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Finnish as a world language?
- keepquestioning 4y agoIs Finnish Proto Indo European?
- Tor3 4y agoNo, Finnish is from a different language group: Uralic.
- keepquestioning 4y agoThat is a mysterious fact.
- darkhorn 4y agoNo. Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese are so called Uralic Altaic languages. They all share same grammatical structures.
- PLMUV9A4UP27D 4y agoIt can be noted that Finnish and Hungarian are more distant than English and Persian.
- darkhorn 4y agoIn terms of words or grammatical structures?
- PLMUV9A4UP27D 4y agoIn terms of words https://histdoc.net/sounds/hungary.html https://histdoc.net/sounds/hungary.html
- marton78 4y agoWhat is absolutely astonishing, however, is how similar they sound, at least in terms of prosody. To my Hungarian ears Finnish, at least if heard from distance, sounds eerily familiar. Compare this to e.g. Spanish and French, languages so close to each other but sounding so different. I wonder if there is some deep reason why prosody is well conserved in the Finnish-Hungarian pair and apparently entirely meaningless in Romance.
- keepquestioning 4y agoIs there a genetic link between Koreans and Finns?
- darkhorn 4y agoI have found this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_N-M231 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_N-M231
- keepquestioning 4y agoHm, I thought Europeans were R1A1
- int_19h 4y agoR1a1a seems to correspond to Proto-Indo-European-speaking migrants, but that's not the only group that contributed to the genetics of the present population of Europe.
- weberer 4y agoWell Finland and North Korea are only separated by one country.
- marton78 4y agoThere doesn't have to be. A people's language family and genetics don't necessarily have to match, because a small group of conquerors can force their language upon a much larger gene pool. Modern day Hungarians, for example, are genetically only marginally different from their Slavic neighbours.
- jcranmer 4y agoNote that Altaic itself is considered discredited among linguists, to say nothing of the Uralic-Altaic (which never found serious purchase).
- darkhorn 4y agoIf you look from Indo-European perspective, in other words if you look only at the common words, yes, they share very little common words. And then no one explains all those same grammatical structures shared between those languages. In the article replace Finnish with Turkish, Mongolian, Hungarian or Japanese and again that article will be correct again.
- morjom 4y agoNo. It's Proto-Uralic.
- yencabulator 4y ago"Aseleponeuvottelutoimikunta" is a silly example and frankly won't come up much. At the same time, (to this ESL person it seems that) a short Finnish expression can express much more complex concepts than a few English words can usually convey. The complete sentence "Juoksutellaan." means something like "[Yes,] we shall[/should/agree to] make them/him/her/it run around[/work hard/be busy]." The "-lla" implies a non-contiguous form of "to make run", where the subject mostly needs to run, but not all the time. Think of exercising a horse, or keeping an intern busy for a day.
- java-man 4y agoperkele!
- naltun 4y ago> I think I do not misspeak myself by saying that the work of this article should settle the matter clearly and finally. Perkele, consider the matter closed.
- euroderf 4y agoSelvä
- stevekemp 4y agoSpeaking as somebody who moved to Finland, and struggles with the language, that's some good satire.
- Ekaros 4y agoAs native speaker it is perfectly logical and sane compared to English. Then again I suppose that is not exactly high bar.
- java-man 4y ago> It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions. I love it! except exceptions.
- Crespyl 4y agoAt least you know to expect them!
- mynegation 4y agoCome on, English is not that bad. No real verb conjugation in response to gender, person, or (to an extent) number. There are irregular verbs, sure, but due to a simpler conjugation you have to memorize way less than for eg Spanish or French. Simpler morphology - no significant agglutination, prefixes or suffixes. Only 26 glyphs. One downside is complicated phonetics though. Not just the sounds, but all the inconsistencies (like “dough”, “through”, “rough”, or “head”, “heat”, “read”).
- stevekemp 4y agoThose inconsistencies you mention are pretty good, but of of course you missed those that are more fun: "read" vs "read" (I have read this book/I will read this book). "bow" vs "bow" (At the end of the opera everybody takes a bow/We shoot the arrows with a bow). etc.
- 4y ago
- vnorilo 4y agono niin.
- chizhik-pyzhik 4y agoNice try, finland
- justapassenger 4y agoIt's part of an elaborate scheme to convince people that Finland exists. We all know it doesn't.
- theshrike79 4y agoTorille?
- atkbrah 4y agoTortilla avataan?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wenderen 4y agoLove this satire. Especially the ominous but completely unhelpful "be very, very careful with this one."
- RajT88 4y agoYes, I think some have missed that this is a dig against English being one of the top "World Languages". English, of course, being illogical, inconsistent and hard to learn.
- codebook 4y agoWe have logical language already. Esperanto. Don't we? :)
- NeutralForest 4y agoMualimaan napa!
- bergenty 4y agoIs this satire?
- ur-whale 4y ago> Is this satire? https://youtu.be/SPmxsRDSmTc?t=108 https://youtu.be/SPmxsRDSmTc?t=108
- treeman79 4y agoOne of the things I love about this community is that satire can go completely over the head of many members here. https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses/1504/ https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses/1504/ Seen many funny instances were blatant satire gets hilarious responses from people that treat it as real. Of course Autistic Savants often takes things far to literally. Took me ages when younger to get the hang of it.
- ternaryoperator 4y agoWell done satire will fool any community. That's the definition of good satire. I don't think HN is any more easily fooled than other communities. And frequently HN finds some aspect being ridiculed and shows that in fact it's not nearly as dismissable as the satire would have one believe.
- qumpis 4y agoI think the confusion is often because people (like myself) don't read the content past the headline
- wizofaus 4y agoI'm fairly sure 90% of comments on HN are written by people who haven't even clicked on the link to the article supposedly under discussion. Disclaimer: including myself, though not on this particular occasion.
- not2b 4y agoWhich would be fine, no one has to read everything, but for some reason people who only read the headline feel qualified to comment, and this particularly shows with satirical pieces.
- koolala 4y ago'Toki Pona' has been slowly making strides as a good world language. Not as a replacement for English of course but as a modern Esperanto.
