
“Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian - collate
https://deepbaltic.com/2019/09/12/did-you-eat-the-whole-cake-on-learning-estonian/
======
mcv
I love the list of vowel-heavy words. You can also construct some similar
words in Dutch. Or at least you used to before 1996, when a spelling change
introduced hyphens into many of these:

    
    
      zeeëend - sea duck, or Velvet scoter (nowadays "zee-eend")
      koeieuier - cow udder (nowadays "koeienuier")
      zaaiuien - seed onions (still legal I think)
      kraaieëieren - crow eggs (nowadays kraaieneieren, I think)
    

We also have the opposite:

    
    
      angstschreeuw - cry of fear
      slechtstschrijvend - worst writing
    

These are fairly normal words. With a bit of creativity, you can make some
that are much worse:

    
    
      borsjtsjschrokkende - borscht gorging
      haaiaaioorkonde - shark petting certificate
      weggooiooien - throw-away ewes

~~~
alecmg
I shuddered when I saw what a 4 letter word got mutilated into

originally (russian) it was Борщ

And coincidentally Borš in estonian.

And in dutch it became borsjtsjsch? How? Why? Why do you need 8 letters to
transmit a single phonem?

No wonder dutch can construct these weird word combos.

Edit, nvm, apparently last sch belongs to next word. Still creepy

~~~
dmitriid
Because there's no close sound to щ /ɕː/ in many European languages.

Some languages approximate it with /ʂ/ (think "sh" in English). For example,
Romanian: borş.

Most languages approximate it with a combination of /ʃ/ ("sh"), /t/, and /tʃ/
("ch"):

\- "sh" and "ch",

\- "sh" and "t", or

\- all three, "sh", "t" and "ch".

Or an approximation thereof.

In Swedish: Approximation for /ʃ/ is "sj" /ɧ/. Approximation for /tʃ/ is "tj"
/ɕ/ which yields "borsjtj". Though they could've gone for just "bortj" :)

Dutch is "Borsjtsj": Approximation for /ʃtʃ/ (sh t ch) with sj /ʃ/ and t

German is "Borschtsch": Approximation for /ʃtʃ/ (sh t ch) with sch /ʃ/ and t

etc. etc.

~~~
joshrotenberg
My Russian teachers always used the old "fre[sh ch]eese" example for us
English speakers.

~~~
dmitriid
To my ear "shit/sheet" are closer to щ :)

------
Mirioron
> _When I asked our teacher how children learn which case to use, her rather
> wonderful reply was that “it comes with mother’s milk”._

As a native speaker, I think the real answer is experience. You pick up most
of the patterns simply by using the language. I think that's how most people
learn English as well. English grammar rules are mostly a mystery to me and
many of my peers from school. Estonian grammar is slightly less of a mystery,
but that's because it is a mandatory subject even in high school (ages 16-19).

 _About the title:_

"Kas sa sõid koogi (ära)?" \- "Did you eat the (whole) cake?"

"Kas sa sõid kooki?" \- "Did you eat cake?"

"Ära" in the first sentence has the meaning of "nothing left" or "gone". "Ära"
doesn't have to be included, but in practice, it almost always is. It's
similar with the abessive ("without") case. The example given in the article
is "riik on ilma juhita". The word "ilma" means "without" and can be left out.
The abessive case of "juhita" is enough - "riik on juhita" \- but in practice
"ilma" is often included.

All in all, people generally don't care too much if you get the grammar just
right. Mostly right is good enough. Many native speakers even have problems
with words such as "kelle _-ga-gi_ " vs "kelle _-gi-ga_ " (the first is
correct: -gi/-ki is always at the end). Some grammar rules can even result in
words that many native speakers will say are incorrect, eg "keni" \- the
partitive plural of "kena" (neat). People are simply more used to the -id/-sid
partitive plural "kenasid".

~~~
simias
From personal experience I think English speakers have troubles approaching
synthetic languages in general because the English language is very analytic.
I lurk in a few language-learning forums and I try to help anglophones
learning French from time to time, they're often overwhelmed by the
conjugations and to a lesser extent the grammatical genders which are
omnipresent in French grammar.

On the other hand I've been studying Russian pretty intensely over the past
year or so, so I can definitely empathize with the frustration of having to
learn a complex case system.

I think the important thing is: it doesn't really matter if you get it
completely right (or even mostly wrong). As long as you build simple sentences
a native speaker will be able to figure out what you're trying to say. If
somebody asks me "tu parlons anglais ?" it's definitely going to sound very
wrong to me but I'll probably be able to figure out what you're attempting to
communicate.

I think it's worth it to actually learn the declension/conjugation tables to
familiarize yourself with them but you have to face the fact that you'll
probably never learn to use them correctly just by memorizing rules.
Eventually as you encounter them IRL you'll start to develop a feel for it.

I wonder if the average English speaker would be able to explain why they say
"if I were you" and not "if I am you". Yet few get it wrong.

More generally I find that the main difficulty in learning languages is, by
far, vocabulary. You can often get by with a surprisingly low amount of
grammar if you understand what the words mean.

