It's Finnish To Me

byverazhelvis

3.1K followers

7 years ago

It's a long post, but it's for language lovers, and language lovers can read long pieces of writing.I first wanted to share about my encounters with Estonian. My mother is Estonian, and many of our relatives live in Estonia. I once wanted to learn it, but having found no resemblance with the languages I studied( now I have fluent English and a bit of German), I gave up an idea.It all looked too tiresome and time -consuming with a totally new bulk of vocabulary and a very complicated system of grammar. With no good motivation and limited time it was no worth a lot of effort. I thought that maybe in some future I would do something about it.

And it so happened that recently I came across a fantastic material on Finnish. And since Estonian and Finnish are twin brothers, and people have surely heard more of Finland than of Estonia, I decided to dedicate this post to Finnish.

"That's Finnish to me"- I think this idiom can rightly appear in any of the European languages and pretty soon you'll see why I think so.

People of all nationalities connect things which are unclear or not understandable with their perception of the language of other nationalities.

In Russian we say, "It's Chinese alphabet to me", in English there's an idiom "That's Greek to me".

There are also some other idioms with a national twist:

"When in Rome, do as Romans do"

"All roads lead to Rome"

"Pardon my French"

"Go Dutch"

"All the tea in China"

And I truly believe that Finnish well deserves its place in this parade of languages.

May the seeming simplicity of its alphabet not confuse you.

Let's look at some words which are easily recognised in most European languages by not native speakers.

Volume:

Football:

How about the sun?

The very name of the country:

And - get prepared! Computer:

Is there any modern system of naming in Finnish?

Credit to:

http://onedio.ru/news/pochemu-mne-nikogda-ne-vyuch...

The thing is that Finnish doesn't enter the Indo- European language family where the most European languages , and even Greek , belong to.

Finnish acutally belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of languages which also includes Estonian and Hungarian. Like it had been noted earlier, nearly every other language spoken in Europe belongs to the Indo-European family of languages which include: Germanic (including English, German and all of the other Scandinavian languages), Romance, Slavic, Celtic, and even East Indian languages among others.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Uralic family of languages. The Finnic group also includes Estonian and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea.

Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with other Uralic languages (such as Hungarian/Magyar) in several respects including:

• Shared morphology:
  • case suffixes such as genitive -n, partitive -(t)a / -(t)ä ( < Uralic *-ta, originally ablative), essive -na / -nä ( < *-na, originally locative)
  • plural markers -t and -i- ( < Uralic *-t and *-j, respectively)
  • possessive suffixes such as 1st person singular -ni ( < Uralic *-n-mi), 2nd person singular -si ( < Uralic *-ti).
  • various derivational suffixes (e.g. causative -tta/-ttä < Uralic *-k-ta)
• Shared basic vocabulary displaying regular sound correspondences with the other Uralic languages (e.g. kala 'fish' ~ North Saami guolli ~ Hungarian hal; and kadota 'disappear' ~ North Saami guo??it ~ Hungarian hagy 'leave (behind)'."

That all is surely Finnish to me.

And to you?