- xena 4y agomi sona ala e ni. toki pona li toki lili. toki sike li wile nimi mute. toki pona li jo ala e nimi mute. toki pona li jo nimi moku. toki pona li jo ala nimi "consume". sona suli li wile e nimi mute. toki siki li wile ala toki pona.
- dvh 4y agoSorry, can't translate, toki pona language specs is copyrighted.
- koolala 4y agoI don't think there is validity to that though I do appreciate the humor and sentiment. A book can be copy-written sure but many have re-created the spec and dictionary. Recreating a spec is the entire idea of teaching something from scratch. It's too fundamental for law like that. Unless you know examples of actual legal threats and aggressive positioning, maybe like what happened around Lojban.
- CRConrad 4y ago> A book can be copy-written Not if it's copyrighted, one would think?
- gnubison 4y agoThe dictionary is released into the public domain :)
- koolala 4y agoIs there a place I can find it online?
- makach 4y agoYou got me until the first point "It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions." "except exceptions?!" whoa..! the brought back memories from learning German. perkele!
- skrebbel 4y agoThere’s extremely few exceptions though, very much unlike other languages. Pronunciation is extremely systematic too. You could record the sound of each character as an audio file and put each file in order of a word/sentence and it’ll sound like (bad, robotic) Finnish. This also means that you can hear a spoken word (or a name!) and just know how it’s spelled, even if you have no idea what it means. Compare that to English! This article is clearly satire, but it’s a delightful language, especially for nerds who think learning consistent grammar rules is easier than endless lists of exceptions (Hi there, French!) The only practical downside is that just about every word is unique to the Finnish language group, except recent imports (eg bussi, teatteri). Eg “mom” is a word with an “m” in every other language I’m familiar with, but it’s “äiti” in Finnish.
- gordaco 4y agoThis is something I really like about Finnish. Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v, or the always silent h). But the letters are not always pronounced the same. For example, c and g are pronounced differently, depending on what the following vowel is. Even worse, u is silent after a q, or when between a g and an e or i. I mean, I don't have any problem with all of this, since I've been dealing with it for all my life :) . But I can understand how annoying it can be for a foreign learner, even if it's not as infuriating as English. Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular. Each letter is pronounced always the same, no matter the context or the letters surrounding it (there aren't even consonant groups like ch). The grammar might be more complex, and the vocabulary might be difficult because it lacks the indo-european roots from all the other languages I know. But phonetics? Yeah, it's one of the simplest languages out there, in this sense. I love Finnish because of that, and I actually listen to a lot of Finnish music (despite not understanding almost anything), just because I love the way it sounds. Still, I with I had fewer issues with a and ä... I can pronounce both separately, but when I hear someone speaking, I still have trouble when I need to differentiate between these two.
- retrac 4y agoIt should be Japanese, of course! Japanese can be written using either the Latin alphabet, or Chinese characters. The two most common writing systems in the world. It can also be written with its own elegant and purely phonetic writing system. There's even Braille, Morse code, and sign language encodings. It is truly media agnostic. Japanese has a regular grammar. From a linguist's perspective, aside from the politeness system, it's really quite normal for a language. Very little in it to surprise a Finnish, Turkish or Korean speaker. (Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.) Finally, some 40% of Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese, and Chinese and Japanese technical terms flow freely between the languages to this day. Another ~20% of Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from European languages like English or Portuguese. The majority of the world already speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don't even know it! For this reason, Chinese, European, and American, alike, usually find it quite easy to learn.
- stardenburden 4y agoNow I need to know if this is also satire or if I need to start learning Japanese
- amyjess 4y agoJapanese grammar is starkly minimalist. It's not hard to learn at all, the basic structure is almost purely agglutinative, and the word order is consistently head-final in all cases (e.g. SOV for sentence and modifier-modified for not only adjectives but also relative and appositive clauses), and it helps that Japanese doesn't grammatically track several things that other languages do, such as person, number, or gender. There are only two real problems: 1. The writing system is ridiculously complex, and even if you just vow to only write in romaji you also have to deal with the problem that kanji acts as a huge source of both puns and compound words. You can invent new compound words just by jamming together the on readings of a couple of kanji and most Japanese people will understand you. It's also not unheard of in, for example, songs, to pronounce a word one way when singing but write it in the official lyrics sheet using kanji that's normally associated with a completely different word. The closest I can compare to this in other languages would be like if you were talking and using sign language at the same time and you were deliberately signing different words than what you were speaking in order to add subtext. 2. Because a) so many features aren't grammatically tracked and b) Japanese is aggressively pro-drop, a lot of sentences are extremely ambiguous without context. For example, you often can't tell just from hearing the words if someone is saying "I go", "you go", "they go", "he goes", or "she goes" (in Japanese these are all just iku/ikimasu... unless you're going out of your way to put a pronoun in there, but most people don't); you have to parse the sentence in the context of what else is being said in the conversation or by what's going on around you.
- aaroninsf 4y agoWhen I studied syntax as part of linguistics at the college level, Finnish was often a go-to example because it more or less had every feature enabled. Case and declination? Sure. Tenses? Yes. Agglutinative? Yes. It was asserted that there a disproportionate number of linguists are Finnish because their language is a superset of many others, and by necessity almost all Finns are multilingual, and that when they are, the language families they tend to learn (Germanic, Romance, and Slavic) are all distinctly different. So by the time Finnish academics get an advanced degree their language faculties can be extraordinary. EDIT oh yeah gender was the exception to the feature flags
- danjac 4y agoFinnish does not have grammatical gender.
- wizofaus 4y agoNot even gendered pronouns?
- chousuke 4y agoNope. Even better: Many dialects of Finnish use "it" for everything in informal speech, so we're not just ahead in gender equality, but animal rights as well.
