Maybe a little side-track, but I recently discovered this brilliant little Finnish folk song called "Ievan Polkka". There are dozens of versions on youtube; I can't understand a word of any of them, but I can't stop listening:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAyWN9ba9J8 - One of my favorite things on the internet, a South African guy remixing an blind Turkish street performer playing a Finnish song.
Thank you for this post. I needed motivation to get up and put more time into something I'm working on that is large and draining, and this short video reminded me why it is important.
I think Scandinavians my age know "ei sa peittaa". Basically "do not cover". When bored on the toilet before phones, reading whatever labels was the norm, and they often had a Finnish version. This was the label on the radiator.
I knew there were some ¨'s sprinkled in, but felt it was safer my way than to botch it up even more, heh. (Could've googled it, but that's less fun).
I've visited Finland a lot the later years due to my company starting a fulfillment center there. It was quite interesting how well I could get by with my Norwegian most places. Either because signage also was in Swedish, words often similar enough (except those that are very very far off, lol), or I even could speak Norwegian to some coworkers that then replied in Swedish (and not all of them even being Finns with Swedish as their native language).
My mother is Finnish, and my parents traveled and mover around a lot during our younger years - but we did live in Finland from I was age 3 to 7, so Finnish is the language I first learned to speak fluently.
Picking it up again once a year wasn't hard (usually when we'd get relatives visiting us, or the other way around), but around the time I became a teenager, I started speaking less - for no other reason than that I traveled less to relatives during the summers. These days I can read some, and listen to some conversation, but speaking is very hard - probably 25 years since I spoke it fluently. It is a shame, as I have to speak English with my grandparents, aunts, etc. - but language is def one of those "use it or lose it" things.
With that said, for the English speaking people - you'd be surprised how much Norwegian / Swedish / Danish (Germanic language) you can understand, with the amount of shared, or very similar words, the languages have.
Same way for us Scandinavians and Dutch. Can't really understand much when the language is spoken, but when reading some text, there's a lot of structure and words you can understand.
I'm natively british, but I live in the southern part of Sweden for the past 11 years, and I can only concur to what TrackerFF is saying.
There's a handful of false friends (Fart, Slut) but probably 10-15% of the scandinavian languages still have influence on modern english.
I say "still have root" because; if you weren't aware: the first common tongue variant of English was a proto-germanic language from the "Angles" of Denmark. "Angle"-ish, if you would.
Its more strange how the scandiavian dialects have a broader application in Scots english (Barn/Baen for child, Kirk for Church for example) - my family are Scottish so that was a weird surprise.
Regardless, if you're going to try to learn a Scandinavian Language: Stick to Norwegiean or Stockholm-Swedish. The Danish and Southern Swedish dialect (Skånsk) is difficult to unpick word from word and will leave you bewildered. But you will understand more than you might originally expect to if you visit Stockholm and have a simple pocket dictionary. :D
I played the game Noita where the enemies have inscrutable names like "Haulikkohiisi." I was amused to learn that is just the Finnish for "Shotgun Goblin", and that was the general pattern of names
This is something I love about Finnish as an outsider: instead of loaning words they create beautifully poetic compounds. I have lost my list but remember comet being "tail-star", capital being "head-city", and world being "ground-air".
That can go wrong too. They (the guardians of language, prim and proper) tried to make "swap file" be "heittovaihtotiedosto", literally "thrown replacement record collection". Thrown as in the things being swapped are in the air while being exchanged, not placed somewhere temporarily. In the real world, lots of computer-related terminology ended up being just transliterated from English directly, along the lines of procedure -> proseduuri, server -> serveri, icon -> ikoni.
"Head city" is just the literal meaning of "capital city".
"Maailma", on the other hand, is an old word, and its original meaning was more like "earth and sky". "Ilma" used to mean things like sky, heaven, air, and weather, but Finnic languages eventually started using the Indo-European loan "taivas" for the first two.
After living in Finland a few years we got a dog, so I was often holding a big bone in my hand and saying the Finnish word for it, "luu". Something felt so correct and ancient about it, like luu is - and could only ever have been - the word that means the concept of a bone. I looked it up and luu is Proto-Finno-Ugric, and one of the oldest words to stick around in the Finnish language.
I have great respect for that first person to shake mammoth bone in another person's face saying "luu". They nailed it.
My best friend George (Gyuri) from college is Hungarian and I've picked up a few words (mostly cuss words) from him. One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (how long you articulate it) is significant. Finnish uses doubled letters for this, Hungarian uses accents (a vs á, o vs ó, etc.) for vowels and doubled letters for consonants. I've gotten to where I can hear the difference when listening to George speak Hungarian but it took some effort.
I've yet to hear a non-Finn get doubled consonants right, ever. Kukkakaali. Ikkuna.
Somewhat easier but still challenging is getting the wovels in the right place. They're just different, and the barrier is as hard going the other way but Finns have more practice in speaking English than the other way around. It's similar to the idea that it's very very hard to learn a tonal language if you grew with non-tonal languages.
> One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (how long you articulate it) is significant
I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure it exists in English as well.
Absolutely, think "lick" vs "leak". I think the author means Hungarian maybe uses very similar looking letters to denote this (ie "lik" and "lík").
In Hungarian also every vowel comes in pairs of short-long: a-á (what vs high),
e-é (ever vs eight), "o-ó" (moss vs most), "u-ú" (put vs you), "ö-ő" (fur vs ... well long version has no English equivalent I think but German does: schön).
"Hungarian has seven pairs of corresponding short and long vowels. Their phonetic values do not exactly match up with each other, so ⟨e⟩ represents /ɛ/ and ⟨é⟩ represents /eː/; likewise, ⟨a⟩ represents /ɒ/ while ⟨á⟩ represents /aː/.[14] For the other pairs, the short vowels are slightly lower and more central, and the long vowels more peripheral."
Typically, when people talk about "long" and "short" vowels they are referring to a combination of duration and pronunciation (e.g. English "bat" vs. "bate"), and that appears to be the case here as well. If you are interpreting the terms differently, I'm not sure what sense you have in mind.
> Typically, when people talk about "long" and "short" vowels they are referring to a combination of duration and pronunciation (e.g. English "bat" vs. "bate"), and that appears to be the case here as well.
Finnish vowels and most Hungarian vowels come in short-long pairs that
- only their lengths differ, their pronunciations do not (meaning: IPA denotes them with the same letter but with or without a colon)
- their lengths are *phonemic*, that is they are *said to be* different phonemes, they are *perceived as* different phonemes, and there are example words that differ only at them
You can observe this property in the table I've linked for i, o, ö, u, ü [0]. You can find minimal pairs for them at [1]. (Note that [1] groups these vowel pairs as "Vowels with length difference: I – Í | O – Ó | Ö – Ő | U – Ú | Ü – Ű" which does not include A - Á and E - É.)
