[HN Gopher] Finnish as a world language?
___________________________________________________________________
Finnish as a world language?
Author : JetSetWilly
Score : 248 points
Date : 2022-08-26 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hagen-schmidt.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hagen-schmidt.de)
| [deleted]
| yongjik wrote:
| > Finnish has longer and better swear words than any other
| language.
|
| Great, trying to sell it as a World Language and they managed to
| insult 99.95% of the world with one line!
|
| (Well maybe less than 99.95%. We can all agree that English swear
| words aren't that great.)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Sanna Marin FTW!
| URfejk wrote:
| No thanks.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Is Finnish Proto Indo European?
| Tor3 wrote:
| No, Finnish is from a different language group: Uralic.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| That is a mysterious fact.
| darkhorn wrote:
| No. Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese
| are so called Uralic Altaic languages. They all share same
| grammatical structures.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Note that Altaic itself is considered discredited among
| linguists, to say nothing of the Uralic-Altaic (which never
| found serious purchase).
| darkhorn wrote:
| 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.
| PLMUV9A4UP27D wrote:
| It can be noted that Finnish and Hungarian are more distant
| than English and Persian.
| darkhorn wrote:
| In terms of words or grammatical structures?
| PLMUV9A4UP27D wrote:
| In terms of words https://histdoc.net/sounds/hungary.html
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Is there a genetic link between Koreans and Finns?
| weberer wrote:
| Well Finland and North Korea are only separated by one
| country.
| darkhorn wrote:
| I have found this one
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_N-M231
| morjom wrote:
| No. It's Proto-Uralic.
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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.
| lynguist wrote:
| I want to add to it that Finnish doesn't actually have _cases_.
|
| It's just the _equivalent of cases_ which takes the shape of
| suffixes.
|
| Note that our personal pronouns also take the shape of suffixes
| in Finnish:
|
| taloni (my house) talossani (in my house)
|
| They're really not cases.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Why shouldn't they be considered cases?
| lynguist wrote:
| Because the grammatical case is a morpho-syntactical
| category of _flexion_.
|
| Suffixes are not inflections.
| canjobear wrote:
| I've never encountered this definition of "case" before.
| In standard descriptive linguistic terminology, these
| Finnish suffixes are certainly case markers.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| > 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).
| geniium wrote:
| kthxbye
| canjobear wrote:
| 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.
| sedeki wrote:
| What does "fusional" mean here?
| [deleted]
| skyyler wrote:
| A simple web search can bring you to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language
|
| >Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word
| bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender,
| nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of
| these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a
| different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes
| masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular,
| or neuter nominative singular.
| canjobear wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Ahyes forgot about that.
|
| Just to continue the explainer, vowel harmony means that "in
| the house" is "talossa" but "in the forest" is "metsassa".
| Notice that it's "-ssa" 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 root.match(/a|u|o/) then "ssa"
| else "ssa"
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| 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.
| vikaveri wrote:
| 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 paalla", 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 (poyta) it would be
| correct and common
| vikaveri wrote:
| I forgot to include a link to blog post that demonstrates the
| ease, simplicity, beauty and clear logic of Finnish, so here
| you go.
|
| https://depressingfinland.tumblr.com/post/65222506844/what-d.
| ..
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| Finnish is ranked as category 4 language out from 5 as how hard
| it is to learn, for English speakers
|
| https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/languag...
| JadeNB wrote:
| Where a higher category means harder to learn, just to be
| clear. (44 weeks for Finnish, according to your link.)
| cqfd wrote:
| 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 :)
| [deleted]
| samstave wrote:
| If there is anyone I would trust on Finnish as a language would
| be Suussu Lacksonen (blair) A famous finnish translator and movie
| maker...
|
| Also you should pleasure your ears by listening to this if you
| think Finnish is a global language...
|
| (ALSO I See Torvalds behind this)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_uq7ypZnc
|
| I have never been so beautifully scolded in a language I cannot
| understand
| NeutralForest wrote:
| Mualimaan napa!
| phtrivier wrote:
| At the beginning of the article, I though this was a spoof of all
| the "why you should use programming language X in your next
| project."
| c-smile wrote:
| > I'm not sure if this article is a joke
|
| Of course not. There is even a book about it:
|
| https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/master-finnish...
| bergenty wrote:
| Is this satire?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Is this satire?
|
| https://youtu.be/SPmxsRDSmTc?t=108
| treeman79 wrote:
| One of the things I love about this community is that satire
| can go completely over the head of many members here.
|
| https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses/1504/
|
| Seen many funny instances were blatant satire gets hilarious
| responses from people that treat it as real.
|
| Of course Autistic Savants often takes things far to literally.
| Took me ages when younger to get the hang of it.
