You know more Finnish than you think
dannybate.com
dannybate.com
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ievan+polkka
If you can only do three:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqthspSKZV8 - Acapella from Finland, circa 1990s
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX5OARoNFpg - Modern Russia, I sincerely hope none of these folks get drafted
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAyWN9ba9J8 - One of my favorite things on the internet, a South African guy remixing an blind Turkish street performer playing a Finnish song.
Delightful stuff.
Turns out you can play it with an angry face.
I've visited Finland a lot the later years due to my company starting a fulfillment center there. It was quite interesting how well I could get by with my Norwegian most places. Either because signage also was in Swedish, words often similar enough (except those that are very very far off, lol), or I even could speak Norwegian to some coworkers that then replied in Swedish (and not all of them even being Finns with Swedish as their native language).
For a brief attempt at a Finnish webshop I also happen to know "Osta Nyt" (Buy now) and "Verkkokauppa" (Online store).
So you know a bit more Finnish than you thought!
Picking it up again once a year wasn't hard (usually when we'd get relatives visiting us, or the other way around), but around the time I became a teenager, I started speaking less - for no other reason than that I traveled less to relatives during the summers. These days I can read some, and listen to some conversation, but speaking is very hard - probably 25 years since I spoke it fluently. It is a shame, as I have to speak English with my grandparents, aunts, etc. - but language is def one of those "use it or lose it" things.
With that said, for the English speaking people - you'd be surprised how much Norwegian / Swedish / Danish (Germanic language) you can understand, with the amount of shared, or very similar words, the languages have.
Same way for us Scandinavians and Dutch. Can't really understand much when the language is spoken, but when reading some text, there's a lot of structure and words you can understand.
There's a handful of false friends (Fart, Slut) but probably 10-15% of the scandinavian languages still have influence on modern english.
I say "still have root" because; if you weren't aware: the first common tongue variant of English was a proto-germanic language from the "Angles" of Denmark. "Angle"-ish, if you would.
Its more strange how the scandiavian dialects have a broader application in Scots english (Barn/Baen for child, Kirk for Church for example) - my family are Scottish so that was a weird surprise.
Regardless, if you're going to try to learn a Scandinavian Language: Stick to Norwegiean or Stockholm-Swedish. The Danish and Southern Swedish dialect (Skånsk) is difficult to unpick word from word and will leave you bewildered. But you will understand more than you might originally expect to if you visit Stockholm and have a simple pocket dictionary. :D
- Hämis (little spider) is "spidey", like a childish nickname
- Ukko (lightning mage) is "old man"
- Stendari (fire mage) is "cigarette lighter" (slang)
- Stevari (holy temple guardian) is "mall cop" (slang)From Swedish "tändare".
- Stevari (holy temple guardian) is "mall cop" (slang)
From STV (Suomen Teollisuuden Vartiointi) security firm.
"Maailma", on the other hand, is an old word, and its original meaning was more like "earth and sky". "Ilma" used to mean things like sky, heaven, air, and weather, but Finnic languages eventually started using the Indo-European loan "taivas" for the first two.
I have great respect for that first person to shake mammoth bone in another person's face saying "luu". They nailed it.
luu = bone
kuu = Moon
suu = mouth
muu = other
You can practically imagine the apes in the first act of the movie “2001” coming up with these words to describe their environment.
(The monolith could be a “muu muu”, the Other Other, to distinguish it from the basic “muu” of the other tribe.)
I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure it exists in English as well.
In Hungarian also every vowel comes in pairs of short-long: a-á (what vs high), e-é (ever vs eight), "o-ó" (moss vs most), "u-ú" (put vs you), "ö-ő" (fur vs ... well long version has no English equivalent I think but German does: schön).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_phonology#Vowel_exam...
"Hungarian has seven pairs of corresponding short and long vowels. Their phonetic values do not exactly match up with each other, so ⟨e⟩ represents /ɛ/ and ⟨é⟩ represents /eː/; likewise, ⟨a⟩ represents /ɒ/ while ⟨á⟩ represents /aː/.[14] For the other pairs, the short vowels are slightly lower and more central, and the long vowels more peripheral."