- wizofaus 4y agoHow do you say it was a "he-said-she-said argument" then? ;) Actually it's often occurred to me pronouns didn't need to be gendered but we should have different pronouns for "the 1st aforementioned person" and "the 2nd aforementioned person". Not sure if any languages do. Edit: maybe ASL? https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/228xys/are_there_any_languages_which_use_ordinal_pronouns/&ved=2ahUKEwj9wc6nnuX5AhXa7TgGHZIrBCYQjjh6BAgFEAE&usg=AOvVaw10Gs0x27j2d9nNzJi2gBq2 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
- boredemployee 4y agoWhy not Esperanto?
- Terretta 4y agoYour sense of satire is quite evolved.
- boredemployee 4y agoFinally someone noticed!
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoI was waiting for it! Thank you. I knew the most educated, elite among us would arise. All hail Esperanto. Duly elected leader of the post industrial, constructed languages =)
- flipcoder 4y agoI actually like Esperanto and the concept of constructed languages in general a lot. Esperanto's grammar is very logical and easy to learn. Its a shame there's not much online content in it and the community is fairly small in comparison to what is often claimed. They actually have a Duolingo course and Google Translate works with it, so that's something.
- yomkippur 4y agoyeah but it sounds so horrible
- samstave 4y agoIf there is anyone I would trust on Finnish as a language would be Suussu Lacksonen (blair) A famous finnish translator and movie maker... Also you should pleasure your ears by listening to this if you think Finnish is a global language... (ALSO I See Torvalds behind this) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_uq7ypZnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_uq7ypZnc I have never been so beautifully scolded in a language I cannot understand
- bmn__ 4y agohttps://i.imgur.com/ixEBdwf.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ixEBdwf.jpg "Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again"
- Kkoala 4y agoHaha, haven't laughed out loud in a while, thanks for sharing! Don't know why I haven't seen this before
- jamal-kumar 4y agoThat's part of an old joke: What do you mean Finnish is difficult? English: A dog Swedish: What English: The dog English: Two dogs Swedish: Swedish: Swedish: En hund, hunden Swedish: Två hundar, hundarna German: English: No, go away Swedish: No one invited you German: Der Hund English: I said go away German: Ein Hund, zwei Hunde Swedish: Stop it German: Den Hund, einen Hund, dem Hund, einem Hund, des Hundes, eines Hundes, den Hunden, der Hunden Finnish: Sup English: NO Swedish: NO German: NO Finnish: English: German: Swedish: Finnish: Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again, koirassa, koirasta, koiraan, koiralla, koiralta, koiralle, koirana, koiraksi, koiratta, koirineen, koirin German: Swedish: Finnish: English: Finnish: Aaaand... koirasi, koirani, koiransa, koiramme, koiranne, koiraani, koiraasi, koiraansa, koiraamme, koiraanne, koirassani, koirassasi, koirassansa, koirassamme, koirassanne, koirastani, koirastasi, koirastansa, koirastamme, koirastanne, koirallani, koirallasi, koirallansa, koirallamme, koirallanne, koiranani, koiranasi, koiranansa, koiranamme, koirananne, koirakseni, koiraksesi, koiraksensa, koiraksemme, koiraksenne, koirattani, koirattasi, koirattansa, koirattamme, koirattanne, koirineni, koirinesi, koirinensa, koirinemme, koirinenne English: Swedish: German: Finnish: Wait! then theres koirakaan, koirankaan, koiraakaan, koirassakaan, koirastakaan, koiraankaan, koirallakaan, koiraltakaan, koirallekaan, koiranakaan, koiraksikaan, koirattakaan, koirineenkaan, koirinkaan, koirako, koiranko, koiraako, koirassako, koirastako, koiraanko, koirallako, koiraltako, koiralleko, koiranako, koiraksiko, koirattako, koirineenko, koirinko, koirasikaan, koiranikaan, koiransakaan, koirammekaan, koirannekaan, koiraanikaan, koiraasikaan, koiraansakaan, koiraammekaan, koiraannekaan, koirassanikaan, koirassasikaan, koirassansakaan, koirassammekaan, koirassannekaan, koirastanikaan, koirastasikaan, koirastansakaan, koirastammekaan, koirastannekaan, koirallanikaan, koirallasikaan, koirallansakaan, koirallammekaan, koirallannekaan, koirananikaan, koiranasikaan, koiranansakaan, koiranammekaan, koiranannekaan, koiraksenikaan, koiraksesikaan, koiraksensakaan, koiraksemmekaan, koiraksennekaan, koirattanikaan, koirattasikaan, koirattansakaan, koirattammekaan, koirattannekaan, koirinenikaan, koirinesikaan, koirinensakaan, koirinemmekaan, koirinennekaan, koirasiko, koiraniko, koiransako, koirammeko, koiranneko, koiraaniko, koiraasiko, koiraansako, koiraammeko, koiraanneko, koirassaniko, koirassasiko, koirassansako, koirassammeko, koirassanneko, koirastaniko, koirastasiko, koirastansako, koirastammeko, koirastanneko, koirallaniko, koirallasiko, koirallansako, koirallammeko, koirallanneko, koirananiko, koiranasiko, koiranansako, koiranammeko, koirananneko, koirakseniko, koiraksesiko, koiraksensako, koiraksemmeko, koiraksenneko, koirattaniko, koirattasiko, koirattansako, koirattammeko, koirattanneko, koirineniko, koirinesiko, koirinensako, koirinemmeko, koirinenneko, koirasikaanko, koiranikaanko, koiransakaanko, koirammekaanko, koirannekaanko, koiraanikaanko, koiraasikaanko, koiraansakaanko, koiraammekaanko, koiraannekaanko, koirassanikaanko, koirassasikaanko, koirassansakaanko, koirassammekaanko, koirassannekaanko, koirastanikaanko, koirastasikaanko, koirastansakaanko, koirastammekaanko, koirastannekaanko, koirallanikaanko, koirallasikaanko, koirallansakaanko, koirallammekaanko, koirallannekaanko, koirananikaanko, koiranasikaanko, koiranansakaanko, koiranammekaanko, koiranannekaanko, koiraksenikaanko, koiraksesikaanko, koiraksensakaanko, koiraksemmekaanko, koiraksennekaanko, koirattanikaanko, koirattasikaanko, koirattansakaanko, koirattammekaanko, koirattannekaanko, koirinenikaanko, koirinesikaanko, koirinensakaanko, koirinemmekaanko, koirinennekaanko, koirasikokaan, koiranikokaan, koiransakokaan, koirammekokaan, koirannekokaan, koiraanikokaan, koiraasikokaan, koiraansakokaan, koiraammekokaan, koiraannekokaan, koirassanikokaan, koirassasikokaan, koirassansakokaan, koirassammekokaan, koirassannekokaan, koirastanikokaan, koirastasikokaan, koirastansakokaan, koirastammekokaan, koirastannekokaan, koirallanikokaan, koirallasikokaan, koirallansakokaan, koirallammekokaan, koirallannekokaan, koirananikokaan, koiranasikokaan, koiranansakokaan, koiranammekokaan, koiranannekokaan, koiraksenikokaan, koiraksesikokaan, koiraksensakokaan, koiraksemmekokaan, koiraksennekokaan, koirattanikokaan, koirattasikokaan, koirattansakokaan, koirattammekokaan, koirattannekokaan, koirinenikokaan, koirinesikokaan, koirinensakokaan, koirinemmekokaan, koirinennekokaan Swedish: German: English: Okay, now you're just making things up! Finnish: Finnish: And now the plural forms...