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| 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.
| qumpis wrote:
| I think the confusion is often because people (like myself)
| don't read the content past the headline
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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.
| not2b wrote:
| 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.
| akprasad wrote:
| Yes, there are quite a few tip-offs that this is satire. Some
| examples:
|
| > The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except
| exceptions.
|
| > Learning Finnish builds confidence. If you can learn Finnish,
| then you can learn anything.
|
| > and shifts the burden of labour over to the person you are
| talking to.
| samizdis wrote:
| More clues can be found higher up in the site. See _Something
| about ... Finnish!_ [1]
|
| > First let's have fun. There are two texts about Finnish
| language: the English original and a German translation.
| Don't take them too serious:
|
| > Finnish as a world language?
|
| > Finnisch, die Weltsprache
|
| I love the site; great fun to explore.
|
| [1] https://www.hagen-schmidt.de/suomi/
| renewiltord wrote:
| English is the Javascript of languages. JS will tell you what
| market fit is about. Neither will die.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I like the sound and the grammar of the Finnish language, if only
| they had an alphabet more suitable for it: _paamaara_ is too much
| for me. (Anteeksi.)
| zocoi wrote:
| 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.
|
| Overall it's all about where I call home
| bfung wrote:
| "Finnish has longer and better swear words than any other
| language."
|
| That already makes adoption of the language doomed, hahaha.
| Swearing also needs no logic, I dun give a fuck. Fuck yeah?
| fuuuuuuck. "fuck" as the universal language and word.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| It is spanish! ;-)
|
| I remember my younger days when Hristo Stoichkov came to play
| with Barcelona FC. A very aggresive and sweary player, a few
| years later he left to play for Parma FC, and while playing in
| Italy, he kept swearing in spanish!
|
| I even saw him doing the same while playing for Bulgaria.
| danwee wrote:
| English is the perfect world language... I wish only words were
| pronounced as they are written.
| buzer wrote:
| Let's just switch to ralli englanti
| Koshkin wrote:
| I just pronounced your comment the way it is written, and I did
| not like what I heard.
| timbit42 wrote:
| "Be the change you want to see in the world."
| koolala wrote:
| 'Toki Pona' has been slowly making strides as a good world
| language. Not as a replacement for English of course but as a
| modern Esperanto.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Has it? I thought the language was built non-extendable and
| essentially frozen.
| koolala wrote:
| 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.
| xena wrote:
| 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.
| bmacho wrote:
| "siki" li seme?
| dvh wrote:
| Sorry, can't translate, toki pona language specs is
| copyrighted.
| gnubison wrote:
| The dictionary is released into the public domain :)
| koolala wrote:
| 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.
| leke wrote:
| Fun fact, the creator of TP is a Finnish fan and a fair bit of
| the vocab is from Finnish words.
| flipcoder wrote:
| I found Toki Pona to be way too simple and there's too much
| ambiguity. It's a neat idea though. I like Esperanto better.
| stew-j wrote:
| 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.
| koolala wrote:
| 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.
| bmn__ wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/ixEBdwf.jpg
|
| "Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again"
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| That's part of an old joke:
|
| What do you mean Finnish is difficult?