So yes, they apparently are "short-long pairs".
Typically, when people talk about "long" and "short" vowels they are referring to a combination of duration and pronunciation (e.g. English "bat" vs. "bate"), and that appears to be the case here as well. If you are interpreting the terms differently, I'm not sure what sense you have in mind.
Finnish vowels and most Hungarian vowels come in short-long pairs that
- only their lengths differ, their pronunciations do not (meaning: IPA denotes them with the same letter but with or without a colon)
- their lengths are *phonemic*, that is they are *said to be* different phonemes, they are *perceived as* different phonemes, and there are example words that differ only at them
A-á and e-é are not such pairs. They differ in pronunciation (see the IPA in [0]), and their lengths, while are somewhat defined, never contrast (no minimal pairs for them). Also you can pronounce any of these four with arbitrary length, it will stay the same phoneme.
[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_phonology#Vowel_exam...
[1] : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Hungarian_minimal_pa...
edit: I find your previous quote 'misleading'. I would say 'wrong', but it avoids to say anything factual. At least in out of context--the rest of the wiki page clarifies everything.
Your position sounds cogent and may well be a more accurate description of Hungarian (e.g. that its long/short vowels are more like Latin than English). I don't know Hungarian, so I can't say.
The rest of this thread is consistent with people assuming the broader definition of long/short.
Somewhat easier but still challenging is getting the wovels in the right place. They're just different, and the barrier is as hard going the other way but Finns have more practice in speaking English than the other way around. It's similar to the idea that it's very very hard to learn a tonal language if you grew with non-tonal languages.
He has no problem with any of the languages including Finnish but she's still convinced that she needs to force it on him before he's an adult so that he can... well, I'm not sure why.
Growing up bi-(or even multi)-lingual is always a good opportunity when it comes to speaking, especially here in Switzerland.
a) convincing yourself its worth the effort: almost every time an adult runs into a confusing element of a new language, they find themselves calculating how many people in the world speak this language, probability they don't speak english and likelihood of running into this person and circumstance, and it's easy to justify giving up and moving on
b) avoiding forcing it into the framework of your first language: if you have one distinctly favored language already, it's very hard not to try shove the new language you are learning into the former's mold, and this can be counterproductive in learning most languages that don't share an ancestor with your favored one.
a) is greatly mitigated by forcing yourself to be in said context by living in a place prioritizing that language. b) is greatly mitigated by already being bilingual+ with languages from distinct origins (eg: mandarin chinese and english) before learning a new one, so you can place the new language on a spectrum with the ones you already know instead of confined by the rules of just one.
An adult studying a language is spending like maybe 1% of the time studying that a child learning a language spends.
The first comment seems to be arguing that the difference is "literally just a function of time and exposure opportunity and nothing else" (explicitly ruling out a significant effect related to a difference in brain plasticity related to age), while the comment you're answering to argues that brain plasticity, even under the same conditions of time and exposure opportunity, makes a significant difference.
If you watch people and you know when they started to learn a new language you can see a pretty strong statistical trend (what I've been exposed to is lots of immigrants who came to the country at various ages): The youngest children learn the language relatively quickly, and there's no accent. If they're around 9 or ten they still learn the language quickly, but the accent may remain for several years. And this gradually "worsen", in a way, as they start learning the language at a later age.
But there are lots of outliers, both ways. There are a few people I know who learned my language to absolute perfection, 100% native in every possible way, in their late twenties.
On the other hand there are also a large majority of people learning my language as mature adults and becoming fluent to the extent that nobody really cares about accent or way of speech - they're not sounding "native", but it's perfectly fine and doesn't matter. People stop noticing, it's just part of who they are.
Though when you get to around sixty it's definitely harder, but still doable. And it varies between people and it matters a lot what language you're trying to learn.
No I didn't. I never said anywhere that it's a sharp cutoff rather than a sliding scale.
If I say Canada is further north than Brazil, it doesn't mean that latitude isn't a continuous spectrum.