- pier25 4y ago> what case? Nominative, accusative, genitive, essive, partitive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative or instructive? Jesus... I studied Latin in high school and this triggered some PTSD. And Latin only has 6 cases! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#Latin
- _vdpp 4y agoWhy not bring back Latin? The alphabet is already in wide use, many languages evolved from it making it easy-ish for them to learn, and Latin was already in wide use as the lingua franca for academia and the church up until the 1700s.
- mynegation 4y agoSeriously though. I found myself once on Interlingua TikTok and had a shocking experience of understanding the speaker almost entirely but not recognizing the language. Vocabulary was close to Spanish (that I have basic knowledge of), but declension and overall flow was more like Italian (that I do not speak). I also could speak French long ago, but not anymore so that may have helped as well.
- leoc 4y agoIf you want to try your luck with Latin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk . Or you could head straight to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09L7bge0w4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09L7bge0w4Q or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7hd799IznU&list=PLU1WuLg45SiyrXahjvFahDuA060P487pV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7hd799IznU&list=PLU1WuLg45S... !
- droobles 4y agoLatin never went anywhere! Carpe Diem, ad hoc, et al. I love learning more about Latin, and while it would be cool to be as fluent as possible as a speaker, I really love parsing and consuming Latin texts, I learn so much not only about history or religion but also just about our current society and language habits. The answer with Latin is obviously the cases, imho Spanish would be my vote for a lingua franca – simple, phonetic, sounds beautiful with any accent sung or spoken, and already has massive influence and history.
- stephc_int13 4y agoIn my opinion, Finnish is almost a joke. This language was created by a Bishop and was later promoted by Russians for political reasons (to piss off the Swedes).
- rhacker 4y agoIt's right there smack in your face, the entire page has a .de domain and is written in english without Google translation help. English is and always will be the international language, for better or worse. Dare to fight it? You'll have to present your argument in English!
- xbar 4y agoI am convinced.
- karaterobot 4y ago> It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions. Then English is obviously more logical, since the rules can be applied just as reliably in all situations as Finnish, and has even more exceptions. Tongue is in cheek here, as it is in the original article.
- dvh 4y agoCzech/Slovak word for ice cream is "zmrzlina" not "zrmzlina". https://translate.google.com/?sl=sk&tl=en&text=zmrzlina&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=sk&tl=en&text=zmrzlina&op=t...
- ur-whale 4y agoThere's a difference? My eyes can tell, gotta use diff.
- mynegation 4y agoIf they wanted to find an example of a word with highest density of consonants, there is a Russian word “взбзднуть“ (“vzbzdnut’” meaning approximately “to fart unexpectedly a tiny bit”) with one vowel, seven consonants and one letter that palatalizes the last consonant.
- smcl 4y agoThat's a great word. You might enjoy the Czech word for "fart" - it also has no consonants and it's almost onomatopoeia: "prd" prrrrrrrrrd
- dvh 4y agoChrt prv zhlt hrst zrn (grayhound first swallowed fistful of seeds)
- Toutouxc 4y agoNice, I first parsed that as Welsh or something, before realizing it was Czech. The word "prv" is archaic and could confuse some younger speakers, but the sentence works even without the word as "Chrt zhlt hrst zrn" and that's all valid modern Czech.
- CRConrad 4y agoA fart, to fart in Swedish: En prutt, att prutta.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yongjik 4y ago> Finnish has longer and better swear words than any other language. Great, trying to sell it as a World Language and they managed to insult 99.95% of the world with one line! (Well maybe less than 99.95%. We can all agree that English swear words aren't that great.)
- skrebbel 4y agoI feel the need to defend Finnish cases. Yes, they have a gazillion, but unlike other languages you might know (eg Latin or German), there’s nothing difficult about Finnish cases. Most cases are simply used where English would use prepositions. In Finnish those are postfixes instead, a bunch of letters tacked onto the end of a word. It’s a case and not a word because there’s no space between the two, that’s it. Eg “talo” means house. Talossa means “in the house”. Talon means “of the house” (actually, “the house’s” - omg English has cases too, super difficult). Talolla means “on (top of) the house”. That’s not harder than prepositions is it? I did cheat a bit, because with some words you first got to find the root before you can tack on “-ssa”. The root of talo is also talo, but for some words you got to apply a (simple, purely letter-based) rule. Eg the root of “ankka” (duck) is “anka” so “the duck’s house” becomes “ankan talo”. There’s a bunch of rules to find the root of a noun and you can learn them in half an hour or so. There’s plenty stuff that’s harder about Finnish (notably the vocabulary), but the cases are peanuts.
- canjobear 4y agoThe difference between Finnish case markers and separate words is deeper than whether it's written with a space: case markers have to agree in vowel harmony with the stem whereas separate words don't. It's still incredibly easy compared to the fusional case systems in languages like Latin or Russian.