|
| English: A dog
|
| Swedish: What
|
| English: The dog
|
| English: Two dogs
|
| Swedish:
|
| Swedish:
|
| Swedish: En hund, hunden
|
| Swedish: Tva hundar, hundarna
|
| German:
|
| English: No, go away
|
| Swedish: No one invited you
|
| German: Der Hund
|
| English: I said go away
|
| German: Ein Hund, zwei Hunde
|
| Swedish: Stop it
|
| German: Den Hund, einen Hund, dem Hund, einem Hund, des Hundes,
| eines Hundes, den Hunden, der Hunden
|
| Finnish: Sup
|
| English: NO
|
| Swedish: NO
|
| German: NO
|
| Finnish:
|
| English:
|
| German:
|
| Swedish:
|
| Finnish: Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again, koirassa,
| koirasta, koiraan, koiralla, koiralta, koiralle, koirana,
| koiraksi, koiratta, koirineen, koirin German: Swedish: Finnish:
| English: Finnish: Aaaand... koirasi, koirani, koiransa,
| koiramme, koiranne, koiraani, koiraasi, koiraansa, koiraamme,
| koiraanne, koirassani, koirassasi, koirassansa, koirassamme,
| koirassanne, koirastani, koirastasi, koirastansa, koirastamme,
| koirastanne, koirallani, koirallasi, koirallansa, koirallamme,
| koirallanne, koiranani, koiranasi, koiranansa, koiranamme,
| koirananne, koirakseni, koiraksesi, koiraksensa, koiraksemme,
| koiraksenne, koirattani, koirattasi, koirattansa, koirattamme,
| koirattanne, koirineni, koirinesi, koirinensa, koirinemme,
| koirinenne English: Swedish: German: Finnish: Wait! then theres
| koirakaan, koirankaan, koiraakaan, koirassakaan, koirastakaan,
| koiraankaan, koirallakaan, koiraltakaan, koirallekaan,
| koiranakaan, koiraksikaan, koirattakaan, koirineenkaan,
| koirinkaan, koirako, koiranko, koiraako, koirassako,
| koirastako, koiraanko, koirallako, koiraltako, koiralleko,
| koiranako, koiraksiko, koirattako, koirineenko, koirinko,
| koirasikaan, koiranikaan, koiransakaan, koirammekaan,
| koirannekaan, koiraanikaan, koiraasikaan, koiraansakaan,
| koiraammekaan, koiraannekaan, koirassanikaan, koirassasikaan,
| koirassansakaan, koirassammekaan, koirassannekaan,
| koirastanikaan, koirastasikaan, koirastansakaan,
| koirastammekaan, koirastannekaan, koirallanikaan,
| koirallasikaan, koirallansakaan, koirallammekaan,
| koirallannekaan, koirananikaan, koiranasikaan, koiranansakaan,
| koiranammekaan, koiranannekaan, koiraksenikaan, koiraksesikaan,
| koiraksensakaan, koiraksemmekaan, koiraksennekaan,
| koirattanikaan, koirattasikaan, koirattansakaan,
| koirattammekaan, koirattannekaan, koirinenikaan, koirinesikaan,
| koirinensakaan, koirinemmekaan, koirinennekaan, koirasiko,
| koiraniko, koiransako, koirammeko, koiranneko, koiraaniko,
| koiraasiko, koiraansako, koiraammeko, koiraanneko,
| koirassaniko, koirassasiko, koirassansako, koirassammeko,
| koirassanneko, koirastaniko, koirastasiko, koirastansako,
| koirastammeko, koirastanneko, koirallaniko, koirallasiko,
| koirallansako, koirallammeko, koirallanneko, koirananiko,
| koiranasiko, koiranansako, koiranammeko, koirananneko,
| koirakseniko, koiraksesiko, koiraksensako, koiraksemmeko,
| koiraksenneko, koirattaniko, koirattasiko, koirattansako,
| koirattammeko, koirattanneko, koirineniko, koirinesiko,
| koirinensako, koirinemmeko, koirinenneko, koirasikaanko,
| koiranikaanko, koiransakaanko, koirammekaanko, koirannekaanko,
| koiraanikaanko, koiraasikaanko, koiraansakaanko,
| koiraammekaanko, koiraannekaanko, koirassanikaanko,
| koirassasikaanko, koirassansakaanko, koirassammekaanko,
| koirassannekaanko, koirastanikaanko, koirastasikaanko,
| koirastansakaanko, koirastammekaanko, koirastannekaanko,
| koirallanikaanko, koirallasikaanko, koirallansakaanko,
| koirallammekaanko, koirallannekaanko, koirananikaanko,
| koiranasikaanko, koiranansakaanko, koiranammekaanko,
| koiranannekaanko, koiraksenikaanko, koiraksesikaanko,
| koiraksensakaanko, koiraksemmekaanko, koiraksennekaanko,
| koirattanikaanko, koirattasikaanko, koirattansakaanko,
| koirattammekaanko, koirattannekaanko, koirinenikaanko,
| koirinesikaanko, koirinensakaanko, koirinemmekaanko,
| koirinennekaanko, koirasikokaan, koiranikokaan, koiransakokaan,
| koirammekokaan, koirannekokaan, koiraanikokaan, koiraasikokaan,
| koiraansakokaan, koiraammekokaan, koiraannekokaan,
| koirassanikokaan, koirassasikokaan, koirassansakokaan,
| koirassammekokaan, koirassannekokaan, koirastanikokaan,
| koirastasikokaan, koirastansakokaan, koirastammekokaan,
| koirastannekokaan, koirallanikokaan, koirallasikokaan,
| koirallansakokaan, koirallammekokaan, koirallannekokaan,
| koirananikokaan, koiranasikokaan, koiranansakokaan,
| koiranammekokaan, koiranannekokaan, koiraksenikokaan,
| koiraksesikokaan, koiraksensakokaan, koiraksemmekokaan,
| koiraksennekokaan, koirattanikokaan, koirattasikokaan,
| koirattansakokaan, koirattammekokaan, koirattannekokaan,
| koirinenikokaan, koirinesikokaan, koirinensakokaan,
| koirinemmekokaan, koirinennekokaan Swedish:
|
| German:
|
| English: Okay, now you're just making things up!