"..Even people who move to another country as adults and spend 100% of their time speaking that country’s language almost never learn to speak it with native-level intuition and a native-sounding accent (though they can reach pretty high levels). Children do, without even trying"
You simply differed between adults and children. If you meant "it gets more and more difficult the farther you move from childhood".. well fine, but you didn't write the equivalent of 'further north than Brazil' so you should expect to get questioned about that.
I spoke four languages by elementary school, including learning a new one (portuguese) in fifth grade. It was all seamless, zero effort, perfect local accent. So I have plenty of language background.
I've spent almost 20 years now as an adult trying to learn french and find it impossible. Still speak it at a 2-year old level, at best. I have constant daily exposure to french, it's just an impossible language. Or that learning a new language as an adult it impossible.
So, 'adult' isn't really right in my opinion / experience - I know many people who were adults and could absorb another language relatively easily.
What seems to happen is that it does change for the worse as the decades go by. But it's not as simple as adult vs child. And it's not by orders of magnitude in any case, it's more linear than that.
I have very jealous of your friend’s multi-lingual son though!
Perhaps for a speaker of another synthetic language like Polish it might be easier to learn Finnish as their brain might would already have the wiring but even then, as the article notes Finnish is not an Indo-European language so it is further removed still.
The pessimist says: Finnish is too hard for an adult to learn, mission impossible.
The realist says: With 10 years of hard work, it's doable.
The optimist says: I can do it in 5 years.
Myself I was an optimist and I kind of did it in 5 years, but it was tight. However, after having spoken it daily for 25 more years I get more and more pessimistic: There are several aspects I will not master in this life.
Seeing your kid speak your native language is a delight regardless of the circumstances.
In the end, all cultures in existence are very sticky and want to survive and replicate. The ones that don't didn't make it into the modern age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finglish
Especially in the IT world. Printteri tilttasi, klikkaa linkkiä, koodi bugittaa, buuttaa serveri!
I have a strong dislike against setting the language of my OS, or most applications, to Finnish. Application translations are extremely inconsistent, sometimes even nonsensical. The absolute worst case is seeing only translated error messages without error codes. It's nearly impossible to search help or follow step-by-step guides.
I definitely should improve my knowledge of "proper" Finnish IT terms. Some of them have very intuitive meanings:
- hashing -> hajautus: (chaotically) splitting, scattering things away from each other
I don't remember seeing any source confirming or refuting the connection.
"The word has definite etymological equivalents in both closely related and distantly related languages, e.g. Karelian and Votic poika, Ludic and Vepsian poig}, Estonian poeg, Livonian puoga, Komi and Udmurt pi, Mansi pig, and Hungarian fiu. Possible equivalents are also the initial parts of the Mordvin word pijo 'grandchild' and the Mari word puerge 'male person' (erge 'man'). The original form of the word has been reconstructed as *pojka. The Swedish pojke, which in the past also meant 'servant boy', is apparently a loanword from Finnish. In contrast, the English boy and the etymologically related German Bube have different origins."
In particular, the pronunciation of Estonian "poeg" and "poiss" seem too close to be entirely coincidental.
Along the coast of southern and western Finland there are many bilingual Swedish/Finnish municipalities where most of the native Swedish speaking population lives. And on the island of Åland the overwhelming majority of the population are native Swedish speakers.
On the other hand in Central and Eastern Finland you aren’t going to get by with just Swedish.
For example, in a bilingual environment, it can be enough to understand two languages and to speak one.
(Disclaimer: Finn)
Read it again:
> The Finnish city of Turku [...] derives its name from [...]
Also there are many cases when a word is just a calque. Like vízfej. I wouldn’t call this a Hungarian word in the strictest sense, because it exists only because of other languages, even when víz and fej are Hungarian words. It clearly comes from German, or maybe Latin, or even Greek.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Po...