A-á and e-é are not such pairs. They differ in pronunciation (see the IPA in [0]), and their lengths, while are somewhat defined, never contrast (no minimal pairs for them). Also you can pronounce any of these four with arbitrary length, it will stay the same phoneme.
edit: I find your previous quote 'misleading'. I would say 'wrong', but it avoids to say anything factual. At least in out of context--the rest of the wiki page clarifies everything.
Your position sounds cogent and may well be a more accurate description of Hungarian (e.g. that its long/short vowels are more like Latin than English). I don't know Hungarian, so I can't say.
The rest of this thread is consistent with people assuming the broader definition of long/short.
This is an important sign when someone who is not Italian speaks Italian. The double consonant, for example in the word bello/a, indicates a longer “l” sound, but English speakers in particular do not hear the longer sound and therefore pronounce it as belo/a. Or, when they are told about the longer sound, they pronounce it in a caricatured way as bellllo/a.
Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and ‘e’ do change sound when lengthened, but some don’t. Those are the ones that are harder to distinguish for speakers of languages like English.
I have a Finnish friend here in Switzerland who believes Finnish is impossible to learn as an adult. I think because of the conjugations. She has a son and she is divorced from a Spanish man who remarried a Greek woman. Her son speaks German (Swiss school), French (Swiss school), English (Swiss school and all the other children at school), Spanish (father), Greek (step-mother and step-siblings), and because she makes a point of speaking Finnish with him at home, Finnish.
He has no problem with any of the languages including Finnish but she's still convinced that she needs to force it on him before he's an adult so that he can... well, I'm not sure why.
> He has no problem with any of the languages including Finnish but she's still convinced that she needs to force it on him before he's an adult so that he can... well, I'm not sure why.
Seeing your kid speak your native language is a delight regardless of the circumstances.
In the end, all cultures in existence are very sticky and want to survive and replicate. The ones that don't didn't make it into the modern age.
I have a(n English) friend who moved to Finland as an adult (in her 30s) and is now fluent in Finnish (and English, just the two languages for her) so it is certainly possible.
I have very jealous of your friend’s multi-lingual son though!
For an English speaker it would be difficult. It is a highly synthetic language (meaning the markers which tell you which parts of the sentence are doing what), compared to English which is an analytical language (meaning there are extra words like prepositions which tell you which part of the sentence is doing what). This is why Finnish (and other Uralic languages’ words) look so long to us, because where we in English would use prepositions and word order to denote object, subject etc., much of that is expressed in Finnish through suffixes.
Perhaps for a speaker of another synthetic language like Polish it might be easier to learn Finnish as their brain might would already have the wiring but even then, as the article notes Finnish is not an Indo-European language so it is further removed still.
The pessimist says: Finnish is too hard for an adult to learn, mission impossible.
The realist says: With 10 years of hard work, it's doable.
The optimist says: I can do it in 5 years.
Myself I was an optimist and I kind of did it in 5 years, but it was tight. However, after having spoken it daily for 25 more years I get more and more pessimistic: There are several aspects I will not master in this life.
English speaker living in Finland (15+ years) checking in. It’s doable but very difficult. I haven’t succeeded and of all the foreigners I know - only a handful have learnt the language to the point of being able to function. Most of them Germans - interestingly.
IMO the hardest parts of learning a new language as an adult is
a) convincing yourself its worth the effort: almost every time an adult runs into a confusing element of a new language, they find themselves calculating how many people in the world speak this language, probability they don't speak english and likelihood of running into this person and circumstance, and it's easy to justify giving up and moving on
b) avoiding forcing it into the framework of your first language: if you have one distinctly favored language already, it's very hard not to try shove the new language you are learning into the former's mold, and this can be counterproductive in learning most languages that don't share an ancestor with your favored one.
a) is greatly mitigated by forcing yourself to be in said context by living in a place prioritizing that language. b) is greatly mitigated by already being bilingual+ with languages from distinct origins (eg: mandarin chinese and english) before learning a new one, so you can place the new language on a spectrum with the ones you already know instead of confined by the rules of just one.
longtime lurker first time account maker. i wouldnt say this was the first time i was tempted to express what felt to me as due acknowledgment nor was this the most compelling, but personal circumstances aligned with the what is apparently a "universal" (as far as human cognition is phenomenologically similar at least among a normal cluster) applicability of your observation on learning as we age, specifically the transactional social/market value of investing one's remaining lifetime. i especially loved the quasiglobal (euro.. swiss euro your emphasis) scope of the swiss school polyglot generator, definitely captured a sense of immensity in your narration (at least to me who understands how one language i dont know is a huge chunk of a known universe i am blind to) so ye anyway thanks, your post was a welcome dose of motivation to learn something complex yet relatively inane but ultimately disproportionately interesting tonight guiltfree not necessarily a new language but something i can brute clone in a childlike brain without the overhead of integrating it with the collective garbage ive recorded of my pov of the history of the universe so far. (i wish)
No, brain plasticity is real. Even people who move to another country as adults and spend 100% of their time speaking that country’s language almost never learn to speak it with native-level intuition and a native-sounding accent (though they can reach pretty high levels). Children do, without even trying.
I feel you are both having very similar views, just your somewhat bad-faith interpretation of their words makes this unnecessarily complicated: the person you are responding to is probably largely talking about those who "don't even try", while you are talking about the thin margins towards perfection.
To me, they both seem to be talking about what explains the perceived difference in effectiveness and efficiency between children and adults when they learn a new language.
The first comment seems to be arguing that the difference is "literally just a function of time and exposure opportunity and nothing else" (explicitly ruling out a significant effect related to a difference in brain plasticity related to age), while the comment you're answering to argues that brain plasticity, even under the same conditions of time and exposure opportunity, makes a significant difference.
But you also implied that it's a question of being and adult or not, as if it's a cut-off. It isn't.
If you watch people and you know when they started to learn a new language you can see a pretty strong statistical trend (what I've been exposed to is lots of immigrants who came to the country at various ages): The youngest children learn the language relatively quickly, and there's no accent. If they're around 9 or ten they still learn the language quickly, but the accent may remain for several years. And this gradually "worsen", in a way, as they start learning the language at a later age.
But there are lots of outliers, both ways. There are a few people I know who learned my language to absolute perfection, 100% native in every possible way, in their late twenties.
On the other hand there are also a large majority of people learning my language as mature adults and becoming fluent to the extent that nobody really cares about accent or way of speech - they're not sounding "native", but it's perfectly fine and doesn't matter. People stop noticing, it's just part of who they are.
Though when you get to around sixty it's definitely harder, but still doable.
