9 ms·

Deconstructing Finnish

129 points by dirtyaura 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago
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.
- jorde 12y ago
  Also Estonian is part of the same group
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    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.
    - saturdayplace 12y ago
      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%A1nhidi/dp/9630258242/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408374143&sr=1-6&keywords=learn+hungarian http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Hungarian-Zolt%C3%A1n-B%C3%A1nhi...
- drc37 12y ago
  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.
- mtrn 12y ago
  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.
  - DrJokepu 12y ago
    Don't forget negative concord. "I haven't eaten nothing all day" makes a lot of sense in Uralic languages.
  - saturdayplace 12y ago
    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.
  - BugBrother 12y ago
    So "Hungarian notation" is a language joke too?! Damn, so many years and I never made the connection.
- bvk 12y ago
  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.
  - zokier 12y ago
    > 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.
    - agrostis 12y ago
      And Mari, and Mordvinic, and Komi, and Udmurt, and Karelian, and Veps, and Vodic (though the last two are, sadly, more or less moribund).
11thEarlOfMar 12y ago
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 http://goo.gl/Zt2WBb
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  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.
  - RBerenguel 12y ago
    Now I can't help thinking of the "spruce is on fire" Finnish-is-hard picture. Do you know it?
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Never heard of it. Reference?
      - pekko 12y ago
        http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Finnish+Lesson+1_f22497_4905528.jpg http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Finnish+Lesson+1_f22497_490...
gambiting 12y ago
>>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.
- arethuza 12y ago
  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....
- BugBrother 12y ago
  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.)
- sp332 12y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E77HpMMbDYc#t=83
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
chousuke 12y ago
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.
- ethanpoole 12y ago
  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.
jinushaun 12y 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.
- sampo 12y ago
  > 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.
- nodata 12y ago
  You have to learn rules. You can't learn all of the numbers that exist without rules, you'd never get anything else done.
  - colanderman 12y ago
    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.
  - twoodfin 12y ago
    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.
    - 12y ago
osmala 12y ago
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
- unlikelymordant 12y ago
  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.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
JSGraef 12y ago
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.
- flohrian 12y ago
  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/ http://www.memrise.com/courses/english/finnish/
  - JSGraef 12y ago
    I haven't, and this looks great! Thank you.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      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.
agrostis 12y ago
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.)
nabla9 12y ago
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/danes_are_not_as_beautiful_as_they_think_at_least/cj97u9k 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<--
notastartup 12y ago
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.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  Kind of sounded like you are going to learn Finnish after forever.
Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
Just as example, how many forms one word can take: http://depressingfinland.tumblr.com/post/65222506844/what-do-you-mean-finnish-is-difficult 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.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
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.

129 points by dirtyaura 12y ago

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.

jorde 12y ago
Also Estonian is part of the same group
- jacquesm 12y ago
  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.
  - saturdayplace 12y ago
    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%A1nhidi/dp/9630258242/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408374143&sr=1-6&keywords=learn+hungarian http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Hungarian-Zolt%C3%A1n-B%C3%A1nhi...
drc37 12y ago
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.
mtrn 12y ago
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.
- DrJokepu 12y ago
  Don't forget negative concord. "I haven't eaten nothing all day" makes a lot of sense in Uralic languages.
- saturdayplace 12y ago
  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.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  So "Hungarian notation" is a language joke too?! Damn, so many years and I never made the connection.
bvk 12y ago
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.
- zokier 12y ago
  > 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.
  - agrostis 12y ago
    And Mari, and Mordvinic, and Komi, and Udmurt, and Karelian, and Veps, and Vodic (though the last two are, sadly, more or less moribund).

11thEarlOfMar 12y ago

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 http://goo.gl/Zt2WBb

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
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.
- RBerenguel 12y ago
  Now I can't help thinking of the "spruce is on fire" Finnish-is-hard picture. Do you know it?
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Never heard of it. Reference?
    - pekko 12y ago
      http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Finnish+Lesson+1_f22497_4905528.jpg http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Finnish+Lesson+1_f22497_490...

gambiting 12y ago

>>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.

arethuza 12y ago
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....
BugBrother 12y ago
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.)
sp332 12y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E77HpMMbDYc#t=83

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

chousuke 12y ago

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.

ethanpoole 12y ago
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.

jinushaun 12y 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.

sampo 12y ago
> 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.
nodata 12y ago
You have to learn rules. You can't learn all of the numbers that exist without rules, you'd never get anything else done.
- colanderman 12y ago
  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.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  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.
  - 12y ago

osmala 12y ago

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

unlikelymordant 12y ago
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.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

JSGraef 12y ago

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.

flohrian 12y ago
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/ http://www.memrise.com/courses/english/finnish/
- JSGraef 12y ago
  I haven't, and this looks great! Thank you.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    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.

agrostis 12y ago

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.)

nabla9 12y ago

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/danes_are_not_as_beautiful_as_they_think_at_least/cj97u9k 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<--

notastartup 12y ago

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.

guard-of-terra 12y ago
Kind of sounded like you are going to learn Finnish after forever.

Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago

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

guard-of-terra 12y ago

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.