Deconstructing Finnish

I travel quite a bit on business. One tactic I use to build relationships with customers and partners is to have them teach me how to count to ten in their language, typically over a beer. By now I know Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Arabic, French, German, Cantonese, Finnish and a couple of others I&#x27;ve forgotten.<p>What popped out immediately when learning the Finnish numbers was how long the words are. All of the other languages count with one or two syllable words. When pronounced, the Finnish is, minimum, two syllables. Three, seven and ten are three syllables. Eight and nine are four:<p>yksi<p>kaksi<p>kolme<p>neljä<p>viisi<p>kuusi<p>seitsemän<p>kahdeksan<p>yhdeksän<p>kymmenen<p>Twenty-First is: kahdeskymmenesensimmäinen<p>I&#x27;ve always wondered what it was about the history of the language and culture that led to this. Finnish does quite a bit of concatenating words to create other words. It was originally the same for numbers. For example, the longest, eight: kahdeksan was originally, literally, &#x27;with two ten&#x27;. You can see hints of this in that kaksi (two) contains &#x27;ka&#x27; and &#x27;dek&#x27; references a borrowed word &#x27;deca&#x27;, ten.<p>Ref. <a href="http://goo.gl/Zt2WBb" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;Zt2WBb</a>

Bottom line: native speakers of English don&#x27;t grok morphology. When exposed to it, the best among them get fascinated and keen, the worst are cast into despair and ennui. But hey, this way of dealing with words is quite common as languages go. Greek, Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Swahili, all of them work by affixing lots of grammar markers onto roots, sometimes changing the roots and the affixes in subtle ways. (Actually, English used to be like that, too, no more than a thousand years ago.)

It&#x27;s sounds to me like a problem lots of people have when learning foreign languages. The author said so himself in the article. If you asked a Finnish person why a particular word is spelled&#x2F;inflected&#x2F;conjugated the way it is, they wouldn&#x27;t be able to tell you. They just memorize the final forms and know when to use it. This is how a child learns a language. It&#x27;s difficult for people learning the language because they know why—they learn the rules. And they can&#x27;t help but try to run through all the rules in their head when forming a sentence.<p>A similar problem occurs when learning French. If you take at face value that 75 is &quot;soixante-quinze&quot; instead of deconstructing it as &quot;sixty-fifteen&quot;, counting is a non-issue. But you can&#x27;t, because you learned that counting is &quot;weird&quot; after 70 and you remember that when you try to speak it.

&gt;&gt;For years, I’ve enjoyed some popular Finnish bands without necessarily having much of a clue what they’re singing about. It&#x27;s not a strange as it might sound.<p>I always found it funny when native English speakers first realise that this is possible. But as a person whose first language is not English, I grew up surrounded by songs which I couldn&#x27;t understand - and I could still enjoy them.

Finnish and Hungarian are the two European languages that I can&#x27;t make any connection to and after reading this article I feel a little bit better about the Finnish part of that, and I&#x27;ll take consolation in the fact that Finnish and Hungarian are related.