And it varies between people and it matters a lot what language you're trying to learn.
You may have meant it like you say but in fact you did write
"..Even people who move to another country as adults and spend 100% of their time speaking that country’s language almost never learn to speak it with native-level intuition and a native-sounding accent (though they can reach pretty high levels). Children do, without even trying"
You simply differed between adults and children. If you meant "it gets more and more difficult the farther you move from childhood".. well fine, but you didn't write the equivalent of 'further north than Brazil' so you should expect to get questioned about that.
I get your point about time availability. This however doesn't explain why it's common for young adults to learn faster than older adults.
Often young adults are even more time constrained than older generations (new family, young kids, possibly less stable job situation, etc.) and yet older adults are usually the ones who have a harder time learning a language (as a "serial" migrant I have experienced this personally). So I don't think that time is the only factor.
Well.. I didn't really get proficient in English until I was in my thirties. I learned another language around that time as well, though not to full fluency (only because the option of continuing went away). And absorbing and understanding of German too.. The actual point is only that I remember how it felt - how listening and other kind of input molded my brain, relatively quickly (and sounds and words started echoing around in my brain). Now, thirty years later, it feels like my brain is much stiffer and everything takes much longer, when it comes to injecting a language (fortunately everything else still works as it should).
So, 'adult' isn't really right in my opinion / experience - I know many people who were adults and could absorb another language relatively easily.
What seems to happen is that it does change for the worse as the decades go by. But it's not as simple as adult vs child. And it's not by orders of magnitude in any case, it's more linear than that.
Learning a new language as an adult is brutally hard.
I spoke four languages by elementary school, including learning a new one (portuguese) in fifth grade. It was all seamless, zero effort, perfect local accent. So I have plenty of language background.
I've spent almost 20 years now as an adult trying to learn french and find it impossible. Still speak it at a 2-year old level, at best. I have constant daily exposure to french, it's just an impossible language. Or that learning a new language as an adult it impossible.
I think I recall seeing the Swedish version of this word listed among cognates with "boy". It seems probable from the pronunciation that the Swedish word is loaned from Finnish, and not the other way around. The meaning is identical to "boy" and the pronunciation is close.
I don't remember seeing any source confirming or refuting the connection.
This is the entry for 'poika' in a Finnish etymological dictionary (Nykysuomen etymologinen sanakirja), run through deepl:
"The word has definite etymological equivalents in both closely related and distantly related languages, e.g. Karelian and Votic poika, Ludic and Vepsian poig}, Estonian poeg, Livonian puoga, Komi and Udmurt pi, Mansi pig, and Hungarian fiu. Possible equivalents are also the initial parts of the Mordvin word pijo 'grandchild' and the Mari word puerge 'male person' (erge 'man'). The original form of the word has been reconstructed as *pojka. The Swedish pojke, which in the past also meant 'servant boy', is apparently a loanword from Finnish. In contrast, the English boy and the etymologically related German Bube have different origins."
From what I can see, the etymology for "boy" beyond relatively modern cognates is still undetermined. It could have entered germanic before 900 and left no written traces before later appearing in Middle English. Finns and Estonians were involved in sea trade around that time (borrowing words such as kauppa, cognate with "shop") so a word for "servant boy" would have been useful.
In particular, the pronunciation of Estonian "poeg" and "poiss" seem too close to be entirely coincidental.
We read and write so much more English than Finnish when working with software, so the English terms bubble up naturally.
I have a strong dislike against setting the language of my OS, or most applications, to Finnish. Application translations are extremely inconsistent, sometimes even nonsensical. The absolute worst case is seeing only translated error messages without error codes. It's nearly impossible to search help or follow step-by-step guides.
I definitely should improve my knowledge of "proper" Finnish IT terms. Some of them have very intuitive meanings:
- hashing -> hajautus: (chaotically) splitting, scattering things away from each other
I think even that is more 90s and it’s getting replaced by just using the English words - sometimes pronounced as if it was Finnish but the final form is that part of the language is just English. Brainrot globalization!
I don't think it is as clear with the Russian word for market (торг) being derived from the name of the Finnish city, because related words (trh in Czech, targ in Polish...) (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/t...) are used in most Slavic languages, so this origin explanation feels a bit strange.
It's debatable whether that's an accent or a slightly funny way of speaking. He's extremely soft spoken in that interview, like using conditionals to soften his statements. Maybe he was just nervous. He's also speaking quite formally, like a newsreader would, using fairly few contractions.
Using Finnish swear words is quite common in Swedish speaking Finns. Finnish expletives particularly sound stronger (probably due to the harder consonants): Perkele!, Saatana, Vittu!
That's entirely false. A lot of Fenno-Swedes do not speak Finnish well. And virtually no Finn speak Swedish. They all loathe it because they are forced to learn it at school. Adult Finns can at most say a few canned sentences in Swedish.
I have never heard someone say "I am bilingual" when what they meant is "I studied another language in school and can somehow understand a few sentences". To me, and I believe, to most people, being bilingual means speaking two languages fluently.
You can get by with just Swedish if you live in a city or town where a large percentage of the population are native Swedish speakers. In Ekenäs, for example, around 80% of the population have Swedish as their native language.
Along the coast of southern and western Finland there are many bilingual Swedish/Finnish municipalities where most of the native Swedish speaking population lives. And on the island of Åland the overwhelming majority of the population are native Swedish speakers.
On the other hand in Central and Eastern Finland you aren’t going to get by with just Swedish.
perkeleen vittupää! I need to use this the next time our junior wants to merge something copy pasted from an LLM that not only breaks something but doesn't even do what it's suposed to do.
Interesting how accurately it has preserved some early Germanic forms verbatim. Wonder if Finnish has been relatively conservative in the same way that nearby Lithuanian is a relatively conservative Indo-European language.
Finnish has been very peripheral and isolated due to geography. It is closely related to Estonian, but remains much more similar to their common archaic root, while Estonian has streamlined and developed due to more contact and exchange.
at the time "proto-Germanic" is claimed to have been spoken, most of Germany spoke a slavic/celtic/local dialects unrelated to what was being spoken in Norway or Sweden and the association was constructed by german nordicists of the 18th century that drove popular indo-european philology based around grammar protocols established by international trade or diplomacy instead of words and tones used by natives in life and labor
At the time of proto-germanic, it would have been spoken only in the northern parts of present day Germany, besides southern Scandinavia. The language spread and diverged during the first millennium AD.
Japanese too. Once you get past the alphabet being different, there are an enormous number of loan words (mostly from English). I bet walking around Tokyo you could read half the signs if you spent a couple of days just learning katakana.
