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Native Finnish speaker here. Those are not postpositions but rather declension suffixes to the same stem word (koira, dog). It's still one word, and you discern
by vesinisa 8y ago
Native Finnish speaker here. Those are not postpositions but rather declension suffixes to the same stem word (koira, dog). It's still one word, and you discern it as such in speech. Though in speech, if the combination of suffixes you are using is particularly complex or unusual, you might need to make extra effort to speak particularly clearly to ensure intelligibility.
In English, you say "together with my dogs", in Finnish you could say "koirieni kanssa" (with-my-dogs together), or cram it all to "koirineni" (with-my-together-dogs), but you would pronounce the latter word clearly to ensure understanding as the -n- suffix in this context is uncommon in modern spoken Finnish.
Using a similar suffix method as Finnish uses to build declension, we could in English build from stem dog -> dogish (i.e. dog-like) -> dogishness (i.e. quality of being dog-like) -> dogishnessism ("ideology advocating the qualities of being dog-like"). It's clearly one word, but it might be hard to imagine a real everyday context to use it in.
Finnish is hard but not impossible. One great thing is the orthography is practically perfectly regular - something which English gets horribly wrong.
- brian_cloutier 8y agoI'll add that Turkish is also like this. "with my dogs" is köpeklerimle, dog-s-my-with. You can make large variety of "word"s based on köpek, dogishness would be "köpeksilik" which would win you some strange looks if you used it but Google turns up what appear to be a few thousand legitimate usages. It's not quite fair to call köpeksilik or köpeklerimle words though, it's not like you have to memorize them to learn the language. Just as you can build the phrase "with my dogs" out of words you already know, you can quickly construct or understand köpeklerimle from the suffixes it's built out of. And just like the end of this list reaches forms which a couple Finnish-speakers have said aren't very meaningful, Turkish also allows for some extreme "words". Here's the longest Turkish word: muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine It means something like "As if you are those whom we may not be able to easily make into people who make others unsuccessful". It usually takes a native speaker a while to actually understand this word.
- vesinisa 8y agoYes, this property of a language is called agglutination, and it is not at all uncommon even in completely unrelated languages.
- mltony 8y agoIt is possible that declension suffixes once upon time were postpositions. At least I remember this was a theory behind Indo-European declension suffixes. If a postposition is used often enough after a noun, people quickly learn the pattern, and think of the pair as a single word. Although this must have happened before writing was invented, so probably people didn't think of what constitutes a word. Now every now and then it happens that a word dies in a language. A postposition could have died as a standalone word but was preserved as a declension suffix. And now we might only think of it as a suffix.
- vesinisa 8y agoAs far as I know, all languages in the Finnish-Ugric family use a similar system of declension suffixes. Usually, the different declension cases are similar in number and their functions, but the actual suffixes used may vary from language to language. Proto Indo-European is indeed believed to have had a suffix-based complex inflection system, which the modern Germanic prepositions either have replaced or developed from.
- thechao 8y agoEnglish orthography is great for Middle English. Not so hot for the various modern Englishes.
- jayd16 8y agoReminds me of elementary when someone pulled out the word Disestablishmentarianism.
- menage 8y agoThey missed out on antidisestablishmentarianism?