3 ms·

The Hungarian and Finnish location and direction suffixes thing sounds a lot like latin case. Do you know off-hand if it’s related?

• macleginn 4y ago
  "Relatedness" is a very thorny notion here because we cannot discount the possibility of long-range contact influence in Western Eurasia. Many ancient Indo-European languages had some kind of ablative or locative case, and accusative was often used in a directional sense. However, localtive-case systems of Hungarian and Finnish are much more developed than anything we see in Indo-European (Latin has at most 3 cases with locative/directional semantics; Hungarian has 9; Finnish has 8), so it's a different system anyway.
• beeforpork 4y ago
  It's not related. But suffixing is a very common way of expressing stuff also in unrelated languages, e.g., your Finnish locative works just like it does in Japanese or Tamil (structurally, not literally: it is a different ending) -- and those three are totally unrelated. Structurally, Finnish endings are also quite different from Latin as the ending is always the same (almost, except for vowel changes), while Latin has an array of endings for the same function and you need to learn about declension classes of nouns to understand how to select the right one. Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'.
  • thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'. This seems to confuse inflectional suffixes with analytic particles. Certainly -ne and -que in Latin are not suffixes; they are clitics, exactly analogous to the English articles a(n) and the (not usually considered "prefixes"). They are not part of the word after which they appear. In contrast, the -i in humi "on the ground" is a part of the word, which mutated into that form to express a locative use. (As a side note, that is not at all the norm in Latin - location is usually expressed with a preposition, as in sub monte "under [at the foot of] the mountain". Humus is one of only a handful of words that preserve the locative case.) I believe the situation for Japanese de is similar, with de being either a clitic or a fully independent word. I have no knowledge of Tamil or Finnish.
    • macleginn 4y ago
      In Japanese, as in many other head-final languages, it is often hard to impossible to distinguish between clitics and suffixes. -de can only attach to a noun because a noun phrase always ends with a noun and there can be nothing between a noun and a -de, they are inseparable. On the other hand, there is no phonological fusion of any kind between a noun and -de (unlike in verbs, where yom-u 'to read' becomes yon-de in the gerund form). Because of this -de and other case markers are described both as "particles" and "case endings" in different sources. In agglutinative languages with freer word order, it is easier to argue that a locative morpheme is a suffix because it always appears with nouns, but absent any phonological processes that bind them together, one can always write them with a space and call the second part "locative postposition". In some cases, it is even unclear if an agglutinative language is very morphologically complex or just uses a lot of function words.
• nulbyte 4y ago
  Related in that they serve similar functions, perhaps. However, while Latin is an Indo-European language, Hungarian and Finnish are Uralic languages. The difference is notable in the number of cases; Latin has six, while Hungarian has 17.
• CSSer 4y ago
  Does anyone know why this was downvoted? It was a genuine question. I’m confused. Accident, maybe?