~~~
jraph
> If somebody asks me "tu parlons anglais ?" it's definitely going to sound
> very wrong to me but I'll probably be able to figure out what you're
> attempting to communicate.

If web browsers had feelings, they would possibly often experience this with
the HTML soup being thrown at their parsers. "Hey, I think I know what you're
attempting to communicate!"

------
FabHK
Wonderful article, exposing some of the oddities of this non-Indo-European
language in the middle of Europe, without becoming too technical.

If you're interested in an entertaining overview of all of the world's
languages, I can recommend the course _Language Families of the World_ by The
Great Courses - 34 byte-sized (half hour) lectures.

[https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-
of...](https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of-the-
world.html)

~~~
himlion
Certainly looks interesting, but in an era where I've been conditioned to
expect free content $335 is a bit steep to indulge in a casual interest.

~~~
iicc
Maybe it's a price anchoring tactic to make the subscription plan ("The Great
Courses Plus" \- which includes this) look like good value.

~~~
FabHK
Yeah, plus they have period revolving discounts, where you get it for 80% or
more off.

I must say I started listening to The Great Courses way before Udacity,
Coursera, EdX, and so on, and back then it was really a good and competitive
source (and, at discounted prices, reasonably priced) to get a variety of
professionally produced audio courses. Nowadays of course there are more
alternatives.

------
apecat
As a Swedish speaker, I get this deeply rooted feeling of righteous
indignation about not understanding spoken Danish. I'm only half-joking.

As a Finnish speaker, I don't get that feeling with Estonian. The written form
is different enough to warrant a deeper look before I start whining about how
annoying I find language studies in general.

~~~
Sharlin
As a Finnish speaker, to me Estonian sometimes sounds like I'm having a
stroke. Like I'm supposed to understand what is spoken but the words just
don't resolve into their meanings.

~~~
sunaurus
As an Estonian speaker, I feel the exact same way about Finnish. I guess it's
universal :)

~~~
exDM69
No it isn't :) As a Finnish speaker with some exposure to Estonian language, I
can understand written and spoken Estonian better than any other language I've
had such little exposure to. I'm not very good in speaking Estonian and I
can't write it at all.

~~~
apecat
Out of curiosity, how did you go about picking up this fluency in Estonian?
Are there any good sources of particularly easy Estonian to get started? I'm
semi-interested.

Granted, I'm also super lazy, but Finnish and Estonian should be close enough
to just have some threshold to get over until it's pretty smooth, I guess?

Fwiw, I'm native in Swedish, but I speak and write Finnish daily.

To go on about my earlier comparison, I can really visit the site for a Danish
or Norwegian Bokmål newspaper like Politiken (
[https://politiken.dk](https://politiken.dk) ) or Verdens Gang (
[https://www.vg.no/](https://www.vg.no/) ) and start reading with a feeling of
just moderate confusion. Academic text would require some extra effort. The
"voice in my head" or mode of reading doesn't really even change, because I've
never attempted to communicate in either Danish or Norwegian per se.

For Estonian Postimees ([https://www.postimees.ee](https://www.postimees.ee) )
I'm stuck pretty much immediately. I can pick up words and some context, but
that's it.

At my first job, at an internal IT Service Desk for a certain Nordic energy
company, I dealt with Norwegians and Danes. But it was a business context
where everyone just seemed to agree to just make a polite effort at having a
maybe slightly "clear in a Swedish way" common Scandinavians language, because
switching to English would feel a little silly. I guess some of the older
dudes working in the field somewhere in Norway might not have spoken English.

~~~
exDM69
I'm not fluent at all. I had several long vacations there as a child, visit
every now and then and have some exposure to news and culture. And I'm pretty
good in getting a superficial understanding of a language, good enough to read
or listen to news and understand the gist of it. I can handle several
languages I have never formally studied.

~~~
apecat
Mm, I referred to 'fluency' as a sliding scale, which I think is a thing.

But anyway, there we probably have it, your vacations as a child. No lifehacks
can beat exposure to language at a young age, I guess. SAD.

Waiting for the day when some drug can trick the brain into some semblance of
a kid's language learning skills.

------
dmitriid
I always find it strange how language materials insist on presenting
agglutination as cases. I was lucky enough to not have it when I studied
Turkish, so for me the

\- -da is "in", not "locative case"

\- -(y)a is "towards", not "locative case"

etc.

I personally find that insisting that students learn proper case names greatly
hinders the learning process.

Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative, and I feel abject horror reading
about "essive", "comitative", "abessive" and other cases. Stahp! :)

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative

Finnish and Estonian are synthetic languages now. While the Proto-Uralic
language ancestral to them both was more agglutinative, the system of
consonant gradation (and subsequent loss of consonants) as it developed in
these languages means they are no longer very agglutinative.

In a purely agglutinative language you only have to memorize one stem for a
word and then you can add all case endings to that one stem. In Finnish, you
have to memorize at least two stems (strong and weak stems). In Estonian,
things are even more complicated.

