I 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.
The 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.
Just to continue the explainer, vowel harmony means that “in the house” is “talossa” but “in the forest” is “metsässä”. Notice that it’s “-ssä” and not “-ssa”. This depends on which vowels are in the root. There’s two groups of vowels and Finnish words helpfully never mix the two in a single (non compound) word.
In other words, “vowel harmony” sounds fancy, but it’s a single
If you are a non native English speaker you will notice shifts in how things are pronounced when put together, some of whiicht are just not written down, like pronouncing "a" as "ei" or "a" or "an" (this one written down )
English or Finnish? English pronunciation is insane, you have to memorize spelling and pronunciation independently because how a word is written is just a vague approximation at best, or an intentional attempt to mislead at worst, of how the word actually sounds.
It's not only not a 1:1 mapping, and not only can wildly different spellings sound the same, but wildly different pronunciations can be written the same. It's crazy.
AOU vowels are made with your tonque low. ÄÖY vowels are made with your tonque high. Mixing vowels from both groups makes tonque movements very awkward and slows down speech.
> AOU vowels are made with your tonque low. ÄÖY vowels are made with your tonque high.
Quite the opposite; /u/ is a high vowel, /o/ is mid-high, and /a/ is low. AOU vowels, assuming the Finnish orthography is anything like the rest of Europe, are made with your tongue pulled back, while ÄÖY are made with your tongue thrust forward.
> The 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.
That is not evidence that they are case affixes rather than separate words. The English articles adjust their pronunciation based on the word that follows them, but they are considered separate words rather than inflectional definiteness markers.
There is a special term for lexical items which are independent words in a syntactic sense without simultaneously being independent words in a phonological sense; they are called clitics, not affixes.
The Finnish case markers are not clitics. Clitics are distinguished in that they modify phrases, not words. For example the English possessive “‘s” is a clitic because it can modify a whole phrase in something like “[the Queen of England]’s hat” although it cannot appear as a word on its own. In contrast, the Finnish case markers are bound phonologically and syntactically to a single word and so they are affixes, not clitics.
> a clitic [] is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase.
The English 'genitive' particle 's is a clitic[1] because it takes its pronunciation from the syllable it follows. Not because it has grammatical functions at a phrase level. Clitic 'm can only ever follow the pronoun I, but that does nothing to stop it from being clitic.
[1] Actually, CGEL prefers to call 's a "phrasal case marker", but I find that absurd.
Fusional means that, in the morphological system of a language, a single wordform encodes multiple parts of the meaning in a way that is opaque and can't be predicted from the parts.
That's very abstract but an example makes it clear. Consider some Latin words with their English translations:
mensa -- table (singular, nominative)
mensae -- tables (plural, nominative)
mensae -- to the table (singular, dative)
mensis -- to the tables (plural, dative)
There are two parts of meaning (whether it's singular vs. plural, and whether it's nominative vs. dative) which are expressed in these forms, but the way this is done is opaque. You can't look at "mensis" and break it into a part that corresponds to plurality, and a part that corresponds to dative: the suffix -is conveys both of those features simultaneously. That's a fusional language.
Compare with the Hungarian equivalents: (Finnish is similar, but I know Hungarian and not Finnish)
asztal -- table (singular, nominative)
asztalok -- tables (plural, nominative)
asztalnak -- to the table (singular, dative)
asztaloknak -- to the tables (plural, dative)
Here you can identify that the suffux -ok corresponds to plural and the suffix -nak corresponds to dative. So the Hungarian paradigm here is agglutinative, not fusional. The upshot is that the Hungarian paradigm will be easier to learn and to extend to a very large number of cases compared to the Latin paradigm.
>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.
Curious that Icelandic should be category 4--I don't know it all, but what I have seen of it looks to me a good deal like Old English or Anglo-Saxon, call it what you will.
I totally agree that the cases themselves aren't so bad conceptually (as you say, most of them are basically just prepositions turned into post-positions/endings); I don't think it's any worse than German or Russian. But I have to say that the mechanics of calculating consonant gradations etc. is decently painful—I think you might be overselling the lack of difficulty haha.
I enjoy studying languages and have learned enough Finnish to get midway through the Harry Potter series, and even just getting to the point where I could smoothly look up words, let alone remember them, took a fair amount of practice. (The form you see on the page often needs to be un-consonant-gradated before you can find it in the dictionary, and the rules are somewhat complicated, though very regular.)
One funny aspect of Finnish pronunciation is that the ubiquitous long sounds give it a bit of a herky-jerky rhythm. It's always sounded to me as if the speaker is trying to figure out the grammar too :)
I don't know German, but in Russian, the case endings also change depending on the grammatical gender of the word, whether it's singular or plural, and then on top of that there are three different categories with different declensions. It's not entirely orthogonal, since e.g. categorization is itself guided by gender, but still, that's a lot of different variations that have to be memorized for each case.
Well, "talolla" can actually mean "at the house" or "the house has", depending on context. "On the house" would usually add "on top" or "talon päällä", or possibly "on the roof of" or "talon katolla". In theory you're right, but in practice the clarification is added. If it was table (pöytä) it would be correct and common
Ah yeah thanks. My Finnish is super rusty but I still like to geek out on its grammar every once in a while.
That said, but this sort of contextual stuff happens with languages with prepositions too (eg “on the table” vs “on the job”). It’s not special about Finnish.
There's more. It can also mean "with the house" or "using the house" (as an implement to a verb). Such as "heitän sinua talolla", "I throw a house at you" (e.g. Monopoly house piece).
> Well, "talolla" can actually mean "at the house" or "the house has", depending on context.
Finnish is pretty weird and unique (at least among the languages I know) in that it doesn't have a separate word for "to have". I suppose the closest it gets is "omistaa", for "to own".
Well, that seeming ambiguity basically just means that English and Finnish prepositions don't match up 1-for-1.
(We have the same between English and German. Most of the time, you can translate the prepositions with a simple lookup table, but they aren't completely 1-for-1.)
In "talossani", there's clearly two suffixes after "talo":
-ssa is the suffix that marks the case
-ni is the first person possessive suffix (not a case)
The first person singular pronoun would be "minä" and its genitive case "minun" - not a suffix but including the suffix -n that marks the genitive case.
My house => Minun taloni (the possessive is visible in both words in formal Finnish: the genitive case in the pronoun, the possessive suffix in the noun)
My house => Mun talo (less formal Finnish shortens the pronoun and does not use the possessive suffix)
I've never encountered this definition of "case" before. In standard descriptive linguistic terminology, these Finnish suffixes are certainly case markers.
Inflection is when the grammatical role of a word is expressed through word formation, eg suffix, prefix, ablaut. Suffixation is a very common way to express inflection in languages.
> 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.
Unless linguistics has advanced since I learnt this (which is quite possible), the theory is that case (and conjugation? I can't remember) came from disambiguating particles that later fused into the base noun (/verb). And of course languages can subsequently go the other way (like English or French which have been shedding conjugation for a few hundred years and case for even longer, and gender too (French still has two but abandoned neuter a while ago).
I feel like calling them cases (while technically correct) make them more complex than they are.
I had the same experience with Turkish, which also has the same "issue" with cases. As long as you try to learn them cases, you'll give up. If you learn them as "this ending means at, this ending means in", you'll learn them in half a day.
Turkish case system is more complex than that actually: it has 7 morpho-syntactic (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative-directive, locative, ablative, instrumental) cases along with 11 derivational cases (commitative, associative, semblative-equative, privative, possesive, familial, diminutive, modal, temporal, benefactive, modal-final).
So... Then you've learnt cases in half a day. How could that become any harder by calling it "cases", or easier by not doing so? You're still doing and learning the same thing. Would it become easier or harder to learn by calling it "strawberry jam"? Or "greedlebeflurp"?
Informally cases can be thought of as groupings of adpositions that produce the same word form. So instead of remembering a bunch of 1:1 mappings from all the adpositions to endings, you first do a 1:N mapping to cases, and then 1:1 from cases to endings.
Whoa, that's like the exact opposite of Filipino languages (and, Austronesian in general, to my understanding). In Visayan, 'Sa' is a general preposition, it is a kindness to add whether that is over/under/around/inside/far from/near from the object it references.
Verb conjugations are where things get super interesting.
> 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.
That's not how the terminology works. Nobody is out there claiming that Latin should be considered to have conjunctive and disjunctive cases (-que, -ve) in addition to its actual cases. They're especially not claiming that we should recognize an "interrogative case" (-ne) that isn't even restricted to nouns.
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.
> speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don't even know it
Only for a very loose definition of "speaking"
A Chinese without knowledge of Japanese reading it or vice versa would be like a English speaker reading French or vice versa. You'd recognize some vocabulary, but the grammar and pronounciation is significantly different and most of the overall sentence is still foreign.