|
| Finnish:
|
| Finnish: And now the plural forms...
| Kkoala wrote:
| Haha, haven't laughed out loud in a while, thanks for sharing!
| Don't know why I haven't seen this before
| java-man wrote:
| perkele!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It is a good sounding language; in other words, it is pleasing
| to the ear. This has to do with its wealth of vowels, which rules
| out ugly consonant clusters. It was recently suggested that some
| vowels should be exported to Czechoslovakia, where a shortage of
| vowels is imminent, and that some Czech consonants should be
| imported to Finland. However, negotiations collapsed at an early
| stage. The Finns would not deal with a language that calls ice-
| cream 'zrmzlina,'
|
| It's always surprising how many people believe that spelling is
| somehow linguistically significant. There is no real difference
| between Czech 'zrm' and English 'zerm', but somehow the Czechs
| are dealing with an unpronounceable vowel shortage.
| kebman wrote:
| I have only one thing to add to this: Kippis!
| pier25 wrote:
| > _what case? Nominative, accusative, genitive, essive,
| partitive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive,
| ablative, allative, abessive, comitative or instructive?_
|
| Jesus... I studied Latin in high school and this triggered some
| PTSD. And Latin only has 6 cases!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#Latin
| docandrew wrote:
| 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.
| droobles wrote:
| 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.
| mynegation wrote:
| 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.
| leoc wrote:
| If you want to try your luck with Latin:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk . Or you could
| head straight to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09L7bge0w4Q
| or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7hd799IznU&list=PLU1WuLg4
| 5S... !
| option wrote:
| English is the world language. Time to formalize that and move
| on.
| freetonik wrote:
| 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 "pidan"; "I like the dog"?
| -- "Pidan koirasta", which is using the "-sta/sta" 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.
|
| * Pidan Norjasta -- I like Norway.
|
| * Puhu Norjasta -- Talk about Norway.
|
| How come the same case is used in these?!
|
| "Loytyy apteekista" -- "Can be found at the pharmacy", literally
| "Find from the pharmacy". Saying "Loytyy 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.
| makach wrote:
| You got me until the first point
|
| "It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute
| and reliable in all situations, except exceptions."
|
| "except exceptions?!" whoa..! the brought back memories from
| learning German.
|
| perkele!
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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 "aiti" in Finnish.
| gordaco wrote:
| 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 _a_... I can
| pronounce both separately, but when I hear someone speaking,
| I still have trouble when I need to differentiate between
| these two.
| [deleted]
| drno123 wrote:
| 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).
| shakow wrote:
| Let's rather talk about German adjective declensions, a much
| more pregnant problem in German than having to memorize a
| weird number.
| kingofpandora wrote:
| 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.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| In my opinion, Finnish is almost a joke.
|
| This language was created by a Bishop and was later promoted by
| Russians for political reasons (to piss off the Swedes).
| PLMUV9A4UP27D wrote:
| 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.
| mongol wrote:
| But you must be immersed with Finnish? Do you struggle with it?
| PLMUV9A4UP27D wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| PLMUV9A4UP27D wrote:
| 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.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| 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.
| kebman wrote:
| > b. what case? Nominative, accusative, genitive, essive,
| partitive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive,
| ablative, allative, abessive, comitative or instructive?
|
| > c. is it possible to avoid using the noun?
|
| And now you know why the most extroverted Finns are the ones who
| look at your shoes instead of on the ground in front of you!
| naltun wrote:
| > I think I do not misspeak myself by saying that the work of
| this article should settle the matter clearly and finally.
|
| Perkele, consider the matter closed.
| euroderf wrote:
| Selva
| PanosJee wrote:
| Let's stick with Greek.