I was reading some Japanese sentence and I stumbled upon word "tsuitaa" which I knew had to be English loan word. I kept reading it aloud over and over in hope that I would figure it out. I didn't so I finally gave up and moved on, the next word was "feisubukku" which was easy and it made me immediately realize what the "tsuitaa" was.
God yeah, sometimes I'll read the katakana and sit there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what the damned English is, pronouncing it a hundred different ways until it finally clicks.
And don’t forget all the Sino-Japanese loanwords (kango, 漢語), which has made up a huge chunk of the vocabulary for centuries, long before the current influx of English loanwords.
It's interesting that whereas old kango are Chinese loanwords, many newer ones are made-up words, and some even got backported into the Chinese language!
The newer words were usually made up to explain Western philosophical and scientific concepts. A lot of this work was done in an academic context, so whoever came up with an appropriate translation first got to be cited by everyone else.
"there are an enormous number of loan words (mostly from English)."
Actually, no. Most of the loan words are from Chinese, if you look at the full vocabulary of Japanese. Old Chinese. It's a huge part of the Japanese vocabulary.
Then you have a lot of loan words (from later times) from Portuguese, Dutch, and even German. And English. But even words like the word for beer (ビール), which sounds something like "beer-oo" isn't from English. It's from Dutch "bier".
In any case, the modern loan words are nearly always written in katakana, while loan words from traditional Chinese aren't. You don't see them as easily, while you can quickly spot modern loan words and there aren't _that_ many. Even though new loan words tend to come more from English nowadays.
Also there are many cases when a word is just a calque. Like vízfej. I wouldn’t call this a Hungarian word in the strictest sense, because it exists only because of other languages, even when víz and fej are Hungarian words. It clearly comes from German, or maybe Latin, or even Greek.
Clickbaity title: In the text he analyses that Finnish has preserved loaned aspects that the indo-germanic languages have lost ages ago. So we indo-germanic speakers don't know them.
That there are plenty of words in Finnish which have indo-germanic roots is without doubt. A majority of things introduced after 1500. But recognizing similarity of single words is not knowing a language. The structure of the language is so different, that even common grammatical concepts like singular and plural or subject and object don't really match to define the rules. Finnish has five house, but fives trousers. The list goes on and on with concepts far too difficult to explain here.
> Clickbaity title: In the text he analyses that Finnish has preserved loaned aspects that the indo-germanic languages have lost ages ago. So we indo-germanic speakers don't know them.
"Indo-Germanic" is a dated and ethno-nationalist and mythical term, popularized by the Nazis, implying a false stronger affinity between the Indic and the Germanic languages than between either and the other Indo European languages, and used in service of the Nazi master race mythology [1].
I don't know for sure. I am pretty sure I did not learn it in school. I read German press daily from the 1970s to the 1990s, less frequently thereafter. So I guess that's the origin. I have never been interested in linguistics as a science. I speak 4 foreign languages, so I have some experience in comparing languages.
A sibling comment says that indo-germanic remains a standard scientific term in German, there is no nationalist background. I cannot comment on the correctness of that claim, but it would explain why I used it. German press is not suspect of nationalism, quite the opposite. (There are of course exceptions, but I have never read those. I am part of the pre 1990 generation that feels uncomfortable when seeing German flags flown by individuals in public.)
> A sibling comment says that indo-germanic remains a standard scientific term in German, there is no nationalist background.
I replied to the sibling about why I think the English word has strong nationalist connections.
I don't know about its German equivalent (Wiktionary claims it's a synonym for Indo-European), but this discussion thread is in English, and furthermore concerns linguistics, and it that context, it has nationalistic connections.
Even the Internet thinks so: the second link on google when you search for the term is a Wikipedia article about the nationalist myth it represents. What appears when you search for it in German?
I understand you didn't use it nationalistically, of course. Sometimes things good and bad are both lost and gained in translation.
If you search for "indogermanisch" you're going to get the Wikipedia article canonically named "indogermanische Sprachen" first. The second result I see is the English Wikipedia article called "Indo-European languages" and the rest of the articles also appear to be very scientific.
Maybe the term has some weird connotations in English, but that's certainly not true everywhere and it's also not necessarily true in linguistic discourse because English only became relevant as a scientific language relatively recently (German and French used to be much more common) and there's still to this date a lot of linguistic research being published in languages other than English (e.g. why would somebody who researches the German language publish in English?).
> Maybe the term has some weird connotations in English, but that's certainly not true everywhere and it's also not necessarily true in linguistic discourse because English only became relevant as a scientific language relatively recently (German and French used to be much more common).
This discussion is in English though, not German or French.
Historically, the term Indo-Germanic was used first, and it's still used prominently used e.g. in German.
From Wikipedia :
> Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India.[10][11] A synonym is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French (indo-germanique) in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European, although in German indogermanisch remains the standard scientific term.
I have no problem saying that Indo-European is a preferable term nowadays, but to claim that the term "indo-germanic" is ethno-nationalist is just absurd. Using two extreme branches of a family to describe the family is a very common practice in linguistics.
> I have no problem saying that Indo-European is a preferable term nowadays, but to claim that the term "indo-germanic" is ethno-nationalist is just absurd.
It's not absurd because it was used ethno-nationalistically, by both Indians and Germans in the past. I've certainly heard it used in English exactly that way. In English, and especially in linguistics contexts, its nationalist associations are clear.
Furthermore, it's also patently incorrect: there is no higher affinity between the Indic and Germanic branches of Indo-European.
"Indo-European" is a term derived from the geographic span of the language family, not a particular language at either end (there is no "Indian" or "European" language). In contrast, the latter half of Indo-Germanic specifically refers to the Germanic sub-branch, to the exclusion of the many other Indo European sub-branches.
The fabrication of that supposed affinity to the exclusion of the other branches was a specifically nationalist exercise, different only in degree to more egregious things like the appropriation of the swastika (whose name and most prominent use is Indic). We know this because the Indo-European family was uncovered by William Jones when he observed the affinities of Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, not the Germanic languages (those connections then quickly followed). So its identity was always broader than Germanic from the moment of its discovery.
Therefore, Indo-Germanic doesn't make sense for the same reason Indo-Hellenic or Indo-Celtic don't make sense.
The oldest sub-branch affinity we can deduce in the Indo-European language family is the centum/satem split, which Indic and Germanic languages are on opposite sides of, and even that split is difficult to track down to single branch point, it could be an independent development in different sub-branches.
If it had been initially called Indo-Celtic or Indo-Romance and those names had stuck, it would be equally fine, but that's not what happened historically.
You're fighting against windmills, there are no perfect names for huge language families, this gets even worse when we look at certain language families in other continents. It's very common to just pick two subbranches (or geographic regions), combine them and call it a day (e.g. Sino-Tibetan).
> If it had been initially called Indo-Celtic or Indo-Romance and those names had stuck, it would be equally fine, but that's not what happened historically.