Even English loanwords are significantly altered by shortening and mapping to Japanese tones. Most English speakers wouldn't recognize "terebi" (television) or "konbini" (convenience store) for example.
Not to mention some words like パターン (pataan/pattern) have either very specific meanings that an English speaker would not understand naturally or other words like テンション (tenshon/tension) have completely different meanings that an English speaker would not recognise as English.
> 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.
English is a mess because it is a mixture of languages from different ethnic groups: Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, and Norman. It's been used for cross-cultural communication ever since it was identifiable as English.
Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme -- resulting in suggestions like that we all start speaking Toki Pona -- but the reality is that human communication is messy and the most practical languages tend to be messy ones. Some linguists have observed that trade pidgins develop English-like morphologies, even when English is not one of the contributing languages.
(And even Scheme got messy; see R6RS and R7RS...)
As for Japanese, I love it, it's beautiful, but as even any weeaboo knows, Japanese language is very bound up with Japanese culture. You can't simply ignore or elide the politeness bits; where you stand in society very strongly influences what you say. The fact that English is largely free of this baggage helps make it an effective language that people around the world pick up and use for trade, especially when different ethnic groups are involved.
Domination of English has more to do with British empire bringing it to large swaths of the world (India, Africa), and the US being the principal winner of WWII and expanding its industrial, scientific, and cultural might around the world.
English language is like Chinese: while simple structurally (no cases, constructive verb forms, etc) has a terribly complicated writing and pronunciation system, where there sort of are rules, but you never know when you hit an exception. Despite that, people take it up, because the important communication happens in English. (People who study areas like ML, or who work a lot with industrial production, likely pick up some Chinese, out of the same necessity.)
I don't doubt that the Empire and America had a lot to do with English dominance. However I do feel there is something inherently fun about English that is lacking in other languages I've encountered. Maybe it's just because it's my native language but I can't help but feel this sense of playfulness is picked up on by non native speakers as well. The article below is really interesting; it's by non English stand up comedians who have started performing in English. The general feel is that they prefer writing/performing in English and can have more fun with it than their native languages.
I'd say each language has pockets of playfulness that aren't found in others. Sometimes you find pockets that coincide to a surprising extent. It's like stacking layers of Swiss cheese.
For instance, Gad mentions in the article the expression "Got it" that doesn't have great equivalents in French. But French also has sentences that don't have great equivalents in English, or if they do have one it's not nearly as playful.
The one thing English has that most languages don't is a massive body of work and a dominant grip on international culture, and I think that's what the comics in the article are interpreting as higher overall playfulness.
> Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme
I see we have met. My ideal computer language would be Scheme in Ido. :) I guess to do real work one needs a ~980 page spec like Common Lisp which consumes half of their available neurons--in English, which consumes the other half. The R7RS spec is ~98 pages, for reference. A few extensions do not remove that much cognitive availablity (see Jaffer's Slib and the SRFI suite). As a matter of fact, speaking of minimalism, I was using MIT Scheme Version 7.4 Edwin today, an Emacs compatible editor written at R4RS (with a few extensions).
Seriously though, I really wish like the universal translator in Star Trek that I could understand all human language with deep context--but my puny U.S.-public-school-trained brain limits me to a few.
> Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme -- resulting in suggestions like that we all start speaking Toki Pona -- but the reality is that human communication is messy and the most practical languages tend to be messy ones.
A world were everyone could speak scheme is a beautiful idea. Like if we were cyborgs. I'd hope there is still value in learning the thought patterns of Scheme 1.0.
I once fancied a girl who was doing postgrad work in linguistics, and one time she made a remark like "I love lambda calculus!" And I was like, really? That's a programming/CS thing, how does it apply in your field? Turns out LC is used as a representation to normalize semantics in linguistics.
It would be interesting to see a Scheme-like underpinning to the semantics of any language -- maybe not to be used for communication in its own right, but to achieve things like more intelligent translation, or NLP machine-learning applications that extract meaning from a text. I don't see much interest in something like this emerging, however, with the current trend in AI being "throw more statistics at the problem".
I think Koran is quite interesting. The symbols were designed from scratch iirc. and they are extremly logical. I'd argue that most people will be able to read and correctly pronounce Korean in a couple of days (even if they don't understand a single word the are saying) which is quite astonishing. I was pleasently surprised at the logical structure. When I first saw the symbols my western brain said "oh my, this is complex and hard". I was shocked how wrong I was.
In the 15th century, the Korean king at the time decided to revamp the entire alphabet. It's consistent and phonetic. There are 24 basic "letters" and 27 complex "letters" that are a combination of the basic letters.
I've been tempted to learn Korean since I discovered this factoid, but haven't found a program or the time that I can stick to.
Anecdotally, I'm learning Dutch right now to prepare to move overseas next month, and the basics haven't been that difficult. I feel pretty confident that I can order food and exchange daily phrases after only a few dozen hours of practice. Lucky for me, the Dutch also speak excellent English, but I'm trying to learn anyway!
The interesting part about Hangeul isn't so much so that it's phonetic - that property is not that uncommon; e.g. modern Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian orthographies are about 99% phonetic. It's that it's featural, meaning that the shapes of the letters are mnemonic and represent their sound values and/or relations between them (e.g. vowel harmony).
Featural scripts are pretty rare - it seems that they never evolve naturally, so it's something that has to be constructed, and then also to become popular for long enough to stick around. The only example I know of other than Hangeul is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics, and they are noticeably less featural.
One thing to keep in mind though is that Hangeul was very systematic and consistent back when it was designed. But languages evolve, and they evolve much faster in the absence of widespread literacy and mass media. And Hangeul is almost 600 years old now. So e.g. ㅐ was originally the diphthong "ai", consisting of ㅏ for "a" and ㅣ for "i", but it's now pronounced "e" - not dissimilar to English, actually, but with much more rapid and drastic changes. At this point, it's actually less phonemic than Serbo-Croatian.
I agree! Hangul is the most interesting writing system I’ve studied so far (I’m also fluent in Japanese and can read/write kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana) and it only took me 2 hours to learn. Being fluent in Japanese already made learning Korean a lot easier too, since the phonetics and grammar structures are so similar.
I think Korean is being learned at far greater pace, zoomers think Korea is cool and want to live that ideal kpop world. No need to learn kanji which means its a lot more approacheable.
I would say hebrew is also another interesting alphabet system
Not anymore. Certainly never to the extent Japanese relies on it on a daily use case basis. Go ahead and downvote me for this
Up until 90s, early 2000s it was common to read Hanja in newspapers. Starting around 10 years ago they all disappeared. English words have largely replaced complicated Chinese characters and young Koreans no longer learn it.
Instead English loan words are now used so much that most Koreans can't go a few paragraph without using it. Downside it leads to confusion as to what the original Korean words meant. But for sure it is not comparable to Japanese which absolutely requires you to memorize a few thousand Chinese characters, their strokes, pronounciation and meaning.
> 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.
English grammar is actually very regular. It has lost most of the complexity of its Germanic substrate due to the repeated historic pidginization. For a learner, the lack of grammatical gender is godsent and a turbo hack to producing grammatically correct sentences.
You're right that English grammar is fairly simple in terms of things like morphology and grammatical gender.
Where I think English would be surprising, if discovered as a new language, is the phonology: we have lots of extremely unusual and hard-to-pronounce consonant and vowel sounds. You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.
> You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.
While true that is "solved" by having very distinct accents. Somebody from Oxford, Melbourne, Delhi and Houston ( all pronounce the /r/ and other sounds quite different, but will still understand each other (given a little will on both sides)
Tolerance of different pronunciations is helpful for people learning to speak English, but not so much for following what they're saying. Plus of course we have a significant number of words where an attempted phonetic pronunciation might not be a bit unusual so much as completely unintelligible.
At least we're not that fussy about stress and apart from implied questions don't really convey much important meaning with tone.
I don't know about you, but I have a very hard time understanding a lot of Indian accents specifically because of the unfamiliar stress patterns. (That, and their avoidance of aspirated consonants, which drives me crazy.)
tbh I find the unfamiliar stress patterns of reasonably fluent Indian English speakers a lot less problematic than some of the quirks my fellow Brits' stronger regional accents! The tendency to enunciate syllables we often mash together actually tends to be clearer
Yeah I do decent with Indian accents as well. And I have more trouble with Chinese accents and many British accents. But I mostly can’t stand the southern English and their inability to pronounce the letter R. It sounds like someone with a speech impediment. As an American I greatly prefer speaking to a Scot or Irishman.
And the closer you get to London the more the English have a French culture. By that I mean an inferiority/superiority complex. They’re always better than everyone else.