| Koshkin wrote:
| 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.
| pelasaco wrote:
| 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 :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_language
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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.
| retrac wrote:
| It should be Japanese, of course!
|
| Japanese can be written using either the Latin alphabet, or
| Chinese characters. The two most common writing systems in the
| world. It can also be written with its own elegant and purely
| phonetic writing system. There's even Braille, Morse code, and
| sign language encodings. It is truly media agnostic.
|
| Japanese has a regular grammar. From a linguist's perspective,
| aside from the politeness system, it's really quite _normal_ for
| a language. Very little in it to surprise a Finnish, Turkish or
| Korean speaker. (Unlike English, which if first discovered today
| spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to
| accusations of a linguistic hoax.)
|
| Finally, some 40% of Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese, and
| Chinese and Japanese technical terms flow freely between the
| languages to this day. Another ~20% of Japanese vocabulary is
| borrowed from European languages like English or Portuguese. The
| majority of the world already speaks a significant amount of
| Japanese and they don't even know it! For this reason, Chinese,
| European, and American, alike, usually find it quite easy to
| learn.
| leke wrote:
| A lot of Finnish people learn Japanese for some reason.
| vesinisa wrote:
| > 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.
| canjobear wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > 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)
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| xhevahir wrote:
| 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.)
| [deleted]
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| usernameak wrote:
| 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.
| kriro wrote:
| 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.
| jhvkjhk wrote:
| yurishimo wrote:
| 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.
|
| You can read more about it here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language
|
| 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!
| bitwize wrote:
| > 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.
| koolala wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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".
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.)
| rcarr wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/stand-up-comedy-english-
| lang...
| Bakary wrote:
| 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.
| linguistbreaker wrote:
| Japanese is a very high context language which instantly
| disqualifies it in my opinion.
| kyleamazza wrote:
| 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)
| stardenburden wrote:
| Now I need to know if this is also satire or if I need to start
| learning Japanese
| teddyh wrote:
| _So You Want To Learn Japanese_
|
| http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm
| amyjess wrote:
| 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.
| golemiprague wrote:
| xhevahir wrote:
| 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/o
| bidos/ASIN/4770016247/ref=nosim...
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| 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.
| cyphar wrote:
| While that is technically true standard Jing Yu
| /honorifics (desu/masu 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
| baitoJing Yu -- usually service workers literally get
| handed a manual which explains how to interact with
| customers using this form of Jing Yu ). 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 desu or masu the person is quite unlikely to be
| insulted. Especially if it's not someone who is your
| superior at work.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| 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 kibodo (kiiboodo) for
| a while but unless it 's in context the English word
| "keyboard" won't jump out.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I had to work with some code from a Japanese manufacturer
| and translated some of the comments. I got stuck on
| debadora (debadora) for a while. It was clearly Japanized
| English but it took a while to realize it is "device
| driver".
| [deleted]
| bryondowd wrote:
| 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.
| cyphar wrote:
| They like four-character abbreviations a lot (obviously
| you have Si Zi Shou Yu , 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 burewai (burewai).
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| It's a language with over 2k common characters of which most
| have two pronunciations, and the language is immensely
| context-dependent.
|
| If that doesn't scare you, go ahead.
| contravariant wrote:
| 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?
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > Kanji are fun to learn, because they are constructive
| to some degree, and actually pictorial to some degree
|
| > actually pictorial to some degree
|
| Only in the same sense that star constellations are
| pictorial.
|
| https://youtu.be/unKrseRCOKo
|
| I really feel like this is appropriate.
| Izkata wrote:
| There are some that are kinda funny when you first see
| them, for example:
|
| Tree: Mu
|
| Forest: Sen
| minikomi wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD0NOhrPyEM
|
| I thought you were going to link this guy but both work
| :)
| Asraelite wrote:
| 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.
| United857 wrote:
| > 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.
| cyphar wrote:
| Not to mention some words like patan (pataan/pattern) have
| either very specific meanings that an English speaker would
| not understand naturally or other words like tenshiyon
| (tenshon/tension) have completely different meanings that an
| English speaker would not recognise as English.
| m1117 wrote:
| Korean is like japanese, minus the kanji.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Hangul is a marvel of an alphabet, especially when you
| realize it was created from scratch six centuries ago.
| skrebbel wrote:
| By the king!
