
Deconstructing Finnish - dirtyaura
http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-finnish.html
======
11thEarlOfMar
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
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.

~~~
bergie
Anteeksi, koirasi on tulessa

(though in practice the polite forms are rarely used in Finnish. You'd
probably go for _hei, sun koiras palaa_ )

~~~
kaitai
Growing up in the US, I learned Finnish from books and maybe some official
radio/TV, as well as family. My cousins in Finland made fun of me for speaking
like a book: I'd always choose the first sentence you presented and they'd
just gawk. "Who talks like that?"

I knew lots of old words they'd never heard, though, since I was practiced at
speaking with 70-year-olds who'd learned from their immigrant parents. A
little linguistic time warp...

------
agrostis
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.)

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jinushaun
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.

~~~
nodata
You have to learn rules. You can't learn all of the numbers that exist without
rules, you'd never get anything else done.

~~~
twoodfin
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.

~~~
a_c_s
I think this has far more to do with the difference in how children and adults
are taught languages than structural differences in the brain.

After all, 2 year olds aren't sat down with pages of conjugation tables to
memorize, rather they pick things up from speaking and being corrected.

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gambiting
>>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.

~~~
sp332
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)

------
jacquesm
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.

~~~
mtrn
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.

~~~
saturdayplace
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.

------
nabla9
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/dane...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Nordiccountries/comments/2bm3e4/danes_are_not_as_beautiful_as_they_think_at_least/cj97u9k)

    
    
        --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<--

~~~
616c
What he is describing are aggulutinative languages. They are not that unique.

I feel like a broken record, but I think Arabic qualifies (my specialty). I
also think of German, Turkish, Russian.

What is interesting, at least with dialectical Arabic and a general trend in
languages where synthetic languages (agglutinative languages are a subset of
that) move to analytic (like English, where you have clusters of words bonding
to have a meaning, instead of morphology changes on the word) over time (I was
studying with an Arabic dialectologist who worked with US DoS to write their
books; perhaps the leading non-native on this stuff). She said if you read,
this is not an uncommon trend as hinted earlier.

English is a good example of eventually dropping agglutinative (synthetic to
analytic). I am not sure if this is happening to Finnish, but as an Arabic
speaker it is very fun to use an agglutinative language with a special pattern
system. Imagine basic word meanings are objects, and you can subclass them
into a person doing it noun (k-t-b -> k-aa-t-b, writer), or a place where it
is done (k-t-b -> m-k-t-b or m-k-t-b-a, office and library respectively) or
something that is the passive object form (m-k-t-oo-b, something written
down). There are even versions for receivng action passively, and many
variants for verb types. You can build verbs on the fly. It is fun to watch US
movies, here a weird word, and guess the root into the right pattern.

I have heard Finnish is cool, but not for quite the same reasons (at least it
is very general). But keep that agglutination and fight the power!

~~~
Jun8
The term agglutinative language has a specific meaning in linguistics:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language).
Under this definition, IE languages (Russian, German), Arabic wouldn't be be
considered as such. Typical examples are Turkic languages, Hungarian, Finnish,
Korean, Japanese, most native American languages. And the language isolate
Basque.

But you are right in the sense that other languages do exhibit agglutinative
aspects, usually in nouns (Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz). One giveaway is
how words get marked for mood, person, and tense. In agglutinative languages
the basic form almost never changes.

~~~
616c
You make a good point, I realized later when I was less tired and I was
confusing the general type (synthetic) with agglutinative (specific sub-
category).

Oh well, thanks for clarifying.

------
chousuke
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
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.

------
JSGraef
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
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
I haven't, and this looks great! Thank you.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

------
osmala
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
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.

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

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.

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guard-of-terra
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.

------
notastartup
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
Kind of sounded like you are going to learn Finnish after forever.