English verb and noun morphology are simple. English phonology and syntax are extremely complex. This is why people say “English has simple grammar”: they’re thinking only about morphology, which is the hard part of Latin, Greek, Russian, etc.
As a native Russian speaker, I would say that getting the morphology wrong won't prevent you from being understood. You will sound pretty weird, but people will still understand you.
Similarly, English syntax errors - which are extremely common among non-native speakers - usually don’t prevent you from being understood, either.
E.g. “I wondered what did he do” will be understood perfectly by virtually 100% of English speakers, but will immediately mark you as a non-native speaker (the correct form is “I wondered what he did”).
And, given the sheer number of accents, getting the pronunciation wrong is not that big of a deal either, especially if you do it consistently. Native speakers adapt very quickly.
The real problem is understanding English spoken by those native speakers in all their accents...
Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.)
Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.
Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."
> Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.)
"Ships are 'she', except in the American navy, where littoral surface combatants are 'he'", or "...except in the British navy, where submarines are 'he'", something like that, isn't it? Guess I'll only talk about "the vessel", which should pretty reliably be "it".
> Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.
Fortunately not so bad for speakers of German and the Nordic languages, which work rather similarly. (Germans usually give themselves away by using the compound in stead of simple past tense.)
> Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."
The canonical example seems to be the Slavic languages, above all Russian.
To me, any use of “she” to refer to ships (or countries, or whatever other inanimate things people sometimes call “she”) sounds dated, weird, and somewhat poetic/figurative. I suspect this usage is almost totally dying out among the younger generations.
It's really annoying that we're modifier-modified when it comes to adjectives but modified-modifier when it comes to relative clauses. We say "the red car", but "the car, which is red,".
Also we sometimes use modified-modifier for adjectives for poetic effect, in constructs such as "painter extraordinaire", "minister plenipotentiary", or "court martial".
And then we have questions, where English goes from normally being SVO to being OSV. We say "That is John." but ask "Who is that?", and if we say "That is who?", it's usually an expression of abject shock. Or sometimes we dip into our Germanic heritage and bring out V2 word order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Mode...).
Japanese 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.
Kanji is indeed complex but you can memorize Katakana and Hiragana in a couple of hours and they will help you tremendously in things like navigating the public transport signage. They have a few more characters than 26, but each letter has exactly one pronunciation. None of that context-dependent pronunciation stuff like English is full of.
Tackle Kanji after mastering Katakana and Hiragana.
Most of the complexity is merely that it requires a lot of memorization, though. One has to literally remember a couple thousand of characters, memorizing their meanings and a few possible readings. Obviously one remember them not as a random opaque pictogram but by mentally splitting it in smaller graphemes. And there are, IIRC, like, about 30 or so most common ones that are enough for most characters one would normally encounter.
Either way, it's surely much more complex than systems that only have alphabets or syllabaries, but in a personal (and biased, because I know one and failed to grok the other) opinion some segmental scripts like Arabic are much harder to process.
You're forgetting the difficulty of learning the elaborate system of honorifics, without which you'll be unable to talk to a native speaker without insulting them. The title of this book gives some idea: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/4770016247/ref=nosim...
While that is technically true standard 敬語/honorifics (です/ます and a few word choices) aren't really that complicated.
There are additional levels of honorifics which can be far more complicated but (outside of workplace honorifics -- which you will need to practice if you will work at a Japanese company) native speakers usually get some kind of training in how to speak in that exceptionally formal way (the kind of keigo used in restaurants is sometimes criticised for being "incorrect" Japanese and is called バイト敬語 -- usually service workers literally get handed a manual which explains how to interact with customers using this form of 敬語). If you or I had an audience with the queen we would probably also get some kind of training in how to politely speak to her.
Finally, if it's obvious you're studying Japanese and you drop a です or ます the person is quite unlikely to be insulted. Especially if it's not someone who is your superior at work.
Just to relate back to the original point of adopting a universal language, I would guess that if any language were adopted as a world-wide language, then things like honorifics and formal-informal distinctions and gendered articles/nouns would be dropped pretty quickly.
You're mistaking simplicity and lack of capabilities.
If a grammar is too limited that it leaves things unsaid and thus ambiguous (well, I can't say that's not a thing in Japanese - it is, sometimes) then yes, it can make things harder because one gotta very carefully watch out for the context to be able to comprehend what's going on.
But if grammar is just simple - e.g. if there are no or almost no irregular verbs (Japanese has only two), or no concept of grammatical gender (so you simply don't have to care about anything related to your nouns and can indicate gender using an extra word if that starts to matter), it's probably just fine. I mean you're not losing anything in that case.
Considering your example (even though I don't think it's a good idea to compare machine and human languages in general) - many assembly languages do NOT exactly map to the actual machine code. Say, many assembly languages remove the concept of argument size which can be compared to a grammatical gender (your operands are your nouns and instruction is a verb). Let's say we're talking classic x86. In Intel syntax you can write "MOV AX, 0" and "MOV EAX, 0" but bytecode would be different - 66B80000 vs B800000000, the assembly had lost the 0x66 operand-size override prefix. There is AT&T syntax that has distinct "MOVW" and "MOVL", but the point is that it's a potentially unnecessary complication that proves to be not needed as everything is pretty much obvious without it.
I understand that simple is better than easy in many cases, that's the whole idea of lisp like languages, but I am not sure it is true for languages, especially for comprehension. Because things sound the same and there is no distinction it makes it hard for listening or even reading comprehension. Many time it is much easier to quickly decipher what a javascript function is doing than lisp because the lisp simplicity doesn't give you those immediate anchors to look at, it all looks the same.
Kanji are fun to learn, because they are constructive to some degree, and actually pictorial to some degree.
If you can imagine a language where 2k+ emoji are used as parts of words, with all the combination rules which emoji have, that would give you some idea.
But it does tax your memory (nothing compared to Chinese, though!), and takes time when writing by hand. Typing is significantly easier because a reasonable IME gives you variants to choose from when you type the pronunciation.
A good chunk of the roughly ~2100 Kanji have two versions of expression. Some of them have upto 8-10 ways of usage (although very few). As a Japanese resident,
(1) It isn't fun. Not everyone of us knows the whole set and have to keep a digital dictionary in smartphone
(2) We don't assume the names of people based on their Kanji, because (surpise!) people do get offended by minor changes in pronunciation e.g Yamasaki vs. Yamazaki, with similar Kanjis.
That's why I always prefer to inscribe my Japanese notes with Kana in a superscript wherever needed. It is very tight in grammar but the language is not easy by any means. In fact, same goes for Chinese & Koreans.
Some make direct sense like the tree/forest, others you have to deep dive into their history for them to make sense (if at all).
For example, the character for people (民) comes from the image of a person being pierced through the eye, which was done to mark slaves in ancient China. Eventually the character and meaning evolved to the way it's used now.
So you can't say "rest" without mentioning a tree? Finnish is funny in similar ways due to its ubiquitous forests. To "hunt" is "metsästää", "metsä" being "forest" the place you went to look for food.
You can say you metsästää for mushrooms (and other edibles) in the forest too, though, can't you? So maybe it's actually more of a direct correspondence to "forage". And, is that perhaps derived from / related to "forest"? (Or fodder?)
Not really, metsästää implies hunting for living things.
There's a dedicated verb for mushroom foraging, sienestää, or you can say sienimetsässä, "in the mushroom forest".
It's not that bad, most sequences of kanji have just a single (common) way to pronounce them.
Although some sequences are completely new, so you need to figure out which word ends where.
And the most commonly used kanji also have the highest number of different pronunciations, sometimes in several ways that are impossible to tell apart grammatically (or even semantically, obviously this is almost never annotated, because adding the pronunciation is for words the author thinks you don't know, even when the pronunciation is entirely unambiguous*)
*: No I'm not bitter I had way too much trouble figuring out how to annotate Japanese text with the pronunciation to make it vaguely readable, why do you ask?
Most Kanji have at least two ways to pronounce them, the On reading and the Kun reading. For example, 水 (meaning water) can be pronounced as both “Mizu” and “Sui.”
Some have a lot more. 下 has two On readings (Ka and Ge) and several Kun readings (Shita, Shimo, Moto, Sa, Kuda, and O).
While combinations typically do have one reading, some can have multiple readings, especially people’s names. Still, it is hard for learners to know which reading for individual Kanji’s are the right ones a lot of times.
EDIT: Fixed a couple of typos and a premature submit.
While those readings might be technically possible, usually only a few of them form a known word. For instance 水 in isolation is (almost?) never pronounced 'sui'. To say it has 2 different pronunciations is a bit like pointing out 'ou' has about 4~5 different pronunciations in English.
Thanks for your reply. Maybe I can help clear this up a bit.
> "While those readings might be technically possible, usually only a few of them form a known word."