- sedeki 4y agoWhat does "fusional" mean here?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- skyyler 4y agoA simple web search can bring you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language >Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.
- renewiltord 4y agoEnglish is the Javascript of languages. JS will tell you what market fit is about. Neither will die.
- Maursault 4y agoI'm not all that against it, Finnish is quite beautiful. Practically, however, it is too late. English is already the de facto international language with 1.5B speakers and is the most spoken language on the planet followed by Mandarin with 1.3B speakers. I suspect English's international popularity is mostly due to two factors, namely, 17th century British imperialism and that English has been the international language of aviation since the 1950's.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoIt's the dominance of the British Empire followed immediately by the dominance of the American Empire.
- nneonneo 4y agoSpoken Mandarin would be a great basis for a logical world language. Although it shares roughly zero words in common with English or other European languages (aside from the occasional loan word, like coffee or sofa), the language itself is concise, expressive and grammatically simple: no conjugation, no inflection, consistent pronunciation and minimal “politeness”. The only ”weird” parts are tonality and those darned counting words. Too bad the written language is a disaster for learners. 10000 unique characters to learn (30000 for literary fluency), and inconsistent and often unpredictable pronunciation.
- jefftk 4y ago> The only ”weird” parts are tonality and those darned counting words. Tonality, which is famously hard for speakers of non-tonal languages to pick up?
- williamscales 4y agoEh, it's not that hard if you have a good teacher to give you feedback. I'd put it on par with learning proper French pronunciation.
- Bakary 4y agoOne way to "solve" the tonality issue with Mandarin would be to increase the number of permitted phonemes or phoneme pairs and turn as many monosyllabic words as possible into polysyllabic ones. To some extent, the latter process has already taken place in the real world with the transition from classical Chinese. Pair this with a Hangul-like script or Bopomofo redesigned from the ground up and you've indeed got yourself a hypothetical tool of communicative beauty. Amusingly enough, English has its own tonal-equivalent learning problem in the form of phoneme stress. One of the final bosses for non-native but highly fluent speakers is the ability to never mess up the stress on certain words.
- FabHK 4y agoI'd say you're off by a factor of 3 to 10? 1000 characters suffices for basic literacy. HSK 6 (the highest level of the Chinese as a second language exam) includes fewer than 3000 characters. A highly educated person allegedly knows 8000+ characters, though I'd take that with a grain of salt.
- rendall 4y agoOne annoying thing about Finnish is that you have to say the whole year, no shortcuts. 1975 is "one thousand, nine hundred and seventy five" None of this nineteen-seventy-five efficiency nonsense. And, of course, you have to say it in Finnish numerals which are all looooong: vuosi yksi-tuhat-yhdeksänsataa-seitsemänkymmentä-viisi Saatanan kyrpä, kun saavun numeron loppuun, en muista vitun alkun.
- Tor3 4y agoYou do exactly the same in Italian - I never found it inconvenient or annoying.
- vikaveri 4y agoFinns do commonly use nineteen-seventyfive, or even seiskaviis or seven-five, when it's clear what year it means. There are plenty of shortcuts. Only if you want to be "official" the whole number is said
- lawlorino 4y agoYou can absolutely shorten pronunciation of numbers, including years, when speaking Finnish https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-vocabulary/vocabulary-lists/finnish-spoken-language-numbers-kaheksan#one https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-vocabulary/vocabulary-lists/...
- mostlylurks 4y agoThere are shortcuts, they're just different than those you have in English. 1975 for me would be vuos seittenviis, vuos seitkytviis, or vuos tuhatysiseittenviis. And if I wanted to say in the year ____, I'd just have to change vuos to vuon. The set of shortcuts you could use when writing in the literary variety is more constrained, however.
- danwee 4y agoEnglish is the perfect world language... I wish only words were pronounced as they are written.
- timbit42 4y ago"Be the change you want to see in the world."
- buzer 4y agoLet's just switch to ralli englanti
- Koshkin 4y agoI just pronounced your comment the way it is written, and I did not like what I heard.
- vnorilo 4y agoI automatically heard it in the voice of older Finnish politicians speaking english in the 90s
- queuebert 4y agoIf English weren't so arbitrary and complex, it would be exponentially harder to detect scammers.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoAnd don't forget detecting when the lower classes are in our presence. Without arbitrary rules strictly enforced, how are we to know who went to the "right" schools? Besides, what other useful things could kids possibly do with that class time other than learn the rules?
- PanosJee 4y agoLet's stick with Greek.
- Koshkin 4y agoModern Greek sounds much like Spanish to me. It is interesting, then, that having arisen, one from Latin and the other from Ancient Greek - quite different sounding languages - they somehow converged.
- eftychis 4y agoI wouldn't say converged. Curious on the traits that sound similar to you. To me they sound pretty different as a native Greek speaker. I can spot the loan words etc and can make some meanings, but that's where that stops. Spanish is pretty different from Latin too, in that it is simplified. Spanish has a really interesting history but a Latin speaker wouldn't be able to communicate with a Spanish native speaker in any way -- i.e. it has deviated substantially.
- Koshkin 4y agoI used the words ‘sound’ in its literal sense, i.e. I referred to phonetics.
- eftychis 4y agoWhich was the interesting part for me! You are not the first person bringing this up. And it's peculiar, as my ear, at least, makes up some differences. But I am not sure how to describe or analyze these language phonetic deviations.
- pwpw 4y agoWhen I hear Spanish (from Spain) expecting Greek or vice versa, it does sound a bit like gibberish in the other language. Of course I speak both, so I quickly understand what's being spoken (at my current level, which is elementary in Greek). Μένεις στην Ελλάδα?
- pelasaco 4y agoI would vote for "old tupi", an extinct Tupian language which was spoken by the aboriginal Tupi people of Brazil and in the early colonial period, Tupi was used as a lingua franca throughout Brazil by Europeans and aboriginal Americans. I'm probably one of the last "speakers", and probably the only one in Germany :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_language
- jmclnx 4y agoI was thinking as I read this. For a world wider lang. we should pick an easy to learn and pronounce extinct lang. That way everyone would have to learn a new language :) old tupi I guess is as good and any Extinct Language.