Actually, no. Most of the loan words are from Chinese, if you look at the full vocabulary of Japanese. Old Chinese. It's a huge part of the Japanese vocabulary. Then you have a lot of loan words (from later times) from Portuguese, Dutch, and even German. And English. But even words like the word for beer (ビール), which sounds something like "beer-oo" isn't from English. It's from Dutch "bier".
In any case, the modern loan words are nearly always written in katakana, while loan words from traditional Chinese aren't. You don't see them as easily, while you can quickly spot modern loan words and there aren't _that_ many. Even though new loan words tend to come more from English nowadays.
That there are plenty of words in Finnish which have indo-germanic roots is without doubt. A majority of things introduced after 1500. But recognizing similarity of single words is not knowing a language. The structure of the language is so different, that even common grammatical concepts like singular and plural or subject and object don't really match to define the rules. Finnish has five house, but fives trousers. The list goes on and on with concepts far too difficult to explain here.
"Indo-Germanic" is a dated and ethno-nationalist and mythical term, popularized by the Nazis, implying a false stronger affinity between the Indic and the Germanic languages than between either and the other Indo European languages, and used in service of the Nazi master race mythology [1].
The correct term is Indo-European.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Indo-Germanic_People
I only know it from studying about how the Nazis appropriated and twisted the legitimate field of historical linguistics to support their objectives.
I've only heard it used to describe that ideology, or sadly, by acquaintances who subscribed to portions of that ideology.
A sibling comment says that indo-germanic remains a standard scientific term in German, there is no nationalist background. I cannot comment on the correctness of that claim, but it would explain why I used it. German press is not suspect of nationalism, quite the opposite. (There are of course exceptions, but I have never read those. I am part of the pre 1990 generation that feels uncomfortable when seeing German flags flown by individuals in public.)
I replied to the sibling about why I think the English word has strong nationalist connections.
I don't know about its German equivalent (Wiktionary claims it's a synonym for Indo-European), but this discussion thread is in English, and furthermore concerns linguistics, and it that context, it has nationalistic connections.
Even the Internet thinks so: the second link on google when you search for the term is a Wikipedia article about the nationalist myth it represents. What appears when you search for it in German?
I understand you didn't use it nationalistically, of course. Sometimes things good and bad are both lost and gained in translation.
If you search for "indogermanisch" you're going to get the Wikipedia article canonically named "indogermanische Sprachen" first. The second result I see is the English Wikipedia article called "Indo-European languages" and the rest of the articles also appear to be very scientific.
Maybe the term has some weird connotations in English, but that's certainly not true everywhere and it's also not necessarily true in linguistic discourse because English only became relevant as a scientific language relatively recently (German and French used to be much more common) and there's still to this date a lot of linguistic research being published in languages other than English (e.g. why would somebody who researches the German language publish in English?).
This discussion is in English though, not German or French.
From Wikipedia :
> Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India.[10][11] A synonym is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French (indo-germanique) in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European, although in German indogermanisch remains the standard scientific term.
I have no problem saying that Indo-European is a preferable term nowadays, but to claim that the term "indo-germanic" is ethno-nationalist is just absurd. Using two extreme branches of a family to describe the family is a very common practice in linguistics.
It's not absurd because it was used ethno-nationalistically, by both Indians and Germans in the past. I've certainly heard it used in English exactly that way. In English, and especially in linguistics contexts, its nationalist associations are clear.
Furthermore, it's also patently incorrect: there is no higher affinity between the Indic and Germanic branches of Indo-European.
"Indo-European" is a term derived from the geographic span of the language family, not a particular language at either end (there is no "Indian" or "European" language). In contrast, the latter half of Indo-Germanic specifically refers to the Germanic sub-branch, to the exclusion of the many other Indo European sub-branches.
The fabrication of that supposed affinity to the exclusion of the other branches was a specifically nationalist exercise, different only in degree to more egregious things like the appropriation of the swastika (whose name and most prominent use is Indic). We know this because the Indo-European family was uncovered by William Jones when he observed the affinities of Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, not the Germanic languages (those connections then quickly followed). So its identity was always broader than Germanic from the moment of its discovery.