Are you suggesting that these various readings are academic and not commonly used? If so, that is incorrect. All the readings are used in common words.
Here are examples of both the On and Kun readings for the kanji 水 being used:
水道: Pronounced "suido" and means "water supply" or "water service."
水着: Pronounced "mizugi" and means "swimsuit."
Here are examples of both the On readings for the kanji 下 being used:
下降: Pronounced "kakou" and means "descent."
下水: Pronounced "gesui" and means "sewer."
Here are examples of all the Kun readings for the kanji 下 being used:
下着: Pronounced "shitagi" and means "underwear."
下々: Pronounced "shimojimo" and means "commoners" or "common people".
法の下 (can also be written as 法の元): Pronounced "hounomoto" and means "under the law."
下さい: Pronounced "kudasai" and means "please."
下りる: Pronounced "oriru" and means "to get off."
Your comparison to the various pronunciations of "ou" in English seems off as well. For example, if you mispronounce "cough" using the "ou" pronunciation of "rough," you'll sound weird but will most likely be understood. However, if you misread "oriru" (下りる) as "kariru," using the On reading "KA" instead of the correct Kun reading, you'd be verbalizing a completely different word. Instead of telling others you're getting off of something, you'd be saying you're borrowing something.
I'd characterize your example of "ou" as a mispronunciation in English, whereas your example in Japanese would be a misreading.
Thanks for the detailed response. I think I do understand your point.
In my (limited) experience so far however I find myself remembering the words themselves, rather than work out their pronunciation from their constituent kanji. To me working from the pronunciations of the kanji themselves is like trying to pronounce 'cough' by fitting together pronunciations for 'c', 'ou', and 'gh' (all of which have several options interestingly enough).
Japanese uses Chinese characters heavily, but they're obviously pronounced nothing like they are in Mandarin, and their contextual meaning has drifted over the last thousand years. Japan and China have also made many different choices in technical loanwords-- Japanese tends to transcribe loanwords directly but English is often lightly mangled by Japanese phonology: you can puzzle over キーボード (kiiboodo) for a while but unless it's in context the English word "keyboard" won't jump out.
I had to work with some code from a Japanese manufacturer and translated some of the comments. I got stuck on デバドラ (debadora) for a while. It was clearly Japanized English but it took a while to realize it is "device driver".
Man, I had a similar experience working with code from a French manufacturer. The comments were mostly translatable, but the variable names were hell. It's bad enough trying to figure out in English whether acc is an abbreviation of acceleration, or accuracy, or some acronym, etc. Trying to expand a three letter abbreviations in a language you don't know it's nearly impossible.
Made me really lean towards never abbreviating in variable names unless it was extremely necessary for brevity, and also provide good comments.
They like four-character abbreviations a lot (obviously you have 四字熟語, but most onomatopoeia are four kana, and a lot of other emphatic words are four kana). I was watching a let's play YouTuber who started referring to Breath of the Wild as ブレワイ (burewai).
I guess we do the same in English - obviously there’s using an acronym (BotW) but often people will use a single word in a multi-word title - like “Smash” for one of the Smash Brothers games
From my experience, the Japanese love four-katakana abbrevations as much as English-speakers love our two-letter and three-letter acronyms.
For example, we abbreviate "personal computer" as PC. In Japanese, it's パーソナルコンピューター (pāsonaru konpyūtā), abbreviated as パソコン (pasokon; roughly "persocom"). Similarly, "remote control" is R/C. In Japanese, it's リモートコントロール (rimōto kontorōru), abbreviated as リモコン (rimokon; roughly "remocon"). You can even see this with proprietary trademarks, such as the Nintendo Family Computer ファミリーコンピュータ (Famirī Konpyūta) abbreviated as ファミコン (Famikon; roughly "Famicom")... which I guess is four and a half katakana, but it's still four morae. And in English-speaking markets, it was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System, which we've abbreviated as NES.
It is literally the hardest language to learn for English speakers. Regardless of what you hear about the elegance of its grammar, this is a real fact backed up with evidence from past learners. Know what you're getting yourself into.
Check out Cure Dolly on YouTube and weep at the poor quality of instruction that you’re probably receiving.
Also I don’t know how much actual conversational practice you get from day to day life - but at least for me, I talk with my wife and my (mostly Japanese) friends in Japanese for hours every day, and that makes a huge difference. Once a week would simply not be enough.
Korean is the correct answer for world language. Revive the hangul triangle and other characters to represent sounds not present in Korea and you're good! Highly efficient. Beautiful. Calligraphy is art.
I have heard that hangul and Mongolic script are related, which might explain how the king was able to create a fully featured beautiful script like that in one go.
"However the character 古 gǔ also functions as a phonetic component of 蒙古 Měnggǔ "Mongol". Indeed, records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is older (more 古 gǔ) than the 蒙古 Měng-gǔ". From palace records that 古篆字 gǔ zhuānzì was a veiled reference to the 蒙古篆字 měnggǔ zhuānzì "Mongol Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol ʼPhags-pa alphabet of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) that had been modified to look like the Chinese seal script, and which had been an official script of the empire."
Might be true, might be not. Still interesting to see. And the Mongols themselves mostly stopped using their script to write in Cyrillic and Hanzi (?) now so.
We have another example of such great men creating a new script by himself after exposure to another script. Cherokee by Sequayah.
Reminds me of Peter the Great's influence on Russian Cyrillic. Among other contributions, he happened to like the shape of the Latin letter R, so he just bunged a backwards one into the alphabet where it represents the sound 'ya'.
Hangul is far less capricious, though, a marvel of careful design.
> Reminds me of Peter the Great's influence on Russian Cyrillic. Among other contributions, he happened to like the shape of the Latin letter R, so he just bunged a backwards one into the alphabet where it represents the sound 'ya'
Do you have a source on that? As a Bulgarian (where Cyrillic comes from) i had never heard anything of the like, and a short Google, in Bulgarian or Russian, found nothing.
IDK about Я, but Peter I definitely reshaped, along the European typesetting guidelines, some letters like lowercase a (which traditionally looked more like the Greek alpha, α), and most drastically the t (т) which for the best part of 17th century looked like Latin m. (This shape still remains in Cyrillic cursive.)
He didn't invent those shapes, though; just picked the preferred ones. In particular, the m/т distinction is still present across different Slavic scripts even in non-cursive form, because they standardized on different variants:
sometimes when I visit twitter, browser or whatever starts to think that Russian twits are actually Bulgarian, and this changes shape of some Cyrillic letters, making text looking somewhat funny to russian eye. T is one of them, IIRC.
Я evolved from the letter Ѧ, the pronunciation of which happened to match that of Ꙗ (that is, a digraph IA, representing the iotated A sound) in Eastern Slavic languages very early on. Its handwritten cursive version looked like this:
From there the transformation into "Я" is obvious. And it happened gradually over time long before Peter; he just happened to look at various different shapes already in use during his time, picked the one that looked the simplest and the most appealing to him, and (sometimes) did further minor tweaks to simplify.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the shape of the letter "R".
Japanese is a language with no future tense and a very choppy system of plurals (many of which have to be inferred). I don't think it's a good candidate.
Not having a future tense is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/verb conjugation. It's simpler to denote something happening in the future with a phrase describing when it happens, which often needs to be included anyway. Fewer tenses means less to learn.
'I go tomorrow' vs. 'I will go tomorrow'
'I go later' vs. 'I will go later'
Note that I don't speak Japanese. I'm basing this off of my very limited understanding of how Mandarin denotes the future. It's very possible I misunderstood what you mean by "no future tense".
Unlike school grammar, most linguists consider English tense as just present and past, or "non-past" and "past", to be precise. There are several arguments for that:
* The auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall" don't behave like present/past tense markers ("-ed"), but behave more like "can", "may", "must", etc., which are grouped as verbs affecting modality. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb
* More importantly, you can actually take the past tense of "will"!
> He would frequently go out for dinner.
Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will".
* English does use present tense in many cases to denote an event in the future, e.g., "We depart at five a.m. tomorrow," or "When does it start today?" Contrast this with the past tense, where nobody says "We depart at five a.m. yesterday," or "When does it start last evening?"
That just shows that English doesn't have an inflectional future, it doesn't show that it has no future tense. A tense being marked by a modal verb is not uncommon at all, German marks the future by means of the verb "werden", and French and Spanish also have an additional future (next to the inflectional one) using the auxiliary "to go" (e.g. "voy a comer").
The fact that future tense is not obligatory is also not an indication that it doesn't exist (again, it's the same situation as in German).
Compare the sentence pair:
"Every day at 6, I eat dinner"
"Every day at 6, I will eat dinner"
They have clearly different meanings, the second referring to something that will only start to happen in the future (which is why it's a bit hard to imagine a context in which the utterance makes sense). The first one refers to a habitual action that extends at least to the present moment.
> Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will".
FWIW, when I learned English (as a foreign language) in school, this use of "would" would be referred to as future-in-the-past, and considered a distinct tense, along with present, past, and future.
When people say English doesn't have a future tense, they mean it doesn't have an inflectional future tense like other languages. It uses modal auxiliaries instead, as in your examples.
Compare "I walked" (inflection) with the simple future "I will walk" ("will" as a modal auxiliary).
There's an argument to be made that that isn't a true future tense, as it's not an inflected verb form. Thus English doesn't have a future tense in the same way it has a past tense (-ed for regular verbs) or a present tense (-s for third person singular verbs), .i. marked by inflection of a verb. Instead, it uses an auxiliary verb to express the future. Now, whether that counts as 'tense' or not is a matter for linguistic debate.
This is my syntax bias for sure, and you're not wrong it is a debate for some reason, but I find it very silly. An inflectional rule or an auxiliary word can assign a `TENSE fut` feature, just like an inflectional ending or an adposition can assign a case feature. They're just different mechanisms.
Yeah, but we're just trying to be consistent: when people say "Japanese has no future tense", they mean a morphological tense, and it's equally true that English has no morphological future tense either.
Both languages, of course, still have other mechanisms for doing this, either via specifying the point in time "She's buying that tomorrow", or via auxillary words (is going to buy, kaeru tsumori desu).
Eh, you're right if you treat it as just clipping "morphological". But it doesn't sound like it to most people, they think "English and Japanese are in the same category of lacking a future tense" in some non-extremely-limited way. When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese.
2. Type in "I will go to the store" and check "mrs" in the output list.
3. Click "Analyze"
4. In the MRS (right pane), under "go_v_1", hover over the "e3" of the "ARG0 e3" line.
5. You'll see "TENSE fut" in the feature box.
That's the result of a symbolic, machine grammar, not a machine-learning system. A rules-based system was able to determine that the verb is future tense (based on a syntactic rule that unifies in the future tense based on the presence of the auxiliary).
If aliens came by and zapped every English speaker's brain so that we all started using "I gowill to the store and buywill some fruits" instead of an auxiliary, that would be a simple adjustment to that grammar (delete the old syntax rule, add a will-lex rule to strip the suffix and apply the same feature to the verb).
If, then, another set of aliens came and zapped our brains again, deleting all memory of the concept of "will X" from our heads, that would be different. In the presence of the sentence "I go to the store tomorrow" or "I write code next year", there's no way for any symbolic grammar to handle all the possible ways you can contextually refer to the future. That's solely the domain of ML systems (and all their faults), at least as far as I know.
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By analogy, the way people talk about English future tense is like if people said "Python doesn't have closures with more than one statement", and when questioned "Well inline function definitions in Python have closure", they responded "Well of course I meant 'Python doesn't have expression closures with more than one statement'". Like sure, it's true and even a valid clipping to make in a certain context, but as it spreads as a meme people who don't know the context get the wrong idea.
> When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese.
I really don’t agree, as a speaker of both languages.
There’s a lot of western-exceptionalism invested in the notion that Japanese somehow has an exceptional paucity of ability to express future events that’s categorically different than English, when in reality the situations are quite quite close to one another.
It’s not that English doesn’t have a future tense in a casual/non-strictly-morphological sense of “tense” — it’s that by that casual definition really Japanese is in almost the same boat, and we should stop playing this “invent arbitrary ways to claim the inscrutable Japanese mind speaks without the ability to use a future tense but English is different because I Say So” game.
There's nothing inherently "western-exceptional" in recognising that Indo-European languages are structured fundamentally differently than Japanese. That's just a basic fact of linguistic typology.
Obviously, nobody is claiming that Japanese has no way of talking about the future, that's the kind of nonsense non-linguists like to read into purely grammatical differences. It's still a fact that English has a grammatical future (actually more than one), even if it's not inflectional and not strictly required in all situations, and Japanese does not.
For example, "tomorrow, it's cold" would generally sound weird in English, the most common way to express this would be "tomorrow, it's gonna be cold". There's nothing weird about 明日は寒い, by contrast.
I don't have a strong knowledge of Japanese (year in college as part of linguistics degree, wife speaks it), so it's possible I'm mistaken about the nature of it grammatically. But my point isn't to make some Sapir-Whorf / Hopi Time-esque argument about its pragmatics, just to argue a point about the grammatical structure (whether the future tense is grammaticalized or not). That point might not hit exactly with Japanese if there's more grammaticalization of the future tense in Japanese than I thought, but my point is regardless to compare a language like English that has a grammaticalized future tense via auxiliary verb to languages that don't grammaticalize future tense.
To be clear, I completely disagree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis & don't think there's anything "weird" about Japanese, the past / nonpast split as opposed to past / present / future is quite common cross-linguistically[1]. The idea of whether something is grammaticalized is separate than whether a language can express it -- AFAIK the current theory is that all languages express just about the same set of concepts, just certain languages evolve grammaticalizations of tenses, aspects, topic, politeness, etc. and others represent them "ad hoc" via constructs like "do tomorrow" etc. Hopefully that makes sense. I find the "Mysterious Japanese mind" trope orientalist and stupid.
> but my point is regardless to compare a language like English that has a grammaticalized future tense via auxiliary verb to languages that don't grammaticalize future tense.
These humongous walls of text sound rather like "and therefore I choose to define what English does as 'grammaticalize' and what Japanese does as 'not grammaticalize'".
> I find the "Mysterious Japanese mind" trope orientalist and stupid.
Then maybe have another think about why you're coming off as if that's exactly what you're doing.
Many descriptions of future events can use the present tense. For example: "He's fixing that tomorrow." If English has a distinct future tense, that should sound just as wrong as "He fixed that tomorrow" does. But it doesn't. This suggests the future tense in English is marginal, and constructed optionally, out of verbs and verb modifiers that are fundamentally expressed in the present tense.
«going» is not «present», and «gone» is not «preterite».
They are present and past participles, respectively, that can be used to form present and past tenses in English, and they can be both used as adjectives which signifies the fact that they are the true participles.
Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages.
> Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages.
They are used in Romance languages as well. Half the tenses in French are auxiliary+participle combinations (Latin even has future participles).
Ah, yes, you are correct. I got temporarily transfixed on something else.
None of the Indo-European languages (to the best of my knowledge) have future participles due to none of them having a true morphological future tense. Therefore, there future participles are not possible.
Future tense, depending on the exact language, is expressed in Indo-European languages either with the use of an auxiliary or a modal verb or with the use of a perfective aspect of the present tense.
Esperanto is the only language that does have the future participles, but that is another bedtime story.
In a strict linguistic sense, these are not tenses, they are... aspects, I think.
In practice, you can lump tense, aspect, and mood together and call them all "tenses." Especially because many languages can end up partially conflating them, insisting on a formal dichotomy based on the specific information being conveyed in verb forms or based on how it is grammatically represented (inflection versus modal verbs versus what have you).
English has basically most (all?) the tenses that a language like French has but may lean on pairing the verb with additional words. (Though it's been way too long since I studied French to even remember the names for all these tenses much less the French forms.)
french has a lot more tenses, behold:
avoir, tu avais, tu as eu, tu as, tu auras, tu auras eu, tu aurais, tu aurais eu, tu eus, tu eus eu, que tu aies, que tu aies eu, que tu eusses, que tu eusses eu, aie, aie eu
There are very few things that you really cannot express in one language. Usually there are work around a using specific phrases or prepositions. Both French and English are more or less complete in that sense.
For example, in French j’irai (I will go) and je serai allé (I will have gone) are two different tenses. Sure, you can express both meanings in English, but French has a specific tense for “things that will have happened at some point in the future” (and many other besides). On the other hand, English has continuous tenses, which cannot be expressed with just a tense in French: /I am going/ (je suis en train de partir) vs /I go/ (je vais).
Both languages can express both concepts, but they have different shortcuts.
Some of them have mostly the same meaning as others but are only used in written form to express that you feel really intellectually superior to your audience. Such levels of snobbery do not translate to english.
Those are modal auxiliaries. If English had a true future morphological tense, there would be some inflection to the word "go" itself that would mean "go-but-in-the-future"
There's one reason (of many) that Japanese still uses kanji: it has a lot of homophones due to the lack of different sounds in the language (relative to Mandarin, which still has a lot of homophones). Even more, it has pitch intonation which differs the meaning of words. The simplicity of the sounds and grammar belies the difficulty of the language. There have been movements to try and romanize the Japanese language, and for the most part, none have caught on.