- pelasaco 4y agoThe interesting part, is that despite the fact that the language is officially dead, almost all Brazilian geography (mountains, beaches) and partially cities have until today a tupi name.
- ian-g 4y agoI opened this up fully expecting it to just be "It's a weird language without many relatives. We'll all be equally miserable learning it except those weirdo Finns. A level playing field for us all"
- CamogliX 4y agoAs a huge fan of Scandinavia And The World comics I agree. Note that in that comic all characters speak, apart Finland that express himself by waving in the air a beer and a rusty knife.
- Ekaros 4y agoSo you see, it is also an expertly non-verbal communication tool.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> It is a good sounding language; in other words, it is pleasing to the ear. This has to do with its wealth of vowels, which rules out ugly consonant clusters. It was recently suggested that some vowels should be exported to Czechoslovakia, where a shortage of vowels is imminent, and that some Czech consonants should be imported to Finland. However, negotiations collapsed at an early stage. The Finns would not deal with a language that calls ice-cream 'zrmzlina,' It's always surprising how many people believe that spelling is somehow linguistically significant. There is no real difference between Czech 'zrm' and English 'zerm', but somehow the Czechs are dealing with an unpronounceable vowel shortage.
- kebman 4y agoI have only one thing to add to this: Kippis!
- kebman 4y ago> b. what case? Nominative, accusative, genitive, essive, partitive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative or instructive? > c. is it possible to avoid using the noun? And now you know why the most extroverted Finns are the ones who look at your shoes instead of on the ground in front of you!
- dhosek 4y agoFor an extremely logical language, I would nominate Hebrew. The way that verbs are conjugated from three-letter roots and those same roots can become related nouns with regular patterns of adding suffixes is just amazing. The Rabbinic tradition is that the original language before Babel was Hebrew and after my studies of the language in college, I can totally buy that.
- Cyph0n 4y agoYep, either Hebrew or Arabic would be my choice. Both are relatively well-structured and have existed for a very long time. Arabic has the advantage of having a larger number of users/speakers.
- dhosek 4y agoAlthough, as I understand it, not all dialects of Arabic are mutually intelligible so, e.g., an Iraqi and a Moroccan might have difficulty understanding each other. The other challenge with Arabic is that the script is considerably more complicated since most letters have distinct initial, medial and final forms whereas Hebrew only has special final forms for three letters. That said, I know almost no Arabic so I can’t speak with much authority on its learnability.
- mtalantikite 4y agoArabic, like all Semitic languages, has this feature as well and I agree it's amazing! There are a few examples on wikipedia for those that haven't encountered this before [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfix
- maratc 4y agoI second this motion. "The Complete Dictionary of Hebrew Language" has about 35,000 words in total. I bet that over a half of that aren't used, and would sound completely new to anyone except Hebrew linguists. Hebrew is a "tabular" language that can be represented as a (sparsely populated) table with the roots as rows and "morphemes" (construction patterns) as columns. If a word exists, it will be in its proper place at an appropriate row and column. Here's an example of a construction pattern for the category of "tools": maXXeXa The X denotes a place to put the root letters. Most of the roots are composed of three letters, and so there are three places. When you combine it with the root S.R.T which has a meaning of "ribbon" (and also, film), you get "maSReTa" — "a tool for making films" (video camera). If you combine it with the root Ts.L.M which has a meaning of "image", you get "maTsLeMa" — "a tool for making images" (still camera). Even if you never heard the word "maVReGa" but are able to separate it into the morpheme of "tools" and the root V.R.G (which has a meaning of clock-wise motion), you can use that to understand the word as "a tool for making clock-wise motion" — a screwdriver.
- zocoi 4y agoNeither Finnish or English is my mother tongue. I spent 8 years in Finland and the rest in the US as an adult. It’s really hard to learn both languages at the same time because of little similarity. My English suffers while I can start conversation in Finnish. Now English is my main language and I couldn’t remember much Finnish. Overall it’s all about where I call home
- option 4y agoEnglish is the world language. Time to formalize that and move on.
- phtrivier 4y agoAt the beginning of the article, I though this was a spoof of all the "why you should use programming language X in your next project."
- JasonFruit 4y agoFinnish is a beautiful language, and I love to hear it sung — there's a wealth of Finnish folk groups doing great music that melds tradition and innovation, borrowing from musics from all over the world. But that's the drawback in learning Finnish: what if, understanding the language, I no longer wished to hear the music? The great advantage of Finnish, for me, is that I am unlikely to ruin a song by accidentally becoming aware of its meaning, since it apparently completely lacks cognates with English.
- ahtavarasmus 4y ago
- PLMUV9A4UP27D 4y agoI'm part of the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, and spent 7 years in school trying to learn Finnish. I spent 3 years learning German, and got about as far with that. Or as a friend of mine said who moved to Germany: German just feels like a dialect compared to Finnish.
- School-Cotton 4y agoSwedish and German are very closely related languages, so you probably had tons of implicit intuition about how Germanic languages work that didn’t have to be studied.
- PLMUV9A4UP27D 4y agoYep, Swedish and German is as closely related as English and German. It's possible that English and German are even closer as they share the same Germanic branch (west Germanic), which Swedish does not share. I bring this up since it can be easier for the English speaking community of HN to relate to the closeness of German, and for a while consider being "easy as a dialect of English" to understand, in contrast to Finnish which is really difficult.
- School-Cotton 4y agoRandom off-topic question: do people in your group (Swedish speakers from Finland) culturally identify more closely with Swedes from Sweden, or with (the rest of) Finnish people? I’ve always been curious about this.
- coffee_beqn 4y agoFinlandssvenska is a strong identity that stands on its own. Kind of like Quebec. Definitely they don’t hold any fealty to Sweden
- CRConrad 4y ago> do people in your group (Swedish speakers from Finland) culturally identify more closely with Swedes from Sweden, or with (the rest of) Finnish people? They're definitely Finlanders. Rooting for Finland in Finland - Sweden sportsball games, general disdain for Swedes as "sissies", etc, etc. Source: I'm an immigrant from Sweden to Finland; my son is a Finland-Swede. Alternative source: I think I've read somewhere on the internet (or seen in some YouTube video?) an offhand quip along those same "Sissy Sweden-Swedes" lines by the internationally most well-known -- at least among the kind of people frequenting HN, I'd assume -- Finland-Swede, Linus Torvalds.
