Deconstructing Finnish | Hacker News Reader

Deconstructing Finnish

borealexpat.blogspot.com

129 pointsdirtyaura69 comments

I travel quite a bit on business. One tactic I use to build relationships with customers and partners is to have them teach me how to count to ten in their language, typically over a beer. By now I know Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Arabic, French, German, Cantonese, Finnish and a couple of others I've forgotten.

What popped out immediately when learning the Finnish numbers was how long the words are. All of the other languages count with one or two syllable words. When pronounced, the Finnish is, minimum, two syllables. Three, seven and ten are three syllables. Eight and nine are four:

yksi

kaksi

kolme

neljä

viisi

kuusi

seitsemän

kahdeksan

yhdeksän

kymmenen

Twenty-First is: kahdeskymmenesensimmäinen

I've always wondered what it was about the history of the language and culture that led to this. Finnish does quite a bit of concatenating words to create other words. It was originally the same for numbers. For example, the longest, eight: kahdeksan was originally, literally, 'with two ten'. You can see hints of this in that kaksi (two) contains 'ka' and 'dek' references a borrowed word 'deca', ten.

Ref. http://goo.gl/Zt2WBb

Ha! My son does a similar icebreaking thing with folks of different culture/language. He asks them how to say "Excuse me, your dog is on fire!" Has it in 5 or six languages now.

Now I can't help thinking of the "spruce is on fire" Finnish-is-hard picture. Do you know it?

Never heard of it. Reference?

http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Finnish+Lesson+1_f22497_490...

Finnish is a great language:

The spruce is on fire. = Kuusi palaa.

The spruce returns. = Kuusi palaa.

The number six is on fire. = Kuusi palaa.

The number six returns. = Kuusi palaa.

Six of them are on fire. = Kuusi palaa.

Six of them return. = Kuusi palaa.

Your moon is on fire. = Kuusi palaa.

Your moon returns. = Kuusi palaa.

Six pieces. = Kuusi palaa

What the others pointed out, sorry for not linking directly. I was on iPad and searching on a separate tab, copying and all the hassle was slightly too cumbersome... And you may have already seen it :)

Anteeksi, koirasi on tulessa

(though in practice the polite forms are rarely used in Finnish. You'd probably go for hei, sun koiras palaa)

Growing up in the US, I learned Finnish from books and maybe some official radio/TV, as well as family. My cousins in Finland made fun of me for speaking like a book: I'd always choose the first sentence you presented and they'd just gawk. "Who talks like that?"

I knew lots of old words they'd never heard, though, since I was practiced at speaking with 70-year-olds who'd learned from their immigrant parents. A little linguistic time warp...

A humble suggestion would be to ask them to start counting from zero, not one.

"kolme" is two syllables, not three.

"kahdeksan" and "yhdeksän" are three syllables, not four.

The gentleman teaching me pronounced the 'h'. As in 'ka-hə-dek-san' and 'u-hə-dek-san'.

Perhaps he was trying to emphasize that the 'h' must not be left silent. There's no vowel implied after the 'h', though.

Dialect differences rear their heads. For a fun read on one major class of Finnish dialects, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savonian_dialects

If I were good I'd be able to identify the region of Finland your teacher came from. Someone from Finland, help me out! Is that a Savolainen murre?

Nope. Though "kahareksan" sounds like something you'd hear in Pohjanmaa.

Yeah it's the dialect of my hometown - that's def not standard Finnish :)

Of course, colloquially, Finns typically shorten them to

yy kah kol nel vii kuu sei kasi ysi kymppi

(or a similar variation)

with multiples of ten shorted to -kyt. So twenty-one is 'kahkytyy', the same number of syllables as in English.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquial_Finnish#Numerals

Learning Finnish involves learning two dialects, spoken and written, and the spoken dialect can vary considerably even between cities 200km apart. But it's an incredibly fun language to learn. Very logically constructed, few(er) exceptions to the rules, and if you can say it, you can spell it!

I'm Finnish and I have to say I've never heard anyone say "kahkytyy" and it ... looks weird, too. "Kakskytyks" is the form I'd use. (Also, "yy kaa koo nee vii kuu seit kasi ysi kymppi" for the first 10 numbers.)

My dialect is from the Turku region, for what it's worth.

When counting something, I (in North Karelia) would say

  yy kaa koo nee vii kuu see kasi ysi 
  kymppi yytoo kaatoo ... kaksyy kakskaa kakskoo...

And when just saying a single number, I would say

  yksi kaksi kolme neljä viisi kuusi seittämän 
  kaheksan yheksän kymmenen ykstoista 
  kakstoista ... kakskytyks kakskytkaks kakskytkolme

Never heard "kahkytyy" either, "kakskytyks" is the form I'd use too (Häme represent).

> What popped out immediately when learning the Finnish numbers was how long the words are.

Interestingly, the Estonian numbers are basically the Finnish ones with the last syllable chopped off: üks, kaks, kolm, neli, viis, kuus, seitse, kaheksa, üheksa, kümme.

I think that Estonian, by the virtue of having been in contact with more different languages and cultures, is kind of a "time travel to the future of Finnish language". They seem to have dropped a lot of the unnecessarily complicated endings etc.

As a Finn i find it most hilarious when it comes to counting the Olympics, e.g. "Kahdennetkymmenennettoiset talviolympialaiset" would be "twenty-second winter Olympics". Even our sport journalists have troubles getting those n:s and t:s correctly pronounced.

Bottom line: native speakers of English don't grok morphology. When exposed to it, the best among them get fascinated and keen, the worst are cast into despair and ennui. But hey, this way of dealing with words is quite common as languages go. Greek, Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Swahili, all of them work by affixing lots of grammar markers onto roots, sometimes changing the roots and the affixes in subtle ways. (Actually, English used to be like that, too, no more than a thousand years ago.)

It's sounds to me like a problem lots of people have when learning foreign languages. The author said so himself in the article. If you asked a Finnish person why a particular word is spelled/inflected/conjugated the way it is, they wouldn't be able to tell you. They just memorize the final forms and know when to use it. This is how a child learns a language. It's difficult for people learning the language because they know why—they learn the rules. And they can't help but try to run through all the rules in their head when forming a sentence.

A similar problem occurs when learning French. If you take at face value that 75 is "soixante-quinze" instead of deconstructing it as "sixty-fifteen", counting is a non-issue. But you can't, because you learned that counting is "weird" after 70 and you remember that when you try to speak it.

You have to learn rules. You can't learn all of the numbers that exist without rules, you'd never get anything else done.

I think you missed jinushaun's point: you can learn 70-99 in French without rules, just like you learn 0-19 without rules in English.

Describing how children learn language as "memorization" is probably not accurate. Native speakers do "learn" rules, they just do it more or less unconsciously because our young, developing brains are wired for language acquisition.

I think this has far more to do with the difference in how children and adults are taught languages than structural differences in the brain.

After all, 2 year olds aren't sat down with pages of conjugation tables to memorize, rather they pick things up from speaking and being corrected.

> They just memorize the final forms

I don't think it is possible to memorize all the gazillions of final forms in an agglutinative language. I am sure native speakers also learned the rules and then apply them, but it's all on a subconscious level.

As a foreign language learner, the "rules" you learn form a framework on which to build understanding when you're learning.

It's been my experience that after you get past a certain point, the rules stop mattering quite as much and are replaced by "intuition" similar (but not necessarily quite as strong) to what a native speaker has. When I write or speak English or Japanese, I do not think in terms of rules; I simply say what I think means what I want to communicate. Sometimes I don't know how to say something, but that's not because I've forgotten the "rules"; it's because I haven't built a strong enough intuition to express myself how I want to, using the words I have memorised.

Studying grammar and etymology can give insight into how a native speaker of a language sees the world. Ultimately, memorization of rules and vocabulary is the easy part of learning a language, though it is often very time consuming.

>>For years, I’ve enjoyed some popular Finnish bands without necessarily having much of a clue what they’re singing about. It's not a strange as it might sound.

I always found it funny when native English speakers first realise that this is possible. But as a person whose first language is not English, I grew up surrounded by songs which I couldn't understand - and I could still enjoy them.

I'd have thought that was pretty common for native English speakers who listen to opera or other classical music. Or indeed most people from the UK who like Rammstein....

Not really relevant to anything, but I could never get why so few of the Finnish bands got so little international traction compared to Swedish bands. There are lots of good musicians, even without importing from St Petersburg, not only in hard rock and metal.

(I remember walking into a Finnish pub the first time and checking the jukebox. Half of the selection were good hard rock and metal; do the same in Sweden and it will be mostly slimy pop produced as a business.)

Here's a song for English-speaking people to get the experience of listening to American pop music without understanding the words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E77HpMMbDYc#t=83

Finnish and Hungarian are the two European languages that I can't make any connection to and after reading this article I feel a little bit better about the Finnish part of that, and I'll take consolation in the fact that Finnish and Hungarian are related.

Also Estonian is part of the same group

You're absolutely right but I've never been exposed to it. I've been exposed plenty to Hungarian and Finnish though, and have failed to make any appreciable headway. Frustrating.

I'm not sure if it's a good Hungarian text, but the one I got the most out of was called "Learn Hungarian"[1]. It's out of print but you may be able to find a used copy on Amazon. To be fair, by the time I got my hands on a copy I already had a decent grasp on the grammar, an OK vocabular, and had been living in Budapest for a few months.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Hungarian-Zolt%C3%A1n-B%C3%A1nhi...

I spent a few years in Estonia and Learned the language while I was there. It's almost like a Spanish to Portuguese difference between Finnish and Estonian. Estonian has like 14 cases. It took me a long time to learn, and that was speaking it every day.

Hungarian is regarded complicated, but in fact it is quite regular and even simple in some aspects - there is no grammatical gender and modern Hungarian has only three temporal forms, of which only one is a combined form (future).

Among the unusual things in Hungarian are agglutination (Turkish has it too and even Esperanto) and vowel harmony (mostly found in Turkic and Uralic languages).

Agglutination example: House is ház, apple is alma. Inside the house is ház[ban], inside the apple, almá[ban]. Inside [my] house is ház[am][ban], inside [my] apple almá[m][ban]. And so forth. It's kind of like postfix notation.

Don't forget negative concord. "I haven't eaten nothing all day" makes a lot of sense in Uralic languages.

I learned Hungarian as a Mormon missionary, and by far this agglutination (I'd never seen that term before) is my favorite part of the language. It's like being given a set of word legos and told "go nuts!" And it always seemed really regular to me; I was never as frustrated learning Hungarian as I was with German in high school.

We taught English classes there, which helped me realize just how capricious the language can seem to an ESL student.

So "Hungarian notation" is a language joke too?! Damn, so many years and I never made the connection.

Not only are Finnish and Hungarian related, but they are (as far as historical linguistics can tell) completely unrelated to every other language of Europe. Going by family resemblance, you'd expect English speakers to have an easier time learning Persian or Sanskrit than Finnish.

> but they are (as far as historical linguistics can tell) completely unrelated to every other language of Europe

You are forgetting the Sámi languages and Estonian.

And Mari, and Mordvinic, and Komi, and Udmurt, and Karelian, and Veps, and Vodic (though the last two are, sadly, more or less moribund).

I'm a Finn and not language person, so I have always wondered why some linguists and philologists (like Tolkien) love Finnish language despite it being so weird and hard to learn. Here is interesting opinion from one foreigner:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Nordiccountries/comments/2bm3e4/dane...

    --8<--

Ok this might get long.

First to give some weight to my opinion, I should mention that I've studied most of the major language families in the world to some depth. I've studied indo-european languages quite extensively (including all scandinavian languages), I have a degree in Icelandic, teach it for a living, and have studied Finnish for many years.

In comparaison to other languages, Finnish is very regular. It is extremely efficient - you can create new words very easily and all the parts 'click' together perfectly. One of the reason for the great practicality and efficiency of the Finnish language is that for one thing, it uses many small ways to integrate endings seemlessly into the words - vowel harmony means only certain vowels can be added onto certain nouns (a o u can only have a o u in the word, whereas ä ö y can only be around other ä ö y, and i e are neutral). Every way in which a word can end in Finnish also has a second 'open' form that is used when the seal of the word is broken (nominative) to add more stuff onto it. The word kuningas 'king' can be 'broken open' to kunkinkaa- and then you add endings (kuninkaalle, kuninkaana, etc.).

So it's kind of like a really slick puzzle where each part fits specifically with a word and various rules make it all seem like one big beautiful well integrated whole.

Another beautiful thing about Finnish is the purity of its sounds. It's extremely clear. You can chose to speak Finnish in such a way that every single vowel is completely distinct from the other, no sound is ambiguous, everything is just the way it should be.

Finnish also has a LOT of words. LOADS of words describing sounds in nature. LOADS of words for various types of movement (jump, jump once, jump around, jump casually, etc.). It is the PERFET language to talk about the forest, mushrooms, types of soil, types of bark, birds, water, weather. I can think of SO many words related to trees, bark, where the tree lies, how big it is, is it dead on its side, dead lying on another tree, dead with the middle rotten away, the bark rotten away, etc.

Finnish is also what is called a linguistic icebox. When you put a new word into Finnish, it remains unchanged for many thousands of years. The word kuningas 'king' is nearly identical to the proto-germanic form (*kuningaZ).

So in other words, Finnish is incredibly clear, very 'integrated' (words seamlessly melt into one another with high specificity), really rich in derivations (you can create hundreds of words based on one root), really rich in words for sound, movement, nature, trees, plants, etc., and it has changed very little for a very very long time.

Sure, it's spoken with a rather low voice and your culture might label Finnish as ugly, but it's just really different from the germanic languages, and in my opinion, infinitely more beautiful!

Upea suomenkieli, kaikkein kaunein kieli!

    --8<--

I think just linking to his comment is fine. I wasn't sure if you were quoting at first.

Interesting.

>In comparaison to other languages, Finnish is very regular.

Sanskrit (another Indo-European language) is another language that is regular, or maybe I should say its grammar rules are fairly systematic. It's as though the language was designed by a mathematician or computer scientist - orthogonal, etc. - speaking loosely, of course - I'm not a linguist by any means. But I did study Sanskrit for some years in high school.

Also:

>really rich in derivations (you can create hundreds of words based on one root

Similar to Sanskrit again. You can create words not only based on one root, but by combining various words, roots, stems, prefixes, suffixes, etc. Of course other languages may have this too.

Another interesting thing I read about Sanskrit is that some of the verses in shlokas [1] have multiple layers of meaning, e.g. a superficial meaning and deeper meaning(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shloka

"But I did study Sanskrit for some years in high school."

Sheesh. 'round here a really first class high school is one that offers one language other than Spanish.

Heh. Well, I don't think my school was exceptional in that way, though it was reasonably good. It's just that this was in India and Sanskrit and Hindi were two of the languages taught. Can't remember now whether it was an elective or not.

Sanskrit comes across as logical because it's almost always learned as a second language for scholarly purposes. It has a small number of native speakers, but when you learn Sanskrit you're probably not specifically learning to talk to them.

A more obvious example of this is Latin, which sounds so scholarly because for centuries it was used only by scholars. If the toddlers of a nation were somehow taught to speak Latin for everyday purposes, the living language that resulted would give Latin teachers a heart attack.

What he is describing are aggulutinative languages. They are not that unique.

I feel like a broken record, but I think Arabic qualifies (my specialty). I also think of German, Turkish, Russian.

What is interesting, at least with dialectical Arabic and a general trend in languages where synthetic languages (agglutinative languages are a subset of that) move to analytic (like English, where you have clusters of words bonding to have a meaning, instead of morphology changes on the word) over time (I was studying with an Arabic dialectologist who worked with US DoS to write their books; perhaps the leading non-native on this stuff). She said if you read, this is not an uncommon trend as hinted earlier.