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| > 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| IDK about Ia, but Peter I definitely reshaped, along the
| European typesetting guidelines, some letters like
| lowercase a (which traditionally looked more like the
| Greek alpha, a), and most drastically the t (t) which for
| the best part of 17th century looked like Latin m. (This
| shape still remains in Cyrillic cursive.)
| codesnik wrote:
| 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.
| inawarminister wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
|
| "However the character Gu gu also functions as a phonetic
| component of Meng Gu Menggu "Mongol". Indeed, records from
| Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no
| one is older (more Gu gu) than the Meng Gu Meng-gu". From
| palace records that Gu Zhuan Zi gu zhuanzi was a veiled
| reference to the Meng Gu Zhuan Zi menggu zhuanzi "Mongol
| Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol
| 'Phags-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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
| nine_k wrote:
| There are three really great, logical and legible writing
| systems known to me.
|
| First is, of course, tengwar, but no real spoken language
| uses it.
|
| Second if hangul, which is great overall and has an easy
| structure [2], with just a few historic warts.
|
| Third, there's Cree syllabary. Just look at the logic:
| [3].
|
| [1]: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Tengwar#Spelling_and_pr
| onunciat... [2]: https://sites.google.com/site/hangulanat
| ionallanguage/photo-... [3]:
| https://fineartamerica.com/featured/plains-cree-
| syllabics-tr...
| lswank wrote:
| 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.
| deltasevennine wrote:
| 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.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Japanese, the language that has an entire sub-alphabet
| dedicated to segregating gaijin words - lest they somehow taint
| the original language.
| cyphar wrote:
| 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 --
| zurui is a good example of this).
| nine_k wrote:
| Latin fonts also have italic forms, sometimes materially
| different in shape from the straight forms.
|
| This is largely similar.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It's not similar, people mostly just use foreign words in
| English without italics.
| mathgorges wrote:
| My understanding is that katakana I used for tons of other
| uses like providing emphasis.
|
| The reason borrowed words are written in katakana is too
| provide a clue that the word may have a non-standard
| pronunciation.
|
| It functions similarly to how italicization does in English
| jhanschoo wrote:
| 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.
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| 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.
| wl wrote:
| English lacking a future tense hasn't stopped it from
| becoming _the_ international language.
| thfuran wrote:
| What? English has several future tenses:
|
| I will go
|
| I will be going
|
| I will have gone
|
| I will have been going
| Veen wrote:
| 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).
| FabHK wrote:
| You forgot:
|
| I'm going to go
|
| I'm going to be going (?)
|
| I'm going to have gone (??)
|
| I'm going to have been going (??)
| SilasX wrote:
| Heh, I sometimes think that in 30 years, "to be gonna"
| will be the "official" future tense helper verb.
| thfuran wrote:
| I'm gonna of gone?
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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).
| msbarnett wrote:
| Those are modal auxiliaries. If English had a true future
| "tense", there would be some inflection to the word "go"
| itself that would mean "go-but-in-the-future"
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| dorchadas wrote:
| 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.
| vgel wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Those are semantically future but not syntactically so.
| yongjik wrote:
| Disclaimer: IANAL(inguist).
|
| 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?"
| wl wrote:
| go = infinitive
|
| going = present
|
| gone = preterite
|
| No future tense there.
|
| You're using "will" as an auxiliary verb to talk about
| the future. It accomplishes the same thing as a present
| tense, but it is not the same thing.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| fvdessen wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| How many of them express concepts that you actually can't
| express in other ways in English?
| fvdessen wrote:
| 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.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| English uses an auxiliary word (will) to express things
| happening in the future rather than having a distinct
| future tense.
| [deleted]
| muffinman26 wrote:
| 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".
| java-man wrote:
| You Ling Wen Zi
| nine_k wrote:
| A beautifully simple language with the world's hardest
| writing system.
| ian-g wrote:
| 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"
| rhacker wrote:
| 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!
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| 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 ...
| xbar wrote:
| I am convinced.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Speaking as somebody who moved to Finland, and struggles with the
| language, that's some good satire.
| Ekaros wrote:
| As native speaker it is perfectly logical and sane compared to
| English. Then again I suppose that is not exactly high bar.
| java-man wrote:
| > It is an essentially logical language. The rules are
| absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions.
|
| I love it! except exceptions.
| Crespyl wrote:
| At least you know to expect them!
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| 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.
|
| The insanity of English is what makes it awesome.
| mynegation wrote:
| 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").