- bfung 4y ago“Finnish has longer and better swear words than any other language.” That already makes adoption of the language doomed, hahaha. Swearing also needs no logic, I dun give a fuck. Fuck yeah? fuuuuuuck. “fuck” as the universal language and word.
- _zamorano_ 4y agoIt is spanish! ;-) I remember my younger days when Hristo Stoichkov came to play with Barcelona FC. A very aggresive and sweary player, a few years later he left to play for Parma FC, and while playing in Italy, he kept swearing in spanish! I even saw him doing the same while playing for Bulgaria.
- Asraelite 4y agoI remember a joke question from the conlanging subreddit asking what real language looks the most like it was constructed, and one of the top answers was Finnish. It really does look like that, it's unnaturally systematic in a lot of ways.
- Ekaros 4y agoI suppose in many ways it was actually constructed and rather lately for a language. And then very effectively put through education system. With good promotion of one standard in written and publicly broadcasted word.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bookofjoe 4y agoSanna Marin FTW!
- URfejk 4y agoNo thanks.
- leke 4y agoI'm a British guy living in Finland and am of course learning the language. I'm not sure if this article is a joke, but Finnish is quite a difficult language to learn quickly. However, it is true that Finnish has some great features, and I'm very lucky to be learning this than some other language. I'm also a fan of auxiliary languages and think some of these constructed languages are a much better choice for a "world language" because of just how fast one can learn them. My personal favourite being Interlingue (aka Occidental). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingue Related to both these points, there is a savant called Daniel Tammet, who is a polyglot amongst other things. I hear his favourite language is Finnish and he has constructed a language based on it (and other Finnic languages) called Mänti. I haven't checked it out yet, but it sounds appealing to me at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet
- linux2647 4y agoI think it’s supposed to be satire
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoI know this piece is tongue in cheek, but I nevertheless bridled at the 'ugly consonant clusters' accusation; I think these add richness and character to a language, and as an English speaker, anyone who disagrees can prise the latchstring from my cold dead hand ...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- c-smile 4y ago> I'm not sure if this article is a joke Of course not. There is even a book about it: https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/master-finnish-language.png https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/master-finnish...
- CRConrad 4y agoSeems pretty recent, judging from the "If you want to marry cool PM" tagline at the top. (Though I thought ms Marin is married already?) Heard a bit of a "Newspodd" on Radio Vega, where someone claimed the most common reaction abroad to the recent storm-in-a-teacup news brouhaha was "Are you just jealous because she's hot and cool?"
- Koshkin 4y agoI like the sound and the grammar of the Finnish language, if only they had an alphabet more suitable for it: päämäärä is too much for me. (Anteeksi.)
- Ekaros 4y agoAt least Finnish mostly has good grace to have new symbols for vowels. And not use same ones for half a dozen different sounds...
- freetonik 4y agoThe weirdest thing about Finnish cases is the counter-intuitive nature (to a speaker of almost any indo-european language). For example: "dog" is "koira", "I like" is "pidän"; "I like the dog"? — "Pidän koirasta", which is using the "-sta/stä" ending of the elative case, which usually means "from". So, it's "I like from the dog". It doesn't end here... * Tulin Norjasta — I came from Norway. * Pidän Norjasta — I like Norway. * Puhu Norjasta — Talk about Norway. How come the same case is used in these?! "Löytyy apteekista" — "Can be found at the pharmacy", literally "Find from the pharmacy". Saying "Löytyy apteekissa", which would literally mean "find at the pharmacy" is grammatically incorrect. So, yeah, Finnish grammar is nicely structured and consistent, but sometimes it just goes against intuition of speakers of other languages.
- vnorilo 4y ago"Pidän koiraa" - I am holding (or keeping) a dog (for now). The case roughly translates to: some (of). "Pidän koiran" - I will keep the dog (for good). "Pitää" is one of these ancient words that means many things, but primarily: to hold, and Finns apparently think that to like something is to hold that which comes out of it! You would still say that the man is in the pharmacy (mies on apteekissa) but the stuff he found is from it (lääkkeet apteekista).
- Ekaros 4y agoI think pharmacy is just thinking different. If something is found at pharmacy and you are buying them you are anyway taking them out from there. "I bought the drugs from the pharmacy" Ostin lääkkeet apteekista. "Drugs are at pharmacy" lääkeet ovat apteekissa.
- CRConrad 4y ago> Pidän koirasta", which is using the "-sta/stä" ending of the elative case, which usually means "from". So, it's "I like from the dog". I find it helps to think of it as "I think highly of the dog". Or in Swedish, "Jag håller av hunden". Which, come to think of it, is pretty much a literal word for word translation -- because the base meaning of "pidä" is "to hold", not "to like".
- stew-j 4y agoIt might have been more interesting to watch Aki Kaurismäki's movies, including the Proletariat Trilogy if I understood Finnish. I'd like to know a very different language from my native English like Japanese, too. (Akira Kurosawa?) You just never know what you miss in translation.
- stew-j 4y agoI got to thinking about silent movies, like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. I don't think I ever saw another treatment of home ownership quite so apropos as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Week_(1920_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Week_(1920_film) It expertly treated its subject matter with great humor--sans verbal language (interstitials aside).