I&#x27;m a Finn and not language person, so I have always wondered why some linguists and philologists (like Tolkien) love Finnish language despite it being so weird and hard to learn. Here is interesting opinion from one foreigner:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Nordiccountries/comments/2bm3e4/danes_are_not_as_beautiful_as_they_think_at_least/cj97u9k" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Nordiccountries&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2bm3e4&#x2F;dane...</a><p><pre><code> --8&lt;-- </code></pre> Ok this might get long.<p>First to give some weight to my opinion, I should mention that I&#x27;ve studied most of the major language families in the world to some depth. I&#x27;ve studied indo-european languages quite extensively (including all scandinavian languages), I have a degree in Icelandic, teach it for a living, and have studied Finnish for many years.<p>In comparaison to other languages, Finnish is very regular. It is extremely efficient - you can create new words very easily and all the parts &#x27;click&#x27; together perfectly. One of the reason for the great practicality and efficiency of the Finnish language is that for one thing, it uses many small ways to integrate endings seemlessly into the words - vowel harmony means only certain vowels can be added onto certain nouns (a o u can only have a o u in the word, whereas ä ö y can only be around other ä ö y, and i e are neutral). Every way in which a word can end in Finnish also has a second &#x27;open&#x27; form that is used when the seal of the word is broken (nominative) to add more stuff onto it. The word kuningas &#x27;king&#x27; can be &#x27;broken open&#x27; to kunkinkaa- and then you add endings (kuninkaalle, kuninkaana, etc.).<p>So it&#x27;s kind of like a really slick puzzle where each part fits specifically with a word and various rules make it all seem like one big beautiful well integrated whole.<p>Another beautiful thing about Finnish is the purity of its sounds. It&#x27;s extremely clear. You can chose to speak Finnish in such a way that every single vowel is completely distinct from the other, no sound is ambiguous, everything is just the way it should be.<p>Finnish also has a LOT of words. LOADS of words describing sounds in nature. LOADS of words for various types of movement (jump, jump once, jump around, jump casually, etc.). It is the PERFET language to talk about the forest, mushrooms, types of soil, types of bark, birds, water, weather. I can think of SO many words related to trees, bark, where the tree lies, how big it is, is it dead on its side, dead lying on another tree, dead with the middle rotten away, the bark rotten away, etc.<p>Finnish is also what is called a linguistic icebox. When you put a new word into Finnish, it remains unchanged for many thousands of years. The word kuningas &#x27;king&#x27; is nearly identical to the proto-germanic form (*kuningaZ).<p>So in other words, Finnish is incredibly clear, very &#x27;integrated&#x27; (words seamlessly melt into one another with high specificity), really rich in derivations (you can create hundreds of words based on one root), really rich in words for sound, movement, nature, trees, plants, etc., and it has changed very little for a very very long time.<p>Sure, it&#x27;s spoken with a rather low voice and your culture might label Finnish as ugly, but it&#x27;s just really different from the germanic languages, and in my opinion, infinitely more beautiful!<p>Upea suomenkieli, kaikkein kaunein kieli!<p><pre><code> --8&lt;--</code></pre>

I&#x27;m Finnish, and I couldn&#x27;t have performed this deconstruction correctly. I had no idea that the -vat form of verbs had anything to do with the conditionals, for example.<p>It&#x27;s common knowledge among Finns that Finnish is a difficult language, but I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re quite able to appreciate just how weird it can get.

My fiancée is Finnish, and she&#x27;s very patient with me trying to speak Finnish, but my progress is slow (due to lack of structured effort). Do any of you HN Finns or language connoisseurs have any good language-learning resources? I have been unable to find something good online paid or otherwise.

Each language has its difficulties. Fully as fully fonetic language learning how to read Finnish atloud should be far easier than in some other languages who&#x27;s speakers actually have spelling competitions for kids.<p>Hard part of English complex vocabulary compared to Finnish, as we usually derive things from existing vocabulary instead of inventing new except for loan words that normally are similar to English but more Finnish style.<p>Kirja=book. Kirjain=letter as in alphabet. Kirje=letter as in mailbox. kirjoitus=writing Kirjasto=library Kirjoittaa=write Kirjoitettu=written Kirjata=to register [as write to register] Kirjaamo= registry office. Kirjoituskone=&quot;writing machine&quot;= type writer

Just as example, how many forms one word can take: <a href="http://depressingfinland.tumblr.com/post/65222506844/what-do-you-mean-finnish-is-difficult" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;depressingfinland.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;65222506844&#x2F;what-do...</a><p>Sometimes when I write keywords in Finnish and English, people have asked me why the list for Finnish is 10x longer, that&#x27;s one of the reasons. There can easily be 10 relevant forms for the one word. But I don&#x27;t naturally list the more uncommon forms.

It&#x27;s not something new, actually every language course has a lot of tables where words turn into another word forms.<p>And it&#x27;s not called deconstructing, just morphology that you learn. Studying English yields some tables too, mostly for temporal forms.

Definitely going to learn Finnish after I master Russian, been stuck on the latter for a few years now, Finnish the way it sounds, I like it a lot.