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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.
| narag wrote:
| _Not just the sounds, but all the inconsistencies..._
|
| Coming from Spanish and our irregular verbs, memorizing the
| inconsistencies is a piece of cake. The sounds though...
| tzot wrote:
| Nobody expects the Spanish exceptions, you surely mean.
| docandrew wrote:
| I think English is generally under-rated but the phonetics
| are a mess, something I appreciate more now that I'm
| teaching my sons to read.
|
| This poem is a classic example:
| https://icaltefl.com/dearest-creature-in-creation/
| stevekemp wrote:
| Those inconsistencies you mention are pretty good, but of
| of course you missed those that are more fun:
|
| "read" vs "read" (I have read this book/I will read this
| book).
|
| "bow" vs "bow" (At the end of the opera everybody takes a
| bow/We shoot the arrows with a bow).
|
| etc.
| jjav wrote:
| > We shoot the arrows with a bow
|
| while standing on the bow (of a boat).
| ch33zer wrote:
| Don't be ridiculous 'bow' (of a boat) can't be confusing
| at all: that's a word that's pronounced differently, but
| spelled the same :D
|
| How bout 'A bowed bow fired from the bow requires that we
| take a bow to receive a bow'
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Wow you wrapped that up in a neat bow!
| mynegation wrote:
| "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.
| enlyth wrote:
| 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.
| jjav wrote:
| > 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.
| noneeeed wrote:
| 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.
| wenderen wrote:
| Love this satire. Especially the ominous but completely unhelpful
| "be very, very careful with this one."
| RajT88 wrote:
| 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.
| vnorilo wrote:
| no niin.
| codebook wrote:
| We have logical language already. Esperanto. Don't we? :)
| karaterobot wrote:
| > It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute
| and reliable in all situations, except exceptions.
|
| Then English is obviously more logical, since the rules can be
| applied just as reliably in all situations as Finnish, and has
| even _more_ exceptions.
|
| Tongue is in cheek here, as it is in the original article.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfix
| maratc wrote:
| I second this motion.
|
| "The Complete Dictionary of Hebrew Language" has about 35,000
| words in total. I bet that over a half of that aren't used, and
| would sound completely new to anyone except Hebrew linguists.
|
| Hebrew is a "tabular" language that can be represented as a
| (sparsely populated) table with the roots as rows and
| "morphemes" (construction patterns) as columns. If a word
| exists, it will be in its proper place at an appropriate row
| and column.
|
| Here's an example of a construction pattern for the category of
| "tools":
|
| maXXeXa
|
| The X denotes a place to put the root letters. Most of the
| roots are composed of three letters, and so there are three
| places.
|
| When you combine it with the root S.R.T which has a meaning of
| "ribbon" (and also, film), you get "maSReTa" -- "a tool for
| making films" (video camera).
|
| If you combine it with the root Ts.L.M which has a meaning of
| "image", you get "maTsLeMa" -- "a tool for making images"
| (still camera).
|
| Even if you never heard the word "maVReGa" but are able to
| separate it into the morpheme of "tools" and the root V.R.G
| (which has a meaning of clock-wise motion), you can use that to
| understand the word as "a tool for making clock-wise motion" --
| a screwdriver.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| 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.
| Koshkin wrote:
| At the other extreme, there's Yiddish, it is full of idioms and
| it's more fun for that!
| Maursault wrote:
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It's the dominance of the British Empire followed immediately
| by the dominance of the American Empire.
| dvh wrote:
| Czech/Slovak word for ice cream is "zmrzlina" not "zrmzlina".
|
| https://translate.google.com/?sl=sk&tl=en&text=zmrzlina&op=t...
| rvba wrote:
| Written Czech/Slovak language is like Polish language where
| someone deleted all the vowels.
| mynegation wrote:
| If they wanted to find an example of a word with highest
| density of consonants, there is a Russian word "vzbzdnut'"
| ("vzbzdnut'" meaning approximately "to fart unexpectedly a tiny
| bit") with one vowel, seven consonants and one letter that
| palatalizes the last consonant.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| 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).
| smcl wrote:
| That's a great word. You might enjoy the Czech word for
| "fart" - it also has no consonants and it's almost
| onomatopoeia: "prd"
|
| prrrrrrrrrd
| dvh wrote:
| Chrt prv zhlt hrst zrn (grayhound first swallowed fistful
| of seeds)
| Koshkin wrote:
| Or the Polish _chrzaszcz_ [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrz%C4%85szcz
| jmclnx wrote:
| For this I thing Welsh wins, I have seen some of their words
| and I cannot even begin to pronounce the words I have seen.