Yes, and in English, the language of this discussion, Indo-European is the term that is used, not Indo-Germanic.
A large photo of some lake, that isn't even named, which contributes nothing to the article -- you need to scroll two pages to get over it, and it's before the first sentence of the article.
Maps that contain text and provide real context to the article's premise -- so small that the page needs to be zoomed in. Original images are slightly bigger, so the website actually makes them even smaller than they are.
The scale of the image, which makes it impossible to fit in one screen, makes this hard to spot if one's not intimately familiar with Finland's geography.
The lake itself is also interesting, but the fact that it was artifically shaped like this, makes it a little bit less interesting.
I lived in Finland for three years; not a chance of absorbing even the most basic things. I can mumble a handful of words and that's about it. Most of those words are in the article.
I'm Dutch. I learned English in school. And some basic French and German. And a bit of Latin. My French was actually getting decent by the time I quit studying it. Good enough to read some simple books. But I've forgotten most of it. I moved to Sweden in 1998 and lived there for 2 years and picked up a basic understanding of the language. Easy; lots in common with German, English, and Dutch. And the grammar is very simple and regular. I can still pick apart written Swedish/Danish/Norwegian pretty easily (they share the same grammar and a lot of vocabulary).
When I moved to Finland where Swedish is an official language, I used that for official things like taxes. It's otherwise completely useless in daily life as no Finnish speaking Finn will bother speaking Swedish and there are only a 10% or so Swedish speaking ones who all speak decent Finnish. In fact I took my Swedish beginners class in Sweden with a few Finnish exchange students. They all had to learn it in school but clearly not to the point where they were any good at it. Mind you, this was a class for beginners with essentially no Swedish skills whatsoever.
Getting by with English is easy in Finland. Essentially everyone speaks it and so few foreigners are able to master Finnish that it's just easier for everyone to stick to English for the locals rather than patiently waiting for the foreigners to string a few words together. They'll just roll their eyes and switch to English at the first hint of you being foreign.
In other countries, you actually get a lot of shit for not mastering the local language. Not a thing in Finland. I live in Germany where that very much is a thing.
Germany is my fourth country and my German sucks; so I get plenty of shit from the locals. I get by with my high school German, very bad grammar, and ability to map enough of it back to Dutch/English that I can work my way through an email or document. My spoken German is extremely limited. I lack the vocabulary, grammar, etc. I'm OK with that. I've accepted that I'm not magically going to be turning into a person that is good at or enjoys studying a language for thousands of hours on end. Which is roughly what it takes. I actually have a busy job. I don't have the spare time. And what little I have, I need for resting and doing enjoyable things.
We have the power of AI these days. It's easier than ever to interact with people around the world. We're not that far off from a usable babel fish type universal translator solution being practical enough that you can just travel to outer Waziristan and strike up a conversation with a local sheep herder. It's getting there for written text. But real time verbal exchanges are still challenging. Kind of looking forward to that getting fixed.
Well.. with AI, or whatever good statistical translation tool you use, it's possible to have a one-to-one conversation, kind of. A Japanese friend (not young, speaks only Japanese) stayed for quite a while in northern Europe and communicated with their host via a hand-held translator. It worked out well enough, they're still in contact long after.
But you can't be part of a group of more than two people and do that. You can't inject your opinion about something in real time when the chatter is going on. You can't even get a translation in your ear about what people are saying, as while you're waiting for the translator to start translating (with Japanese the verb, and thus the action, comes last..) the next person is already talking.
There'll never be a Star Trek universal translator. And today's AI doesn't understand context enough to handle pronouns and gender when translating between languages which don't have them, or handles them differently.
You probably already have the babel fish in your pocket, most modern Samsung phones now will do a very acceptable real-time english-german translation - both in-person and during a call.
I'm aware; I have a Google Pixel phone. Real-time translations are still fairly useless for business meetings. I've also been experimenting with various AI transcription tools in online meetings, live subtitles, etc. They all suffer from the same problem: you need a lot of context to translate spoken language and that context is simply not there in a fragments of a conversation. It's in the category of better than nothing. But when you need to respond to somebody it's very distracting to be dealing with bad translations.
You get mis-understood and weirdly translated names, acronyms, jargon, etc. And that's on top of people with bad accents, microphones, etc. It's getting better but right now it's more of a LOL whut?! than that it's actually useful.
But it's clearly on a path to crossing into useful and from there to indispensable territory. Hopefully soon. Because I need this stuff in a hurry.
Maybe a little side-track, but I recently discovered this brilliant little Finnish folk song called "Ievan Polkka". There are dozens of versions on youtube; I can't understand a word of any of them, but I can't stop listening:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ievan+polkka
If you can only do three:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqthspSKZV8 - Acapella from Finland, circa 1990s
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX5OARoNFpg - Modern Russia, I sincerely hope none of these folks get drafted
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAyWN9ba9J8 - One of my favorite things on the internet, a South African guy remixing an blind Turkish street performer playing a Finnish song.
Delightful stuff.
This song was a meme in the early youtube days called "Leek Spin": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/leekspin-loituma-girl
Here's a modern take I like with banjo and accordion by Slack Bird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMvpeYBnwTg
Turns out you can play it with an angry face.
I like this version from Finnish folk metal band Korpiklaani: https://youtu.be/0LfT5qJH2zc?si=woi7bs2szdJu1BBu
Many, many years ago this song got me into folk metal which has been my favourite genre for the last decade and a half.
Thank you for this post. I needed motivation to get up and put more time into something I'm working on that is large and draining, and this short video reminded me why it is important.
Just makes you wanna spin a leek around, y'know?
Thanks! I just kind of knew that a "South African guy ... something music something ... remix" had to be The Kiffness.
This little Finnish folk song is one of the most famous and popular meme songs of all time.
Thank you that second link made my day!
I think Scandinavians my age know "ei sa peittaa". Basically "do not cover". When bored on the toilet before phones, reading whatever labels was the norm, and they often had a Finnish version. This was the label on the radiator.
And condiment labels from reading them during dinner. That’s 90% of the Finnish I know.
*Ei saa peittää. :)
I knew there were some ¨'s sprinkled in, but felt it was safer my way than to botch it up even more, heh. (Could've googled it, but that's less fun).
I've visited Finland a lot the later years due to my company starting a fulfillment center there. It was quite interesting how well I could get by with my Norwegian most places. Either because signage also was in Swedish, words often similar enough (except those that are very very far off, lol), or I even could speak Norwegian to some coworkers that then replied in Swedish (and not all of them even being Finns with Swedish as their native language).
Also "Hoitoaine, meaning "Conditioner".
For a brief attempt at a Finnish webshop I also happen to know "Osta Nyt" (Buy now) and "Verkkokauppa" (Online store).
Hoitoaine is actually two words, “hoito” = treatment + “aine” = substance.
So you know a bit more Finnish than you thought!
I should book my next vacation in Finland, the wife already wants to visit Moomin World.
My mother is Finnish, and my parents traveled and mover around a lot during our younger years - but we did live in Finland from I was age 3 to 7, so Finnish is the language I first learned to speak fluently.
Picking it up again once a year wasn't hard (usually when we'd get relatives visiting us, or the other way around), but around the time I became a teenager, I started speaking less - for no other reason than that I traveled less to relatives during the summers. These days I can read some, and listen to some conversation, but speaking is very hard - probably 25 years since I spoke it fluently. It is a shame, as I have to speak English with my grandparents, aunts, etc. - but language is def one of those "use it or lose it" things.
With that said, for the English speaking people - you'd be surprised how much Norwegian / Swedish / Danish (Germanic language) you can understand, with the amount of shared, or very similar words, the languages have.
Same way for us Scandinavians and Dutch. Can't really understand much when the language is spoken, but when reading some text, there's a lot of structure and words you can understand.
I'm natively british, but I live in the southern part of Sweden for the past 11 years, and I can only concur to what TrackerFF is saying.
There's a handful of false friends (Fart, Slut) but probably 10-15% of the scandinavian languages still have influence on modern english.
I say "still have root" because; if you weren't aware: the first common tongue variant of English was a proto-germanic language from the "Angles" of Denmark. "Angle"-ish, if you would.
Its more strange how the scandiavian dialects have a broader application in Scots english (Barn/Baen for child, Kirk for Church for example) - my family are Scottish so that was a weird surprise.
Regardless, if you're going to try to learn a Scandinavian Language: Stick to Norwegiean or Stockholm-Swedish. The Danish and Southern Swedish dialect (Skånsk) is difficult to unpick word from word and will leave you bewildered. But you will understand more than you might originally expect to if you visit Stockholm and have a simple pocket dictionary. :D
I played the game Noita where the enemies have inscrutable names like "Haulikkohiisi." I was amused to learn that is just the Finnish for "Shotgun Goblin", and that was the general pattern of names
What's especially funny about the names in Noita is that a lot of them are Finnish colloquialisms or jokes, e.g.
Ukko is also the god of thunder in Finnish mytology
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukko
Oh, ha. Totally missed that reference - ignore me :)
> - Stendari (fire mage) is "cigarette lighter" (slang)
From Swedish "tändare".
- Stevari (holy temple guardian) is "mall cop" (slang)
From STV (Suomen Teollisuuden Vartiointi) security firm.
This is something I love about Finnish as an outsider: instead of loaning words they create beautifully poetic compounds. I have lost my list but remember comet being "tail-star", capital being "head-city", and world being "ground-air".
That can go wrong too. They (the guardians of language, prim and proper) tried to make "swap file" be "heittovaihtotiedosto", literally "thrown replacement record collection". Thrown as in the things being swapped are in the air while being exchanged, not placed somewhere temporarily. In the real world, lots of computer-related terminology ended up being just transliterated from English directly, along the lines of procedure -> proseduuri, server -> serveri, icon -> ikoni.
"Head city" is just the literal meaning of "capital city".
"Maailma", on the other hand, is an old word, and its original meaning was more like "earth and sky". "Ilma" used to mean things like sky, heaven, air, and weather, but Finnic languages eventually started using the Indo-European loan "taivas" for the first two.
After living in Finland a few years we got a dog, so I was often holding a big bone in my hand and saying the Finnish word for it, "luu". Something felt so correct and ancient about it, like luu is - and could only ever have been - the word that means the concept of a bone. I looked it up and luu is Proto-Finno-Ugric, and one of the oldest words to stick around in the Finnish language.
I have great respect for that first person to shake mammoth bone in another person's face saying "luu". They nailed it.
The other “uu” words in Finnish feel ancient too. When Finnish children are asked to come up with rhymes, these are often the ones they suggest:
luu = bone
kuu = Moon
suu = mouth
muu = other
You can practically imagine the apes in the first act of the movie “2001” coming up with these words to describe their environment.
(The monolith could be a “muu muu”, the Other Other, to distinguish it from the basic “muu” of the other tribe.)
Belonging here: puu = tree
My best friend George (Gyuri) from college is Hungarian and I've picked up a few words (mostly cuss words) from him. One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (how long you articulate it) is significant. Finnish uses doubled letters for this, Hungarian uses accents (a vs á, o vs ó, etc.) for vowels and doubled letters for consonants. I've gotten to where I can hear the difference when listening to George speak Hungarian but it took some effort.
I've yet to hear a non-Finn get doubled consonants right, ever. Kukkakaali. Ikkuna.
Somewhat easier but still challenging is getting the wovels in the right place. They're just different, and the barrier is as hard going the other way but Finns have more practice in speaking English than the other way around. It's similar to the idea that it's very very hard to learn a tonal language if you grew with non-tonal languages.
> One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (how long you articulate it) is significant
I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure it exists in English as well.
Absolutely, think "lick" vs "leak". I think the author means Hungarian maybe uses very similar looking letters to denote this (ie "lik" and "lík").
In Hungarian also every vowel comes in pairs of short-long: a-á (what vs high), e-é (ever vs eight), "o-ó" (moss vs most), "u-ú" (put vs you), "ö-ő" (fur vs ... well long version has no English equivalent I think but German does: schön).
a-á and e-é are not short-long pairs. a is /ɒ/, á is /aː/, e is /ɛ/, é is /eː/.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_phonology#Vowel_exam...
From your source (page up a bit):
"Hungarian has seven pairs of corresponding short and long vowels. Their phonetic values do not exactly match up with each other, so ⟨e⟩ represents /ɛ/ and ⟨é⟩ represents /eː/; likewise, ⟨a⟩ represents /ɒ/ while ⟨á⟩ represents /aː/.[14] For the other pairs, the short vowels are slightly lower and more central, and the long vowels more peripheral."
So yes, they apparently are "short-long pairs".
No, not in the sense we are talking about it.
Not in the sense _you_ are talking about perhaps?
Typically, when people talk about "long" and "short" vowels they are referring to a combination of duration and pronunciation (e.g. English "bat" vs. "bate"), and that appears to be the case here as well. If you are interpreting the terms differently, I'm not sure what sense you have in mind.
> Typically, when people talk about "long" and "short" vowels they are referring to a combination of duration and pronunciation (e.g. English "bat" vs. "bate"), and that appears to be the case here as well.