- mzs 4y agoHa, fantastic to contrast with English as logical and world language :) Anyway, one thing that the post did not touch on was word stress. Finnish is awesomely simple and consistent! (again, especially compared to English)
- Qw3r7 4y agoSUOMIIIII
- rvba 4y agoThe European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English". In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
- hahaitsfunny 4y ago
- gerdesj 4y agoI think that language diversity is important - the more the merrier as far as I am concerned. I am a Brit. You might know a bit about where I live - a set of islands to the left of mainland Europe, one of which Britain (UK) shares with the Republic of Ireland. We generally speak one of several varieties of English around here along with roughly 100 other languages - our rather complicated history means that this is a very diverse society nowadays. Brythonic/Pretonic etc are the languages from before the Angles/Saxons/Vikings rocked up - that's where the modern word Briton ultimately comes from. A greek bloke called Pytheas who circumnavigated these isles called the natives here Pretanike - ie Pretish/British peoples. We have Welsh, Scottish, Irish and the rest in rude health. Cornish is being gradually resurrected. Cumbric is nigh on dead as are loads of other old languages. This discussion about a lingua franca (French) is mostly carried out in English for a good reason. English is extremely malleable and not too fussy. It can be complicated or not as required. There are loads of pidgins too. There are no diacritics in English (a few French borrow words perhaps, and that weird double dot over naive that I've left out here). It is also accepted that vowels can wander a bit and consonants can also trot around and find some greener grass.
- ygmelnikova 4y ago
- stew-j 4y agoIs it too late to nominate Nadsat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat or Newspeak? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak both expressive languages developed by forward thinkers for our modern era.
- regularperson26 4y agoa lot of finnish choose to speak swedish, not a good look.
- paledot 4y ago> we have developed a method of fording this linguistic barrier I twice misread this as "fjording" and found it quite clever, but alas.
- langsoul-com 4y agoTo make a world language, you need power and control. A cultural invasion and reasons for the language to be absolutely superior to others. I don't think Finland has the economic or cultural capacity to make that real. China is the next best bet, but they haven't succeeded in the cultural invasion aspect. Japan with anime and Korea with kpop (the cultural export was funded by the S.Korean gov to start) has made better inroads.
- yomkippur 4y agoExactly this and soft power is the best. Lot of young Western women moving to Korea to find Korean men. Such is the power of pop culture and unfortunately this means the West's anti-asian posture in films and exclusion of asians in pop American culture is clearly out in the open. We are heavily influenced by media. nobody is learning Finnish before Korean or Japanese.
- aetherson 4y agoGuys. This article is a joke.
- vjk800 4y agoSo... step one in the plan will then be: make Finland an economic and military superpower.
- awsrocks 4y ago
- briandear 4y agoIronically the article is on a German site in English.
- eftychis 4y agoOk I understand this is a troll/joke post, but "In order to make things easier to understand, nominative and genitive are called accusative." How does that make sense in any way? Am I missing something in the case conflation here? These are pretty distinct cases.
- lawlorino 4y agoI think it's in reference to this (minor) controversy between linguists and Finnish teachers https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-grammar/finnish-cases/grammatical-cases/the-accusative-case-akkusatiivi https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-grammar/finnish-cases/gramma...
- eftychis 4y agoInteresting. Thank you a lot. Can't say that the post referenced makes this less funny of a statement!
- skellyclock 4y agoLörs lärä
- Cloudef 4y agoFinnish Jazz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5-AhIDzqAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5-AhIDzqAs
- znpy 4y ago> It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions. so... the rules are not absolute and reliable in all situations?
- CRConrad 4y agoNo, of course exceptions are excepted from the rules. But relax: There aren't any.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoI lived there for a bit over three years. Never spent any time trying to learn the language. I learned more about Finnish from this article then in three years of living there. The language is so hard that I just did not see the point of even trying to learn it. Everybody speaks English and I already learned a bit of Swedish when I was living in Sweden so I figured that speaking one of their official languages was good enough (even though non Swedish speaking Finns hate having to deal with Swedish). At least for official stuff (which you usually can do in English as well), that was sometimes useful. The need to learn new languages is slowly disappearing. And not because English is so dominant (which it is) but because machines are getting better at translations. That is about to become very disruptive. Right now, using machine translations is nice when you really need them but still a bit awkward and tedious. And they still get a lot wrong. But that's not going to last very long. Real time subtitles are already a thing in video chats and on Youtube. They aren't necessarily very good yet but improving over time. Once we hit the good enough stage, Having real time conversations with people you don't share any language with also becomes a possibility. Right now you can use your phone for simple stuff but it's a bit awkward. I think in a decade or so, you'll be able to go wherever and have meaningful conversations with just about anyone you meet. I think that's going to be massive enabler for businesses.
- CRConrad 4y ago> I lived there for a bit over three years. Never spent any time trying to learn the language. This feels like the same kind of attitude that makes immigrants from English-speaking countries think they're not immigrants (which you were, if only for a while) but "expats" (see other recent HN threads on that subject).
- jillesvangurp 4y agoI'm not actually a native English speaker even. But I get your point. To which I say, so what? It's not a problem for me to not be fluent in Swedish, Finnish, or German even though I've lived in Sweden, Finland, and now Germany for many years. I think it's great that people can move around and lead productive lives like that. There's going to be more of that enabled by tools and automated translations. It seems to offend people that I don't dedicate a large chunk of my life trying to master new languages; which is something I simply neither value nor enjoy. Sorry, I have more interesting things to do than trying to level up my language skills and my job is taking a lot of energy. I mastered English and that was a lot of work and it took many years. I use it more than my native language Dutch. It will have to do. Adding a third and a fourth language to that mix is just never going to be a thing for me.
- sershe 4y agoPiling on other suggestions, why not Turkish? Admittedly I only ever made it to lower intermediate level (I could read newspapers slowly with occasional look-up) and now forgot most of it, but I don't think I've ever encountered anything difficult or illogical, except maybe the -ki suffix ("of"/"related to", that seems to require experience or memorization to know how to use correctly). Simple rules, simple writing system, few exceptions and none in pronunciation (that I know of), and piling suffixes sometimes feels like programming, there's suffix for everything and you just add them logically or with simple combination rules: https://trstem.com/en/verb/conjunct/gel/ https://trstem.com/en/verb/conjunct/gel/, you can learn entire conjugation in time it would take you to learn 5 verbs in Spanish ;) Also (like Finnish?) has a political advantage of not being in either of the superpower language families, so every one suffers the ~same amount :)
- garfieldnate 4y agoReminds me a bit of the classic essay, So You Want to Learn Japanese: http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm.