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English, Swedish, German and Finnish Decline “Dog” (2013)
- cimmanom 8y agoWhere is the line drawn between a declension and a phrase? Even though they're a single word, a lot of those Finnish variants appear to serve the purpose that a multi-word phrase would in most languages.
- pw6hv 8y agoThat's right, I would say that it is a bit misleading. Anyway 15 cases are already surprising, and if we count the plural form then we have 30 forms for a noun. I tried to learn Finnish when I was living there, I think it is a really enjoyable and logical language. Certainly one of the most special languages that we have in Europe.
- depressedpanda 8y agoWell, yes, it's quite special; it's a Finnish-Ugric language, one of the few languages in Europe that isn't Indo-European.
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- chousuke 8y agoFinn here. Most of the technically valid declensions of "dog" would never see any actual use, so it's not quite as bad as it seems, but I think you still need to count them as individual words because they can't form a valid sentence by themselves. These noun declensions are not where it ends, though. There are many ways to derive adjectives from nouns and nouns from verbs and verbs from adjectives, so you can generate technically valid new words for quite a long time given just one root.
- klipt 8y ago> These noun declensions are not where it ends, though. There are many ways to derive adjectives from nouns and nouns from verbs and verbs from adjectives, so you can generate technically valid new words for quite a long time given just one root. You have verbs like "dogged" and adverbs "doggedly" in English too.
- est31 8y agoEnglish also has diminuitives. piglet, doggy, etc.
- ajuc 8y agoEnglish diminutives are very rudimentary and irregular compared to inflected languages. In some language you can form several levels of diminutives from any noun. Even stuff that makes no sense, like "cute taxes", "cute death", "cute abstraction", "cute declension". And you can form the opposite - take a noun and create less cute/uglier/larger version of it. And these additional forms still obey the other rules, including declension. So there's a combinatorial explosion of versions of each word.
- Udik 8y ago> Even stuff that makes no sense, like "cute taxes", "cute death", "cute abstraction" A cute abstraction would definitely be my thing. As we would say in Italian, an astrazioncella, or astrazionuccia, or astrazioncelluccia, or astrazioncinuccia, or astrazioncinelluccia. :)
- r-bryan 8y agoWhen learning some Italian I was both dismayed and fascinated to discover that it was necessary to avoid every diminutive ("cute") and augmentative I could think of, because they all carry sexual innuendo.
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- est31 8y agoThe line is drawn around having single words for what other languages have phrases for. koirankaan is a single word just as houses is not a phrase (house es) but the plural of house. Languages use different concepts to express the same ideas. The study of languages isn't built around the ideas but around the structure of the language itself.
- mcguire 8y agoWikipedia: "Finnish is a member of the Finnic language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. It modifies and inflects nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence." "Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features." "An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions." "A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word." In a hardcore synthetic language, the difference between a word and a phrase is just about meaningless. The "words" can get full on crazy-pants, too.
- tuukkah 8y agoHow to know where one word ends and the next begins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word#Word_boundaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word#Word_boundaries Examples of how the system works in Finnish and in other languages on the continuum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination
- rando444 8y agoI think the distinction you are looking for is the articles. In english you have dog and dogs, but can add articles and say 'these dogs' 'those dogs' 'the dogs' and so on. In languages like finnish, the articles are included in the word, thus more variations when you take case and word genders into consideration.
- eMSF 8y agoNo word genders in Finnish, sorry! :-) Also, pronouns like "these" and "those" can't be included in the word in Finnish -- however, those that indicate ownership can (i.e. my dog/s, or the genetive case* ). There's no direct equivalent of "the dog" in Finnish either, the closest being "these/those dogs" where applicable. * For language nerds: considering the subject (that emphasizes the many declensions in Finnish), it is somewhat ironic that both "my dog" and "my dogs" is the same single word in formal Finnish. Unlike many other cases, plain genetive doesn't allow distinction between singular and plural.
- NoNameHaveI 8y ago"No word genders in Finnish, sorry!" No direct word for "please" either, unless you want to count kiitos, which I understand as thank you.
- amaccuish 8y ago> but can add articles and say 'these dogs' FYI those aren't articles, but demonstrative adjectives, which are part of the language class of determiners, to which articles also belong.
- PrimeDirective 8y agoCan't talk about crazy Finnish declensions without inviting Estonians! Koer -- Eesti keele süntesaator Koer // sg n, // koer koer Koer // pl n, // koerad koerad Koer // sg g, // koera koera Koer // pl g, // koerte koerte koerade koerade Koer // sg p, // koera koera Koer // pl p, // koeri koeri koerasid koerasid Koer // sg ill, adt, // koera koera koerasse koerasse Koer // pl ill, // koertesse koertesse koeradesse koeradesse Koer // sg in, mas, // koeras koeras Koer // pl in, // koertes koertes koerades koerades Koer // sg el, mast, // koerast koerast Koer // pl el, // koertest koertest koeradest koeradest Koer // sg all, // koerale koerale Koer // pl all, // koertele koertele koeradele koeradele Koer // sg ad, // koeral koeral Koer // pl ad, // koertel koertel koeradel koeradel Koer // sg abl, // koeralt koeralt Koer // pl abl, // koertelt koertelt koeradelt koeradelt Koer // sg tr, maks, // koeraks koeraks Koer // pl tr, // koerteks koerteks koeradeks koeradeks Koer // sg ter, // koerani koerani Koer // pl ter, // koerteni koerteni koeradeni koeradeni Koer // sg es, // koerana koerana Koer // pl es, // koertena koertena koeradena koeradena Koer // sg ab, mata, // koerata koerata Koer // pl ab, // koerteta koerteta koeradeta koeradeta Koer // sg kom, // koeraga koeraga Koer // pl kom, // koertega koertega koeradega koeradega Source: https://www.filosoft.ee/gene_et/ https://www.filosoft.ee/gene_et/ Edit: typo
- magic_beans 8y ago(declensions)!
- Mirioron 8y agoAnd all of these are words that are used depending on the context (some are interchangeable though).
- mnyary 8y agoLet's see some Hungarian ones: kutya, kutyát,kutyának, kutyán, kutyába, kutyában, kutyához, kutyának a (dog's), kutyára, kutyánál, kutyailag, kutyább, legkutyább, legeslegkutyább, kutyai, kutyáé kutyám, kutyámat, kutyámnak, etc. (my dog) kutyáim, kutyáimat, kutyáimnak, etc. (my dogs) kutyájuk, kutyájukat, kutyájuknak, etc. (her/his dog) kutyáik, kutyáikat, kutyáiknak (her/his dogs) kutyák, kutyákat, kutyámnak etc. (plural) etc, etc. My beloved teacher (she was professor of ancient history, India) said that the Hungarian language is almost as difficult as the Sanskrit.
- jakedata 8y agoGoogle translate of the Finnish: your dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog
- p1mrx 8y agoYour list seems long and repetitive, until you compare it to the set of dogs that currently exist.
- nathell 8y agoI can’t help but share a slide from my talk at EuroClojure 2016 that’s gone viral: https://goo.gl/images/m5QgbE https://goo.gl/images/m5QgbE
- dmitriid 8y agoAs with all agglutinative languages, you learn a set of morphemes that are applicable to all words, and are crazily composable. It’s a bit disingenuous to show the resulting words as examples of how hard these languages are. I’d say they are easier (but very different) than English. I know this from experience, as I speak Turkish with its Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word_in_Turkish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word_in_Turkish
- SilasX 8y agoRight, isn't this whole thing a crazy artifact of "some languages put in a space between a noun and its modifiers, some don't". If it were a practice to always join modifiers with the noun, you'd see the same for English, right?
- jacobush 8y agoNot exactly... I wouldn't say. Unless porkinspectorsofficepenmakerdeclensionsufferer would be a normal composition in English. Just with spaces in between them.
- SilasX 8y agoI do see native speakers string together noun phrases like that, with the spakes. e.g. "Fast downvote suppression throttler".
- mirimir 8y agoIt's shorter than the unpacked equivalent "throttler for the suppression of fast downvotes". And more importantly, it's less ambiguous when you're writing long sentences.
- SilasX 8y agoI wasn’t disputing its usefulness. I was saying that it’s just like these agglutinative languages, except it has the convention of writing them with spaces.