Finnish vowels and most Hungarian vowels come in short-long pairs that
You can observe this property in the table I've linked for i, o, ö, u, ü [0]. You can find minimal pairs for them at [1]. (Note that [1] groups these vowel pairs as "Vowels with length difference: I – Í | O – Ó | Ö – Ő | U – Ú | Ü – Ű" which does not include A - Á and E - É.)A-á and e-é are not such pairs. They differ in pronunciation (see the IPA in [0]), and their lengths, while are somewhat defined, never contrast (no minimal pairs for them). Also you can pronounce any of these four with arbitrary length, it will stay the same phoneme.
[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_phonology#Vowel_exam...
[1] : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Hungarian_minimal_pa...
edit: I find your previous quote 'misleading'. I would say 'wrong', but it avoids to say anything factual. At least in out of context--the rest of the wiki page clarifies everything.
So yeah, we are talking about different things.
Your position sounds cogent and may well be a more accurate description of Hungarian (e.g. that its long/short vowels are more like Latin than English). I don't know Hungarian, so I can't say.
The rest of this thread is consistent with people assuming the broader definition of long/short.
This is an important sign when someone who is not Italian speaks Italian. The double consonant, for example in the word bello/a, indicates a longer “l” sound, but English speakers in particular do not hear the longer sound and therefore pronounce it as belo/a. Or, when they are told about the longer sound, they pronounce it in a caricatured way as bellllo/a.
Sure does! “Beach” and “bitch” differ only in vowel length in some accents, IME.
Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and ‘e’ do change sound when lengthened, but some don’t. Those are the ones that are harder to distinguish for speakers of languages like English.
Only some dialects of English have contrastive vowel length.
Considering the only Finnish I think I know is "sauna" and "perkele", it'd be hard to know less.
I have a Finnish friend here in Switzerland who believes Finnish is impossible to learn as an adult. I think because of the conjugations. She has a son and she is divorced from a Spanish man who remarried a Greek woman. Her son speaks German (Swiss school), French (Swiss school), English (Swiss school and all the other children at school), Spanish (father), Greek (step-mother and step-siblings), and because she makes a point of speaking Finnish with him at home, Finnish.
He has no problem with any of the languages including Finnish but she's still convinced that she needs to force it on him before he's an adult so that he can... well, I'm not sure why.
> He has no problem with any of the languages including Finnish but she's still convinced that she needs to force it on him before he's an adult so that he can... well, I'm not sure why.
Seeing your kid speak your native language is a delight regardless of the circumstances.
In the end, all cultures in existence are very sticky and want to survive and replicate. The ones that don't didn't make it into the modern age.
I have a(n English) friend who moved to Finland as an adult (in her 30s) and is now fluent in Finnish (and English, just the two languages for her) so it is certainly possible.
I have very jealous of your friend’s multi-lingual son though!
For an English speaker it would be difficult. It is a highly synthetic language (meaning the markers which tell you which parts of the sentence are doing what), compared to English which is an analytical language (meaning there are extra words like prepositions which tell you which part of the sentence is doing what). This is why Finnish (and other Uralic languages’ words) look so long to us, because where we in English would use prepositions and word order to denote object, subject etc., much of that is expressed in Finnish through suffixes.
Perhaps for a speaker of another synthetic language like Polish it might be easier to learn Finnish as their brain might would already have the wiring but even then, as the article notes Finnish is not an Indo-European language so it is further removed still.
The joke goes: There are 3 kinds of people
The pessimist says: Finnish is too hard for an adult to learn, mission impossible.
The realist says: With 10 years of hard work, it's doable.
The optimist says: I can do it in 5 years.
Myself I was an optimist and I kind of did it in 5 years, but it was tight. However, after having spoken it daily for 25 more years I get more and more pessimistic: There are several aspects I will not master in this life.
English speaker living in Finland (15+ years) checking in. It’s doable but very difficult. I haven’t succeeded and of all the foreigners I know - only a handful have learnt the language to the point of being able to function. Most of them Germans - interestingly.
Finnish or not, it is orders of magnitude harder to learn any language as an adult.
IMO the hardest parts of learning a new language as an adult is
a) convincing yourself its worth the effort: almost every time an adult runs into a confusing element of a new language, they find themselves calculating how many people in the world speak this language, probability they don't speak english and likelihood of running into this person and circumstance, and it's easy to justify giving up and moving on
b) avoiding forcing it into the framework of your first language: if you have one distinctly favored language already, it's very hard not to try shove the new language you are learning into the former's mold, and this can be counterproductive in learning most languages that don't share an ancestor with your favored one.
a) is greatly mitigated by forcing yourself to be in said context by living in a place prioritizing that language. b) is greatly mitigated by already being bilingual+ with languages from distinct origins (eg: mandarin chinese and english) before learning a new one, so you can place the new language on a spectrum with the ones you already know instead of confined by the rules of just one.
longtime lurker first time account maker. i wouldnt say this was the first time i was tempted to express what felt to me as due acknowledgment nor was this the most compelling, but personal circumstances aligned with the what is apparently a "universal" (as far as human cognition is phenomenologically similar at least among a normal cluster) applicability of your observation on learning as we age, specifically the transactional social/market value of investing one's remaining lifetime. i especially loved the quasiglobal (euro.. swiss euro your emphasis) scope of the swiss school polyglot generator, definitely captured a sense of immensity in your narration (at least to me who understands how one language i dont know is a huge chunk of a known universe i am blind to) so ye anyway thanks, your post was a welcome dose of motivation to learn something complex yet relatively inane but ultimately disproportionately interesting tonight guiltfree not necessarily a new language but something i can brute clone in a childlike brain without the overhead of integrating it with the collective garbage ive recorded of my pov of the history of the universe so far. (i wish)
I think this is literally just a function of time and exposure oppirtunity and nothing else.
An adult studying a language is spending like maybe 1% of the time studying that a child learning a language spends.
No, brain plasticity is real. Even people who move to another country as adults and spend 100% of their time speaking that country’s language almost never learn to speak it with native-level intuition and a native-sounding accent (though they can reach pretty high levels). Children do, without even trying.
I feel you are both having very similar views, just your somewhat bad-faith interpretation of their words makes this unnecessarily complicated: the person you are responding to is probably largely talking about those who "don't even try", while you are talking about the thin margins towards perfection.
To me, they both seem to be talking about what explains the perceived difference in effectiveness and efficiency between children and adults when they learn a new language.
The first comment seems to be arguing that the difference is "literally just a function of time and exposure opportunity and nothing else" (explicitly ruling out a significant effect related to a difference in brain plasticity related to age), while the comment you're answering to argues that brain plasticity, even under the same conditions of time and exposure opportunity, makes a significant difference.
I really can’t understand how you think we’re saying the same thing. He’s saying age doesn’t intrinsically matter and I’m saying it does.