~~~
Gravityloss
Current limitations of English centric software language parsing means it's
annoying to type machine generated or parseable text in Finnish.

For example pinging people in Facebook comments doesn't work with correct
Finnish.

English: "this would be useful to @Pekka"

Correct Finnish: "tämä olisi hyödyllistä @Pekalle".

Machine parseable but incorrect Finnish: "tämä olisi hyödyllistä @Pekka :lle"

It would probably be possible to make a library to understand the transformed
forms of words.

------
sunaurus
An interesting thing I've noticed is that a lot of the younger generations in
Estonia use English a lot when expressing themselves, especially when talking
to their peers. I constantly hear everything from single English words in
sentences, to fully English sentences used in-between Estonian ones.

I'm sure this is something that's happening everywhere (because of things like
Hollywood and most of the internet being in English), but with the population
in Estonia decreasing anyway, I wonder if this is an indication that the
Estonian language will be dying out relatively soon.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Young people across Europe use lots of English words or even whole sentences.
It tends to be a fad though, a way for young people to show off how trendy
they are. Once my own peer group in Romania all reached their thirties and
were no longer so interested in showing off, everyone generally dropped the
English admixture and went back to speaking fairly “pure” Romanian.

Granted, Estonian may be in a different situation due to demographic factors.

~~~
Mirioron
I don't know if it's really a fad. I use plenty of English words when speaking
Estonian to somebody that also speaks English well. Sometimes the language
switches every other sentence or even mid-sentence. Some concepts are just
easier to put forth in English.

I suppose part of this is that a lot of tech vocabulary in Estonian either
doesn't exist or is quite awkward.

------
9nGQluzmnq3M
The "total object” and “partial object” distinction exists in Finnish as well.
One famous example is the verb _naida_ , "to marry": _nain hänet_
(total/nominative) means "I married them", but _nain häntä_
(partial/partitive) means I married only a part of them, or in more colloquial
terms, "I fucked them".

------
simoes
Great article showing some of the complexities in Estonian, really appreciated
this breakdown.

I recently worked on a data visualization platform for the trade statistics
office in Estonia ([https://data.stat.ee](https://data.stat.ee)) and many of
the nuances from this article came up while we were working on the bilingual
version of the site.

For example adding prepositions in front of country names, required us to
write a custom function taking into account the normal "rules" and exceptions.

Here is the case for _Estonia_ \+ _preposition_

From Estonia: Eestist

To Estonia: Eestisse

With Estonia: Eestiga

Between … and Estonia: Eesti ja … vaheline

And now here is the case for the _UK_ \+ _preposition_. (notice the extra _g_
added in the _from_ , _with_ and _between_ cases)

From United Kingdom: Ühendkuningriigist

To United Kingdom: Ühendkuningriiki

With United Kingdom: Ühendkuningriigiga

Between … and United Kingdom: Ühendkuningriigi ja … vaheline

------
tiborsaas
My favourite Estonian pun is a pink bench. Pink means bench in English :)

------
mdmoll
A wonderful introduction to the Estonian language and some of its quirks. I
have minor quibbles, although my relationship to the language is as a non-
native historian of the country, not a Finno-Ugric linguist or local. I always
felt (rather unscientifically, of course) as though Estonian traded some of
the agglutinative regularity that characterize Finnish and Hungarian for
greater vocabulary familiarity for Germanic speakers. Despite what the author
writes in her first endnote on foreign loan words, I've found a knowledge of
German to be quite helpful when trying to guess the meaning of a word (or to
extemporaneously construct one) using a calque from German.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> I've found a knowledge of German to be quite helpful when trying to guess
> the meaning of a word (or to extemporaneously construct one) using a calque
> from German.

The same can be said of Hungarian. In spite of Hungarian being a Uralic
language and utterly opaque to the neighbouring countries, so many of the
verbal derivations (especially since the 19th-century language reform) are
calques from German. I found it easier to memorize certain Hungarian verbal
idioms by storing them mentally alongside their German models.

------
Yetanfou
On the subject of weird language constructs there's also the following correct
Swedish sentence:

 _Bar barbarbarbarbar bar bar barbarbarbarbar_

This translates to _' naked naked-barbarian-bar-barbarian carried a naked
naked-barbarian-bar-barbarian'_, a worthy competitor to the well-known
_Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo_

------
Yuval_Halevi
I never thought about the langugue they speak in Estonia

TIL there is a langugue called Estonian :)

~~~
distances
There aren't many countries in Europe without their own language. Switzerland,
Austria, Cyprus, Belgium, and the microstates -- can't think of anything else?

~~~
wavefunction
Switzerland has Romansh as one of its four national languages, though I'm not
sure if that's the context you were intending.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language)

~~~
distances
Interesting, I somehow had missed the existence of this even though I've lived
a couple of months in Switzerland. Thanks for the link!

~~~
wavefunction
My pleasure!