- vortico 8y ago鳴く、鳴きます、鳴いた、鳴きました、鳴いて、鳴ける、鳴かれる、鳴かせる、鳴かせられる、鳴け breathes 鳴かない、鳴きません、鳴かなかった、鳴きませんでした、鳴かなくて、鳴けない、鳴かれない、鳴かせない、鳴かせられない、鳴くな
- dnautics 8y ago... and that's just declining based on the "familiar" social relationship. You'd never use any of these forms with the emperor. Well, at least there isn't gender or number to worry about
- TheAceOfHearts 8y agoYour comment would be more constructive if it included an explanation in English of what you wrote, like a few of the other top level comments have done. Putting this through Google Translate produces the following romanji: "Naku, nakimasu, naita, nakimashita, naite, nakeru, naka reru, naka seru, nakase rareru, nake breathes nakanai, nakimasen, nakanakatta, nakimasendeshita, nakanakute, nakenai, naka renai, nakasenai, nakase rarenai, naku na". Converting it to English produces the following: "Crying, squealing, singing, crying, crying, singing, sounding, sounding, sounding, barking breathes not singing, not singing, not singing, not singing, not singing, not singing, not singing, not singing No, I will not be singing, I will not sing, I can not cry, do not crow"
- PokemonNoGo 8y agoI was so sure this was about some naming convention debate in a commit message or column/variable choice somewhere where it would be translated into, in Swedish, to "died" (=dog) without fluffy ears. "DogUsers"
- nabla9 8y agoFinnish is a synthetic language that uses heavily agglutination morphology to express syntactic relationships. All those examples are grammatically correct but most of them are never used in written or spoken language. Instead of having few cases you learn and actually use, there is a set of rules you can use to build new words. Real spoken or written language is not using all what is grammatically available.
- Cursuviam 8y agoThis would make a great Polandball edit: Did not expect downvotes on this. Curious why
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y agoLacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitas
- gattr 8y agoNot much to see here, in Polish all the forms (for plural and singular) are just: pies, psa, psu, psem, psie, psy, psów, psom, psami, psach
- 1wd 8y agoIt does! http://i.imgur.com/QFm6SCE.png http://i.imgur.com/QFm6SCE.png https://www.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/211ogu/conjugation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/211ogu/conjugat...
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- romwell 8y agoLest we be Russian here... Собака, Собаки, Собаке, Собаку, Собакой, Собаке. Собаки, Собак, Собакам, Собак, Собаками, Собаках. That's, of course, the declension for female dog, which is distinct from male dog (and bitch).
- nategri 8y agoI took several years of Russian in college and am now trying to pick up a little German. Word of mouth had taught me to fear the German case system but... after Russian? Hard to see what all the fuss is about.
- amaccuish 8y agoI find german and russian weirdly close to each other. Ok so there are the obvious words like кино, but also other things like the fact that in german, it's "jemande/m/ helfen" and in russian "кому-то помогать/помочь", both taking dative. There's loads of other similarities. Maybe it's the fact they're both indo-european, I'm sure someone more knowledgeable could explain.
- int_19h 8y agoProto-Indo-European was fusional and pretty crazy on declensions, with plenty of cases for nouns and pronouns, verb aspects and moods, grammatical numbers (it had dual) etc. When you see the same in a European language, that's usually where it comes from, so it's not a coincidence. It seems that languages tend to shed that complexity over time, some (e.g. English) faster than others.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Maultasche 8y agoYeah, Russian is far worse. I learned Polish for a while, which I understand has a lot of similarities to Russian, and it was far more difficult than German. I remember having decline words differently depending on which number came before it.
- lnyng 8y agoHope that I am not the only one confused about this: what does "decline" mean in the title?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sjwpv 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension
- Geimfari 8y agoIt's a confusing title. It would be more clear as "The declension of the word "dog" in various languages".
- plq 8y agoThe correct verb is "declinate". The title is wrong. Declination (not declension) is like conjugation bur for nouns. Important note: I don't care about the fact that none of the English dictionaries agree with me in this respect :)
- brudgers 8y agoThe Finnish seems related to the idea that code is the most compressed form of information.
- mltony 8y agoThe problem is that what constitutes a word is not uniformly defined across all languages - every language has its own set of rules that is partly justified by its grammar, and sometimes by historical reason. Let me give you an example in English: a dog, with dog, to dog, behind dog, inside dog, ... I can continue this list forever. But you would tell me that's not interesting, because I'm just using prepositions Well, then we'll have to ask what is a preposition. In English you write preposition as a separate word because you can insert something in between: a red dog, with blue dog, to tall dog, behind quick dog, inside my dog, ... But what if in finnish you canot squeeze anything between preposition and noun? Oh, I rather meant postposition, but same difference. I don't speak a word of Finnish, but I suspect that's the case, and you are supposed to put your adjectives either before or after that word concatenated with all its postpositions. Maybe that's why the word is written together with its postposition. Some languages add markers to the words, such as gender markers, tense markers, evidence markers (dog that I see vs. dog that I've heard of) in a similar way. Now just compute a cartesian product of all the possible prepositions times 3 gender markers times 3 tense markers times a few evidence markers and times 2 plurality markers. You get a scary number in the end, especially if you have to learn this language. And as about Finnish, I have a friend who learnt it as a second language, and he told me that it's not as scary as it seems, because despite the shear number of declension forms, it all follows patterns with relatively few exceptions. That is not to say that Finnish is a simple language, but it's not as complicated as you might think after reading this story. P.S. I'm an amateur in the field of linguistics with no knowledge of Finnish, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My example about cartesian product wasn't about Finnish in particular, but rather how gigantic numbers of declension forms may arise in other languages.
- mc32 8y agoThey forgot the possessive/genitive of dog: dog's and dogs's [dogs']
- SilasX 8y agoI could have sworn I saw this exchange as a Polandball comic but I can't find it.
- sampo 8y agoHere: https://www.google.fi/search?q=finnish+declination+dog&tbm=isch https://www.google.fi/search?q=finnish+declination+dog&tbm=i...
- ySteeK 8y agoMaybe finnish has more declinations but german has a nearly unlimited amount of words with "dog" too... Hundstage, Hundehotel, Hundekot, Hundeasyl, Hundepension, Hundeweg, Hundemüde, Hundefell, Hundebox, Hundebett, Hundefloh, Hundebiss, Hundewiese, Hundekeks, Hundebaby, Hundedreck, Hunderasse, Hundekette, Hundehalsband, Hunde... and so on and so on
- org3432 8y agoIt's amusing, but it's likely a cardinality like issue, they have n cases * n tenses * n genders. So I'm sure they follow a pattern that reduces what you need to learn at least by half and every day usage is a fraction of that.
- pvaldes 8y agoOkay, now we are ready to start with the dog breeds, from the afghan hound to the yorkshire terrier
- ramigb 8y agoNo one did Arabic? ok I'll write it in Latin characters for y'all: One Dog : Kalb, Two Dogs : Kalban, Three to 100 dogs : Thalathat Kelab, Dogs : Kelab .. 100 and more it reverts to singular so it's <Number> Kalb. I guess in Hebrew it'd be very similar as well but I don't speak it.
- MattLeBlanc001 8y agoSmall correction: One Dog - Kalb Two Dogs - Kalban 3 - 10 - Kelab from 11 - 99 would be: Kalban. 100 - Kalb 101 - 110 - Kelab 111 - 199 - Kalban 200 - Kalb etc
- jopsen 8y agoIt's funny how people in this thread start to debate what is a word.. Maybe we should just laugh and move on :)
- bewuethr 8y agoI'd like to point out that in German, "der Hunden" doesn't exist.
- danans 8y agoIn a way English is the most interesting of these, because it descended from a language as highly inflected as Finnish, and in addition with fusional morphology, but has become almost completely analytical over time, like Chinese or Vietnamese.
- rdiddly 8y agoSeeing all the different languages represented here, I'm struck by how successful the dog has been at ingratiating itself to humanity. Does anyone know a language that has no word for dog?
- vesinisa 8y agoThat sounds utterly impossible unless there is somewhere on this planet an isolated tribe on some island who would have lost all their dogs eons ago.
- joecool1029 8y agoI was introduced to this through the polandball comic of this post: https://imgur.com/QFm6SCE https://imgur.com/QFm6SCE
- darkhorn 8y agoAll Uralic-Altaic languages have this property. Also there is wovel harmony in those languages. This makes it very hard for computers to understand them.
- heuiop 8y agoI think this may be misleading, because if there are clear rules, and all words follow them, then a lot of things become easier. English has of/for/with etc in the place of these. Here's Armenian (western). Singular: (շուն: shoun) շուն շունս շունդ շունը շունի շունիս շունիդ շունին շունԷ շունԷս շունԷդ շունԷն շունով շունովս շունովդ շունովը Plural: (շուներ: shouner) շուներ շուներս շուներդ շուները շուներու շուներուս շուներուդ շուներուն շուներԷ շուներԷս շուներԷդ շուներԷն շուներով շուներովս շուներովդ շուներովը Technically, there are 16 more, but they have the same form as the first eight of each.