| ur-whale wrote:
| There's a difference?
|
| My eyes can tell, gotta use diff.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| Nice try, finland
| justapassenger wrote:
| It's part of an elaborate scheme to convince people that
| Finland exists. We all know it doesn't.
| leke wrote:
| 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 Manti. I haven't
| checked it out yet, but it sounds appealing to me at least.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet
| aaroninsf wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >had every feature enabled
|
| Is there any list for what those features can be? (Not
| constrained to Fin.)
| mostlylurks wrote:
| 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).
|
| [0]: https://wals.info/
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
| danjac wrote:
| Finnish does not have grammatical gender.
| egiboy wrote:
| Because it's a bug, not a feature.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Not even gendered pronouns?
| chousuke wrote:
| 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.
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit: maybe ASL? https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=w
| eb&rct=j&url=https:/...
| Ndymium wrote:
| I would use the idiom "sana sanaa vastaan", i.e. "word
| against word" for that situation.
| mostlylurks wrote:
| 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 (taa (= 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.
| housecarpenter wrote:
| 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.
| ardacinar wrote:
| 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 :)
| brnt wrote:
| 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).
| thriftwy wrote:
| Does Polish actually have articles? I know Bulgarian does.
| mzs wrote:
| Ha, fantastic to contrast with English as logical and world
| language :)
|
| Anyway, one thing that the post did not touch on was word stress.
| Finnish is awesomely simple and consistent! (again, especially
| compared to English)
| boredemployee wrote:
| Why not Esperanto?
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| 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 =)
| flipcoder wrote:
| 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.
| Terretta wrote:
| Your sense of satire is quite evolved.
| stew-j wrote:
| It might have been more interesting to watch Aki Kaurismaki'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.
| ahtavarasmus wrote:
| nneonneo wrote:
| _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.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> The only "weird" parts are tonality and those darned
| counting words._
|
| Tonality, which is famously hard for speakers of non-tonal
| languages to pick up?
| FabHK wrote:
| I'd say you're off by a factor of 3 to 10?
|
| 1000 characters suffices for basic literacy. HSK 6 (the highest
| level of the Chinese as a second language exam) includes fewer
| than 3000 characters. A highly educated person allegedly knows
| 8000+ characters, though I'd take that with a grain of salt.
| jhvkjhk wrote:
| I think you miss typed a zero for literary fluency. There are
| only 2500 most frequent used characters and 1000 second
| frequent characters (from <<Xian Dai Yi Yu Chang Yong Zi Biao
| >> , frequent standard Chinese characters list)
|
| Moreover, they are not unique, but composed from common
| radicals, like prefix/suffix in English.
| Bakary wrote:
| 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.
| bfung wrote:
| 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.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| The comment you are replying to isn't claiming that
| letters/characters (Zi zi4) correspond 1-1 to words/terms
| (Ci ci2, what you call phrases)
| [deleted]
| CamogliX wrote:
| 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.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Torille?
| atkbrah wrote:
| Tortilla avataan?
| [deleted]
| rendall wrote:
| 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-yhdeksansataa-
| seitsemankymmenta-viisi_
|
| _Saatanan kyrpa, kun saavun numeron loppuun, en muista vitun
| alkun._
| Ndymium wrote:
| Just a note, you wouldn't say yksi-tuhat, as just tuhat already
| implies "one". So rather
| tuhatyhdeksansataaseitsemankymmentaviisi or as I'd say it out
| loud, tuhatyheksansataaseitkytviis.
| Tor3 wrote:
| You do exactly the same in Italian - I never found it
| inconvenient or annoying.
| vikaveri wrote:
| 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
| tzot wrote:
| There's a legend that no Finnish ever says what the current
| year is; by the time they... finish, they're wrong.
| rendall wrote:
| Yes, you _can_ shorten it, by deploying a kind of semi-
| sanctified mumbling they call _puhekieli_ :
| _tuhatyhekssataaseiskytviis_
|
| I make fun because I love
| lawlorino wrote:
| You can absolutely shorten pronunciation of numbers, including
| years, when speaking Finnish https://uusikielemme.fi/finnish-
| vocabulary/vocabulary-lists/...
| wilihybrid wrote:
| 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..."
| mostlylurks wrote:
| 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.
| Bakary wrote:
| In Mandarin you can just say "one nine seven five"! Though you
| usually have to add "year" after that.
| Asraelite wrote:
| 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.
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