.

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.)

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".

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.

Why shouldn’t they be considered cases?

Because the grammatical case is a morpho-syntactical category of flexion.

Suffixes are not inflections.

Inflection is when the grammatical role of a word is expressed through word formation, eg suffix, prefix, ablaut. Suffixation is a very common way to express inflection in languages.

I've never encountered this definition of "case" before. In standard descriptive linguistic terminology, these Finnish suffixes are certainly case markers.

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

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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