Therefore, Indo-Germanic doesn't make sense for the same reason Indo-Hellenic or Indo-Celtic don't make sense.
The oldest sub-branch affinity we can deduce in the Indo-European language family is the centum/satem split, which Indic and Germanic languages are on opposite sides of, and even that split is difficult to track down to single branch point, it could be an independent development in different sub-branches.
You're fighting against windmills, there are no perfect names for huge language families, this gets even worse when we look at certain language families in other continents. It's very common to just pick two subbranches (or geographic regions), combine them and call it a day (e.g. Sino-Tibetan).
Yes, and in English, the language of this discussion, Indo-European is the term that is used, not Indo-Germanic.
A large photo of some lake, that isn't even named, which contributes nothing to the article -- you need to scroll two pages to get over it, and it's before the first sentence of the article.
Maps that contain text and provide real context to the article's premise -- so small that the page needs to be zoomed in. Original images are slightly bigger, so the website actually makes them even smaller than they are.
It so matches the times we live in today.
It is a lake in Finland that has the shape of Finland.
The lake itself is also interesting, but the fact that it was artifically shaped like this, makes it a little bit less interesting.
I'm Dutch. I learned English in school. And some basic French and German. And a bit of Latin. My French was actually getting decent by the time I quit studying it. Good enough to read some simple books. But I've forgotten most of it. I moved to Sweden in 1998 and lived there for 2 years and picked up a basic understanding of the language. Easy; lots in common with German, English, and Dutch. And the grammar is very simple and regular. I can still pick apart written Swedish/Danish/Norwegian pretty easily (they share the same grammar and a lot of vocabulary).
When I moved to Finland where Swedish is an official language, I used that for official things like taxes. It's otherwise completely useless in daily life as no Finnish speaking Finn will bother speaking Swedish and there are only a 10% or so Swedish speaking ones who all speak decent Finnish. In fact I took my Swedish beginners class in Sweden with a few Finnish exchange students. They all had to learn it in school but clearly not to the point where they were any good at it. Mind you, this was a class for beginners with essentially no Swedish skills whatsoever.
Getting by with English is easy in Finland. Essentially everyone speaks it and so few foreigners are able to master Finnish that it's just easier for everyone to stick to English for the locals rather than patiently waiting for the foreigners to string a few words together. They'll just roll their eyes and switch to English at the first hint of you being foreign.
In other countries, you actually get a lot of shit for not mastering the local language. Not a thing in Finland. I live in Germany where that very much is a thing.
Germany is my fourth country and my German sucks; so I get plenty of shit from the locals. I get by with my high school German, very bad grammar, and ability to map enough of it back to Dutch/English that I can work my way through an email or document. My spoken German is extremely limited. I lack the vocabulary, grammar, etc. I'm OK with that. I've accepted that I'm not magically going to be turning into a person that is good at or enjoys studying a language for thousands of hours on end. Which is roughly what it takes. I actually have a busy job. I don't have the spare time. And what little I have, I need for resting and doing enjoyable things.
We have the power of AI these days. It's easier than ever to interact with people around the world. We're not that far off from a usable babel fish type universal translator solution being practical enough that you can just travel to outer Waziristan and strike up a conversation with a local sheep herder. It's getting there for written text. But real time verbal exchanges are still challenging. Kind of looking forward to that getting fixed.
You get mis-understood and weirdly translated names, acronyms, jargon, etc. And that's on top of people with bad accents, microphones, etc. It's getting better but right now it's more of a LOL whut?! than that it's actually useful.
But it's clearly on a path to crossing into useful and from there to indispensable territory. Hopefully soon. Because I need this stuff in a hurry.
But you can't be part of a group of more than two people and do that. You can't inject your opinion about something in real time when the chatter is going on. You can't even get a translation in your ear about what people are saying, as while you're waiting for the translator to start translating (with Japanese the verb, and thus the action, comes last..) the next person is already talking.
There'll never be a Star Trek universal translator. And today's AI doesn't understand context enough to handle pronouns and gender when translating between languages which don't have them, or handles them differently.