Korean has a much simpler writing system, but similarly suffers from a lot of homophones, and in addition with no characters/kanji to differentiate them. Neither of these are magically simpler languages: like any language, there's a lot of legwork that goes into learning them, particularly if you come from a language with little in common
(Edit: I'm not a linguist, I just happen to like both of these languages as a hobbyist; feel free to point out any inaccuracies)
I find it inelegant. Two alphabets and a borrowed character system from chinese which is entirely different.
An elegant language that is easy to learn should be based off of consistent primitives. Similar to math where an entire mathematical language can be derived from a few axioms. For a language you should have a single alphabet and consistent grammar rules.
Such a language is not only more elegant, but much more practical to learn as well. And Practicality is by far more important then elegance.
Except for all the exceptions. Also, the millions of different ways you need to manipulate your verbs based on what comes after/what you are talking about.
Oh, and that you cannot read/write contemporary Japanese without knowing at least 3 writing systems (with a minimum of 54 characters each).
Japanese grammar was pretty easy for me to learn. There are only three verb groups in Japanese (i.e., Godan, Ichidan, and irregular verbs). The irregular verb group only has two verbs する and くる. The others are pretty consistent in following a few simple rules that map quite cleanly into a spreadsheet. There are 14 conjugation forms, which seems like a lot at first, but again, the rules are pretty consistent and easy to learn. At least I think so.
The hardest part of learning Japanese for me was Kanji (which I still forget all the time if I’m not using an IME or a dictionary).
Japanese, the language that has an entire sub-alphabet of broken Chinese letterforms dedicated to segregating native Japanese particles and inflections - lest they somehow taint the original kanbun.
Katakana are used for far more than loan words, loan words is just the first example you learn when you first start learning Japanese.
Among many other stylistic uses, katakana are often used for native onomatopoeia and are used to write native words all the time (usually in cases where the kanji is either not well-known or to give a different feeling to the sentence -- ズルい is a good example of this).
Also if you go back in time a hundred years, you'll find things using katakana where hiragana is used today (to the point of having full sentences in katakana)
There’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.
This 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.
> 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) […]
And then there is the double l, «ll», which is pronounced as «y» in nearly all varieties of Spanish. But, yes, the Spanish spelling is far more regular and straightforward compared to many other languages.
> Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular.
… at this given point in time and history. The relationship between the spelling and the pronunciation is a notoriously complicated affair due languages being living things that keep on evolving with the spelling and pronunciation inevitably diverging over extended periods of time. There is not guarantee that, for example, either Spannish or Finnish will be pronounced the same way in, say, 200-300 years time as they are spelled today.
Different languages with their respective writing systems have resorted to different ways of dealing with the problem. English and Icelandic, for instance, have retained most of the historical spelling representing the no longer accurate historical pronunciation (with some complications), whilst, for example, Tibetan (being one of the more extreme examples) and Burmese languages have retained the archaic spelling in its entirety – both are spelled today using the pronunciation that existed hundreds of years ago. Other languages have resorted to regular historical revisions of spelling rule to purge obsolete spellings or even purge the disappeared sounds, e.g. Russian.
On the opposite side of the spectrum we have Chinese characters that have remained [mostly] unchanged over a very extended period of time, however, the pronunciation has changed several times, i.e. 越 as /*ɢʷaːd/ in Old Chinese -> as /ɦuɑt̚/ in Middle Chinese -> as /yuè/, /yuht/, /yad6/, /oat/, /uêg8/, /hhyq/ in modern Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew and Wu, respectively).
However, the languages evolved much faster historically than they do today. On one hand, the states are now effectively enforcing standard forms of language on populations via universal primary education, and then mass culture and media further reinforce that, often aided by social conventions (where the enforced standard often becomes socially proper "educated speech" that people strive to emulate to present themselves better and/or to not be discriminated against). And at the same time, modern borders significantly reduce migration rates, making it harder for language innovations to spread.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, of course. But a phonemic spelling created today is still likely to have a much longer useful lifetime than one created 300 years ago, say.
I stand corrected! I have visited Catalonia quite a few times and never noticed they being homophones. In Argentina, or at least in Buenos Aires, they even teach you in primary school to pronounce the v using your upper teeth and lower lips (it makes it sound closer to f), and the b only with both lips. I'm very surprised to learn this, can't imagine pronouncing vacaciones as bacaciones hahah that's amazing, I wonder where this difference comes from.
Indeed. I remember seeing spelling bees in American TV shows and movies (which were subtitled) as a child, before I learned English, and wondered what the point was. It would be trivially easy in Finnish and anyone who knew how to read and write could easily get perfect points in such a competition.
There's an amusing way to quantify just how systemic the language orthography is: train an ML model to converts words to phonemes and back, and then see how many mistakes it makes. With similar sized training corpus in different languages, you get numbers that are directly comparable. Of course, it's a very rough estimate, but still interesting:
Finnish scored 98% accuracy on "writing" (model converting phonemes to written words) and 92% accuracy on "reading" (written words to phonemes) in this study. The only other languages with both scores above 90% in their comparison are Esperanto - which is explicitly designed for that, of course - Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. I'd say that's a very good result for a natural language.
For comparison, Spanish is 70% writing / 85% reading, French is 28% writing / 80% reading, and English is at dismal 36% writing / 30% reading.
That's a digraph, and they're only a problem if they can be pronounced differently. If "ng" is always the velar nasal [ŋ] and can never be the sequence [ng], then you can just treat it as a distinct symbol that happens to be composed of shapes used for other symbols.
German exceptions are nothing compared to French exceptions. French is basically all exceptions and no rules! And some math (in French when you want to say 99, you literally say four twentieths and 10 and 9).
People make a big deal about "quatre-vingt", but no French speaker thinks about that word as anything except "80". No one is doing multiplication in real time.
The context is people learning the language though... this sort of efficiency will always come with familiarity, like how you can read 21:00 as 9 without thinking about it
> like how you can read 21:00 as 9 without thinking about it
Well... in French you can totally say twenty-nine instead of just nine (although nine also works). I think that is pretty rare among languages but I'm not sure.
Come 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”).
In Spanish when a 5 or 6 yr old learns to read, they can read virtually any word correctly, no crazy phonetics, vowels are very distinct, the language has somewhat complex but strict rules. Compared to it, English looks like spaghetti thrown to the wall.
In Greek, all letter combinations always have the same pronunciation. My Greek teacher told me she learned English by reading alone. When she first met an American, she apologized for arriving early, but she pronounced "early" like "yearly" because in her native Greek, the "ea" combination would always produce the same sound.
“Read” - lol I did not miss that one, just did not elaborate. I really could go on and on :-) I personally struggled with “bear” vs “hear” (and “heard” vs “beard”), voicing of “th” (“this” vs “thin”, “than” va “thanks”), accent change in verb vs noun (“prOgress” vs “”progrEss”). But not with silent letters as in “psychology” or “bomb” because compared to Russian and French that is a piece of cake.
English also has phrasal verbs, which are basically a group of inconsistent, illogical idioms that you need to learn by heart in order to understand them.
For example:
"come around" (apparently change your mind?)
"come down on" (apparently this means "attack or punish harshly", not oral sex)
"come down with" (get sick with some disease, ok you go down because you lay in bed, although you dont lie "on" the bed)
"come up" (you come up with new ideas, for example that one can "calm down"; why up and down?)
There are tons of those phrasal verbs that are easy to natives, but those are so illogical who has to learn them. For example when Tony Soprano tells to "do someone in", maybe you can figure it out from the context, but without context it is just a mess.
Yeah English pronunciation is probably the only part I'd say is difficult or annoying to learn. As a fluent speaker for more than 20 years, I still have to look up how to pronounce different words multiple times a week.
Overall it feels like a simple language though, none of the annoying stuff such as
gendered nouns and declension.
> As a fluent speaker for more than 20 years, I still have to look up how to pronounce different words multiple times a week.
And even more tellingly, there's so many words in english where native speakers don't even agree how it's pronounced since there's no consistent pattern. Just depends how each person first heard it and got used to it.
In finnish pronounciation and spelling are 1:1, competely predictable with no exceptions. The english language game of a spelling bee would be extremely boring in finnish as there are no trick spellings. It's always written the way it is said.
Is that not just regional accents? Don't most countries with a reasonably sized population have differences in punctuation? Or are you referring to something different?
As an English person, there are parts of my own country where it will take me a bit of time to get my ear tuned to the local accent and dialect (just this evening my wife's mother, from south yorkshire, used a word I'd never heard). But I was under the impression this is pretty common, at least across Europe. I've heard French people complaining about how people from some other part of France speak, the same for Germany. Is Finnish unusual in having a more homogeneous pronunciation?
I'm not being defensive or anything, this is a genuine question. As someone who struggled to spell at school I'm well aware of what a mess English is.
> Is Finnish unusual in having a more homogeneous pronunciation?