English is a good example of eventually dropping agglutinative (synthetic to analytic). I am not sure if this is happening to Finnish, but as an Arabic speaker it is very fun to use an agglutinative language with a special pattern system. Imagine basic word meanings are objects, and you can subclass them into a person doing it noun (k-t-b -> k-aa-t-b, writer), or a place where it is done (k-t-b -> m-k-t-b or m-k-t-b-a, office and library respectively) or something that is the passive object form (m-k-t-oo-b, something written down). There are even versions for receivng action passively, and many variants for verb types. You can build verbs on the fly. It is fun to watch US movies, here a weird word, and guess the root into the right pattern.

I have heard Finnish is cool, but not for quite the same reasons (at least it is very general). But keep that agglutination and fight the power!

Finnish has various forms of consonant gradation, e.g. kyky (ability) -> kyvystä (from skill), or saapas (boot) -> saappain (by boots). I'm no linguist, but I'm pretty sure that hinders Finnish from turning very analytic. This is in contrast to say, Quechua, which is so regular I'm not sure how they decided which things are inflections and which are their own words.

The term agglutinative language has a specific meaning in linguistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language. Under this definition, IE languages (Russian, German), Arabic wouldn't be be considered as such. Typical examples are Turkic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, most native American languages. And the language isolate Basque.

But you are right in the sense that other languages do exhibit agglutinative aspects, usually in nouns (Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz). One giveaway is how words get marked for mood, person, and tense. In agglutinative languages the basic form almost never changes.

You make a good point, I realized later when I was less tired and I was confusing the general type (synthetic) with agglutinative (specific sub-category).

Oh well, thanks for clarifying.

I'm Finnish, and I couldn't have performed this deconstruction correctly. I had no idea that the -vat form of verbs had anything to do with the conditionals, for example.

It's common knowledge among Finns that Finnish is a difficult language, but I don't think we're quite able to appreciate just how weird it can get.

Foreigners are taught to use the -vat form to form a conditional to get the correct consonant gradation. It's not relevant for juoda because the stem is juo-, no consonants.

My fiancée is Finnish, and she's very patient with me trying to speak Finnish, but my progress is slow (due to lack of structured effort). Do any of you HN Finns or language connoisseurs have any good language-learning resources? I have been unable to find something good online paid or otherwise.

have you heard of memrise? everybody there can attend every course. they are created by the community and are free.

http://www.memrise.com/courses/english/finnish/

I haven't, and this looks great! Thank you.

memrise warning: the quality of the decks is very variable and more than a few of them will teach you total nonsense. I'm not remotely qualified to evaluate the Finnish-English decks (I know exactly two words of Finnish) but I just made a huge 'ignore' list for one particular English-Dutch deck that would happily teach you absolute nonsense.

Each language has its difficulties. Fully as fully fonetic language learning how to read Finnish atloud should be far easier than in some other languages who's speakers actually have spelling competitions for kids.

Hard part of English complex vocabulary compared to Finnish, as we usually derive things from existing vocabulary instead of inventing new except for loan words that normally are similar to English but more Finnish style.

Kirja=book. Kirjain=letter as in alphabet. Kirje=letter as in mailbox. kirjoitus=writing Kirjasto=library Kirjoittaa=write Kirjoitettu=written Kirjata=to register [as write to register] Kirjaamo= registry office. Kirjoituskone="writing machine"= type writer

As an english speaker who learned some finnish, my problem is that all your nouns all get handled differently e.g. is kirjeet the plural of book, letter(alphabet), letter(mailbox), library or some other book related word. What about kirjoja? Of course I know the answer, but there are so many ways to modify words, and each one is a bit different. Still I enjoy it.

Just as example, how many forms one word can take: http://depressingfinland.tumblr.com/post/65222506844/what-do...

Sometimes when I write keywords in Finnish and English, people have asked me why the list for Finnish is 10x longer, that's one of the reasons. There can easily be 10 relevant forms for the one word. But I don't naturally list the more uncommon forms.

It's not something new, actually every language course has a lot of tables where words turn into another word forms.

And it's not called deconstructing, just morphology that you learn. Studying English yields some tables too, mostly for temporal forms.

Definitely going to learn Finnish after I master Russian, been stuck on the latter for a few years now, Finnish the way it sounds, I like it a lot.

Kind of sounded like you are going to learn Finnish after forever.

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