AFAICS, I'd say yes, it is.
There are some dialects (way up north, and in the East) where stuff is pronounced differently, but that's so hilariously different that I think speakers of those dialects are themselves fully aware that the way they pronounce stuff, it oughta be spelled differently. And conversely, what with only the "official" spelling being taught in school, they automatically learn the "correct" nationwide pronunciation from that -- thanks to the "everything is spelled as it's pronounced, and vice versa" phenomenon.
I believe English has an easier to reach basic level, but it is perhaps the hardest language to master out of all of them.
Comparatively, learning German to a level where you can get by is a bit harder, but building on top of that to master the language is not an extraordinary amount of work.
Like, one would get much further with natural language processing based on a purely mechanistic approach targeting German, while English would have more exceptions than contenders where a rule applies.
English is the superior language because of its infinite number of states.
It will beat and humiliate the learner, leading them to feel accomplished when they have finally attained proficiency.
By the master, English can be beaten and humiliated into submission and used to accomplish amazing feats of literary insanity.
Think rules matter? In some languages grammar rules (and their exceptions) are strict. When you start to mess around, things fall apart. Meaning evaporates. People don't understand you.
In English? Verbing weirds language.
Logic and reason are the refuge of the unimaginative and dispassionate. The people who don't understand or appreciate the satirical nature of the above article.
Spoken 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.
> Spoken Mandarin would be a great basis for a logical world language.
Grammatically, yes (with a few caveats). Phonetically… perhaps not so much. Mandarin has a pretty poor phonetic inventory having lost a large number of sounds (including finals) throughout the history of its development. Words in Mandarin tend to be longer (as in having 3 syllables on the average) compared to other Chinese languages that have retained more sounds.
> The only ”weird” parts are tonality and those darned counting words.
There is nothing specifically weird about them. English has them too, they are called «collective nouns», i.e. «a flock of birds», «two shivers of sharks», «an ambush of DevOps engineers», «three pandemoniums of webdevs», «murders of Deloitte consultants», «a dazzle of Rust developers» or «a pitying of enterprise architects». Flock, shiver, ambush, pandemonium, murders, dazzle, pitying are your «darned» counting words.
Collective nouns, a common feature of Indo-European languages, are not an exact equivalent of counting words in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and other Southeast Asian languages, they are their nearest functional equivalent though.
It is not unfathomable (in fact, it is rather common) to conjure up the following conversation:
- How much milk (bread) do I have to buy?
- Two packets (two loaves), please.
In this context, packets and loaves fulfill the same role as the Korean counting words although they are multifunctional words, indeed.
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.
I’ve heard the lower stats, but I’m not sure I agree. I’m learning Mandarin and have gone through the entire HSK6 character list - and I’m still having to look up lots of characters when I read the newspaper, novels, etc. 10,000 might be a bit high, but I think a typical literate Chinese person knows a lot more characters than you’d expect.
I love chinese and its grammar/expressiveness is fantastic, but having lived in China and now Taiwan, I have a hunch that for even for native speakers Chinese is actually harder to "make out" than English.
For instance all Chinese movies/shows have subtitles that everyone reads along with (even in Beijing/Taipei). At first I thought this was for people that have poor Mandarin (minorities, old people that only speak a local dialect etc) but it seems even people that only speak standard mandarin also "need" subtitles to make out all the words. Without them a lot of words aren't distinct enough to make out over speakers/headphones. In every day speech as I understand it's common to not make out words as well and to kinda guess along what the other person said. It's possible to speak clearly, like a tv announcer, but as soon as you get a bit lazy or speak to fast it's easy to become unintelligible
I'd be curious to hear some native speaker's thoughts on this
I think you miss typed a zero for literary fluency. There are only 2500 most frequent used characters and 1000 second frequent characters (from 《现代汉语常用字表》, frequent standard Chinese characters list)
Moreover, they are not unique, but composed from common radicals, like prefix/suffix in English.
As a speaker of Mandarin and knowing phrases from inside mainland China and the phrases outside (ex: Taiwan), there’s already phrases and words of the same spoken language that’s mutually unintelligible: [credit card, ice cream] - completely different phrases used for the same ideas/objects.
And the only way to express these ideas is with phrases (combination of characters), as Chinese characters (spoken) on their own already are overloaded.
Right, but the spoken phrases and words are also divergent and overloaded already, making it not a good choice for a more uniform, simple to learn universal language.
One 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.
For 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.
"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.
Arabic, 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].
Yep, 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.
Although, 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.
Hebrew has the ridiculous feature of changing the sounds of those three letter roots in a such a way that they sound like _completely_ different words to someone who is not already fluent - e.g. kaf and khaf, bet and vet.
The lack of vowels also trips up non-native speakers/readers.
The lack of (written) vowels is less of an issue than most people think as the vowels tend to come in predictable patterns. Likewise the differences of pronunciation for ב, פ and כ are again predictable. It’s not unlike how in Czech, a consonant in a cluster takes on the voiced/unvoiced quality of the following consonant so that kde is pronounced as if it were written gde. I really think that Hebrew is the most beginner-friendly language of all the languages that I’ve learned.
I mean, that doesn’t sound too far off from what happens in Celtic languages like Welsh or Irish where the ending of one word mutates (softens) the beginning of the next word
Why 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.
Latin 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.
Seriously 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.
I'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
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
The 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.
If 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.
Nice, 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.
I'm gonna strike right back with the Czech, perfectly valid, words "vchrstls" and "smrskls" (roughly "you have splashed/thrown/hurled" and "you have shrunk", respectively).
Ha nice, I hadnt heard either before. These both rely on (I think) informal/slang way to contract past-tenses. Plus it seems (only after I looked them up on prirucka.ujc.cas.cz) the second one is a missing “se” as it’s reflective.
So I think the verb “smrsknout se” would more correctly be used as “smrskl[a] jsi se”, and contracted as “smrskl[a]s se” - but then I’m a foreigner who repeatedly messes Czech up so I’m likely talking nonsense :-D
> These both rely on (I think) informal/slang way to contract past-tenses.
It's called "příklonné -s" and yes, it's mostly used in Common Czech (the informal dialect we use in day-to-day life). I wouldn't call Common Czech slang because basically everyone speaks it or some form of it, it's not restricted to members of a subculture, profession, etc.
> would more correctly be used as “smrskl[a] jsi se”
Even native speakers almost never get this right -- “smrskl[a] jsi se” is the formal-ish-sounding form, but it's actually incorrect. "smrskl[a] ses" is the correct (codified) form. And yes, the verb is reflective, although I can think of some reaaally relaxed Common Czech sentences where it wouldn't be. (Smrskls trochu ty minimální požadavky [pro ten software]?)
BTW where do you come from? You seem to know your way around Czech grammar. Foreigners tend to struggle a LOT with the language.
This is actually great - I didn't know the proper name of that! I first encountered it when I was first learning Czech and one friend prompted me to ask another "srals?" when they returned from the bathroom after spending a while there (I didn't know what it meant at the time) so I always just assumed it was a sort of informal/slang thing :D And I've encountered "<verb> ses" before but never really picked up on why or how it should be applied, thx the example!
I'm from Scotland, but in truth I'm only really fine with Czech when i have time to sit and think about it (like reading) or when I'm talking. I totally panic when listening and get all mixed up :)
The main difference here is orthography as opposed to the actual pronunciation of the word - Welsh uses y and w as vowels, as well as multiple 2-letter clusters for a single sound (eg, dd is the same as one of the English th sounds, or rh and ll are both single sounds).
So in that sense, a word that may look bad (eg bwyta, to eat) actually has no consonant clusters in it - actually being pronounced 'boy-ta'.
When 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
Polish _actually_ had every grammatic feature known to man, and as a bonus tons of inconsistenties andere exceptions (which Finish does bot, at least that's my impression from here).
Nope. 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.
How 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.
It's very informal and I'm not sure how widely spread it is outside of the Helsinki region, but at least least here in the Helsinki region, you can also use demonstrative pronouns (tää (= this), toi (= that)) as third person pronouns in certain specific circumstances to further specify how the people referred to in the conversation relate to you, the speaker, and whoever the listener happens to be. So you can have people A,B,C conversing, with D present but not participating in the conversation, and E not present but being discussed, and A can tell B "this told that that it/he/she did something" and it will be understood as "C told D that E did something". Not the exact distinction you were asking about, but it's another related axis of distinction in pronouns that I thought might be interesting enough to mention here.
English definitely needs better pronouns, but I have no idea how you can introduce them. We can't even agree on what cases you can use "they/their/them" for an individual person!
One thing you do occasionally hear people doing if they don't want to repeat full names and need to disambiguate pronouns is to refer to people by the first letter of their name ("John told Adam J wasn't the right person for A"), but obviously that won't work if you don't know their names.
There are languages like that---the distinction is referred to as "proximative" vs. "obviative". (Though strictly speaking, it differentiates between "more topical" and "less topical" third persons, which might not necessarily correspond with the order in which they're mentioned.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative Apparently, there's even an Algonquian language which has a "further obviative" too, thus distinguishing three different levels of topicality.
Not Finnish, but in Turkish (another language without gendered pronouns) I'd use something like "o ne dedi bu ne dedi" (what did that say, what did this say)
I'd guess Finnish has more than one demonstrative pronoun, too :)
> I'd guess Finnish has more than one demonstrative pronoun, too :)
One of the most common ways to do that in Finnish is talking about how "One (did something) and the other (did something else)"... With the only tiny little problem being that the Finnish for both "one" and "the other", in this context, is "toinen"!
Not a complete list of every feature and language, but WALS [0] would probably be of interest to you. It has a decent list of language features you can browse and read about, shows you a map with the occurrence of each feature with languages placed on that map for each feature, and lists which languages have each feature (to the extent that is recorded in that particular database).
>It was asserted that there a disproportionate number of linguists are Finnish because their language is a superset of many others
??
Finnish isn't Indo-European. It's a Uralic language of which their are only about 25 million speakers collectively, mostly in Finland, Hungary, and Estonia.
ADDED: Perhaps the intended point is that the language has many language features. But the language itself isn't a superset.
The 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.
> 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".
"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).
I 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.
I'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.
Swedish 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.
Yep, 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.
Random 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.
> 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.
It's reasonable to think I'm immersed with Finnish, but I live in a part of Finland that is Swedish speaking, even by law (https://satwcomic.com/difficult-love). I have a Finnish speaking manager since 6 years back. We've never spoken anything else than English.
Yes, 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.
One 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.
Nah, doesn't work like that in practical (spoken) Finnish. Someone born in 1975 would be "seiskafemma", someone in 1984 "kasinelonen" and so forth. Even spelling the whole word out would be along the lines of "ysitoista seitenviis" (19 75). No-one would ever say "yksi-tuhat..."
They do on the TV (and, I assume, radio) news. But even they sometimes stumble over them, which leads me to further assume that the announcers only speak that way on the air.
Hmm. I mean, "femma" is like a "fiver". "Seiska" is the nickname for the tabloid "7" (that became its official name). "Seiskafemma" though? Seems weird.
Yeah, "femma" is literally "fiver" in Swedish. (Or "fifth"; "Jag kom femma i loppet" means "I placed fifth in the race".) And "seiska" is the colloquial pronunciation of seven in general, not just that publication.
So "seiskafemma" is just the digita concatenated; "seven-five" in stead of "seventy-five". Doesn't feel all that weird to me. For one thing, other languages do that too. And for another, it's all the "-kymmenen" bits that are too long to pronounce, so leaving them out (when that doesn't introduce confusion, of course) seems eminently sensible. Really not weird at all.
Just a note, you wouldn't say yksi-tuhat, as just tuhat already implies "one". So rather tuhatyhdeksänsataaseitsemänkymmentäviisi or as I'd say it out loud, tuhatyheksänsataaseitkytviis.
There 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.
Finns 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
Do you find Esperanto is closer to a full language? Does it avoid the burden of learning a full language? To me I am excited by the potential to learn a whole language in a day. Like learning the entire syntax of C vs. C++. To at least know the words well enough to enter into a language world and begin writing and parsing programs with the full syntax. Maybe we are not at the '1 day' learning stage yet but the potential seems there.
The big question is really if its possible to 'think' in the language. Have you been able to get into the stage where its like thinking? But then your thought feels limited? I feel like people have proven its possible to think in it though I'm not there yet. I am still at the puzzle stage. Thinking it in unlocks abilities like how AI are now are able to think in terms of human language.
I definitely consider Esperanto to be a full language. I like how the vocabulary is based on a prefix/suffix system that reduces the amount of words you have to know, and the grammar is very simple and consistent.
> The big question is really if its possible to 'think' in the language. Have you been able to get into the stage where its like thinking?
I was approaching that stage when I was learning it, but I'm a bit rusty now since I haven't used it in a while. There are definitely people at that level though. Check out Esperanto youtubers like Evildea.
> But then your thought feels limited?
Usually if you can't think of a word, you can insert the English word in your thinking and make a mental note to look up the vocabulary later.
It's a really fun language. It's a shame there aren't more speakers.
After I commented I realized you're referring to Toki Pona in the second part of your comment. Yeah you're definitely going to be limited with your thinking. That's not really a problem with Esperanto.
I like Couturat et al.'s Ido even better. I can't "think" in it yet, but it is very regular and easy to learn. The main (irrational, personal) issue I have with it is the monotony of endings, -o is always a singular noun, etc. Plus it is Eurocentric. It does have pan-gender words like lu, saving having to say he/she/it. Tradeoffs.
mi 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.
I 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.
Searching google for "toki pona dictionary online", in an incognito tab, brings up three dictionaries. One of them (the one on zrajm.github.io) is identical to the one in the book. You can also find a copy in the Toki Pona discord server. I have prepared a PDF version (1 page double-sided, a4 paper) which can be found here: http://0x0.st/ofqt.pdf from this groff input file: http://0x0.st/ofqv.roff (also by me).
Some people say writing and computers and law have frozen English as well. At least relatively. It really depends on your own goals and opinions of language and what kind of world-wide-web of communication you'd be wanting. I'm thinking in terms of world-wide cyberspace where word-language is just a tiny fraction of the total universal mediums people can communicate it.
I 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.
> 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).
I'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.
Finnish 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.
I 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.
I 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 :)
I 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.
The 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.
And 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?
And in the places where you left 'c' it sounds like 's'. You could just replace 'c' with either 'k' or 's' everywhere and get rid of letter 'c' entirely.
Piling 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/, 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 :)
Neither 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.
"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.
> 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.
I 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"
I'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.
To 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.
Exactly 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.
Modern 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.
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.
When 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).
Interesting. Usually both languages are too distinct to me/"my ear" to confuse them, but I do encounter that phenomenon with other pair of languages.
Ans: I live abroad/SF Bay Area. Κοίτα προφίλ για επικοινωνία! Εσύ;
Which 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.
Because it's the most popular constructed language, and despite all it's publicity and fanaticism, it still didn't take off.
For me, there was something that just seemed off about the language. I mean it's usable and useful and all that jazz, but I just didn't like using it. In some ways, as a language, it feels unfinished, or unpolished, and it seems stuck in its ways. But then there are those who would argue anything different would not be Esperanto, and I can see their point.
For me, the great international language has still to be invented, or perhaps has existed for many decades, but has yet to go viral.
The whole concept of an international language might just be like religion though. There are some that will never embrace it. There are some that will prefer one over the other and never change, and some that might convert.
The solution to a universal language might be multiple universal languages (lol). For example, Occidental, Oriental and African. As long as they are easy to learn while being precise enough that miscommunication through ambiguity is difficult.
You start with the language that is local to you, thus giving you access to many people and local trading partners. Then if you want, you can branch out to areas that interest you. It should even be possible for someone from the African area to speak with another from the Oriental area if both have learned Occidental, for example.
I 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 =)
I 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.
It went for regularity instead of naturality. If you want to sacrifice a little regularity, for naturality, check out Interlingue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingue
Knowing nothing about either language as such, the name seems utterly weird: According to Wikipedia, it was created (as "Occidental") in 1922 and renamed to "Interlingue" in 1949. WP also notes: "Not to be confused with Interlingua..." But the linked page for Interlingua says: "Interlingua [...] is an international auxiliary language (IAL) developed between 1937 and 1951..."
So why the heck did they rename Occidental to something that differs by one letter from another language that they must have known about?!? Just totally baffling.
It was renamed from Occidental because some weird group (communist I think) calling themselves something similar and that was being associating with the language Occidentalists.
As for the name change, I think it has a very general meaning, like amongst-language with the e ending being typical for Occidental nouns and the a ending for Interlingua nouns (maybe). Weirdly enough, the name push was by a guy called Ric Berger who was a Occidentalist who moved to Interlingua and probably played a part in naming both languages. BTW, both languages are very similar in vocabulary roots with Interlingua drawing inspiration from Occidental during its development (if I understood correctly).
Yes, I think that is the case. There is a bit more history between Interlingue and Interlingua than I have mentioned, and I think Ric played a part of that.
It 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.
I 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:
Seems 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?"
Ok 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.
I 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 ...
I 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.
I 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.
“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.
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.
Well 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.
Which 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.
I'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.
As 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.
What 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.
If 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.
There 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.
R1a1a 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.
It'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!
#/media/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Special_Cyrillics_BGDPT.svg){kind=link}
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.