But you also implied that it's a question of being and adult or not, as if it's a cut-off. It isn't.
If you watch people and you know when they started to learn a new language you can see a pretty strong statistical trend (what I've been exposed to is lots of immigrants who came to the country at various ages): The youngest children learn the language relatively quickly, and there's no accent. If they're around 9 or ten they still learn the language quickly, but the accent may remain for several years. And this gradually "worsen", in a way, as they start learning the language at a later age.
But there are lots of outliers, both ways. There are a few people I know who learned my language to absolute perfection, 100% native in every possible way, in their late twenties.
On the other hand there are also a large majority of people learning my language as mature adults and becoming fluent to the extent that nobody really cares about accent or way of speech - they're not sounding "native", but it's perfectly fine and doesn't matter. People stop noticing, it's just part of who they are.
Though when you get to around sixty it's definitely harder, but still doable. And it varies between people and it matters a lot what language you're trying to learn.
> But you also implied that it's a question of being and adult or not, as if it's a cut-off. It isn't.
No I didn't. I never said anywhere that it's a sharp cutoff rather than a sliding scale.
If I say Canada is further north than Brazil, it doesn't mean that latitude isn't a continuous spectrum.
You may have meant it like you say but in fact you did write
"..Even people who move to another country as adults and spend 100% of their time speaking that country’s language almost never learn to speak it with native-level intuition and a native-sounding accent (though they can reach pretty high levels). Children do, without even trying"
You simply differed between adults and children. If you meant "it gets more and more difficult the farther you move from childhood".. well fine, but you didn't write the equivalent of 'further north than Brazil' so you should expect to get questioned about that.
I get your point about time availability. This however doesn't explain why it's common for young adults to learn faster than older adults. Often young adults are even more time constrained than older generations (new family, young kids, possibly less stable job situation, etc.) and yet older adults are usually the ones who have a harder time learning a language (as a "serial" migrant I have experienced this personally). So I don't think that time is the only factor.
Well.. I didn't really get proficient in English until I was in my thirties. I learned another language around that time as well, though not to full fluency (only because the option of continuing went away). And absorbing and understanding of German too.. The actual point is only that I remember how it felt - how listening and other kind of input molded my brain, relatively quickly (and sounds and words started echoing around in my brain). Now, thirty years later, it feels like my brain is much stiffer and everything takes much longer, when it comes to injecting a language (fortunately everything else still works as it should).
So, 'adult' isn't really right in my opinion / experience - I know many people who were adults and could absorb another language relatively easily.
What seems to happen is that it does change for the worse as the decades go by. But it's not as simple as adult vs child. And it's not by orders of magnitude in any case, it's more linear than that.
If you have learned a few languages when young, learning another language as an adult is much easier.
Learning a new language as an adult is brutally hard.
I spoke four languages by elementary school, including learning a new one (portuguese) in fifth grade. It was all seamless, zero effort, perfect local accent. So I have plenty of language background.
I've spent almost 20 years now as an adult trying to learn french and find it impossible. Still speak it at a 2-year old level, at best. I have constant daily exposure to french, it's just an impossible language. Or that learning a new language as an adult it impossible.
Hey neighbour!
Growing up bi-(or even multi)-lingual is always a good opportunity when it comes to speaking, especially here in Switzerland.
There are 51 declension types that are not taught to natives. You're either born Finnish or you'll have to learn them on a case-by-case basis.
It seems possible the word "boy" was loaned from Finnish "poika", presumably then via proto-norse.
hm, neither etymonline nor wiktionary list that derivation; do you have a source?
I think I recall seeing the Swedish version of this word listed among cognates with "boy". It seems probable from the pronunciation that the Swedish word is loaned from Finnish, and not the other way around. The meaning is identical to "boy" and the pronunciation is close.
I don't remember seeing any source confirming or refuting the connection.
This is the entry for 'poika' in a Finnish etymological dictionary (Nykysuomen etymologinen sanakirja), run through deepl:
"The word has definite etymological equivalents in both closely related and distantly related languages, e.g. Karelian and Votic poika, Ludic and Vepsian poig}, Estonian poeg, Livonian puoga, Komi and Udmurt pi, Mansi pig, and Hungarian fiu. Possible equivalents are also the initial parts of the Mordvin word pijo 'grandchild' and the Mari word puerge 'male person' (erge 'man'). The original form of the word has been reconstructed as *pojka. The Swedish pojke, which in the past also meant 'servant boy', is apparently a loanword from Finnish. In contrast, the English boy and the etymologically related German Bube have different origins."
From what I can see, the etymology for "boy" beyond relatively modern cognates is still undetermined. It could have entered germanic before 900 and left no written traces before later appearing in Middle English. Finns and Estonians were involved in sea trade around that time (borrowing words such as kauppa, cognate with "shop") so a word for "servant boy" would have been useful.
In particular, the pronunciation of Estonian "poeg" and "poiss" seem too close to be entirely coincidental.
The blog discusses ancient loans, but you know a lot more Finnish than you think if you look at loans happening today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finglish
Especially in the IT world. Printteri tilttasi, klikkaa linkkiä, koodi bugittaa, buuttaa serveri!
We read and write so much more English than Finnish when working with software, so the English terms bubble up naturally.
I have a strong dislike against setting the language of my OS, or most applications, to Finnish. Application translations are extremely inconsistent, sometimes even nonsensical. The absolute worst case is seeing only translated error messages without error codes. It's nearly impossible to search help or follow step-by-step guides.
I definitely should improve my knowledge of "proper" Finnish IT terms. Some of them have very intuitive meanings:
- hashing -> hajautus: (chaotically) splitting, scattering things away from each other
Who needs English based IT words when things like "ikikiersiö" is an option!
I think even that is more 90s and it’s getting replaced by just using the English words - sometimes pronounced as if it was Finnish but the final form is that part of the language is just English. Brainrot globalization!
I don't think it is as clear with the Russian word for market (торг) being derived from the name of the Finnish city, because related words (trh in Czech, targ in Polish...) (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/t...) are used in most Slavic languages, so this origin explanation feels a bit strange.
The other way around, the city of Turku was named after the word for marketplace, "tǔrgǔ". The word's origin has been traced to the Novgorod area.
Read it again:
> The Finnish city of Turku [...] derives its name from [...]
If you're interested in learning languages by reading blocks of text with a word-by-word translator, I've built Pingtype to help with that:
https://pingtype.github.io/finnish.html
Yeah I know some Finnish. I learned it mostly from hearing Linus Torvalds swear in Finnish.
Torvalds is a Swedish-speaking Finn.
He speaks Finnish too (though I believe with an accent). https://youtu.be/Pt-X82HZlOU
It's debatable whether that's an accent or a slightly funny way of speaking. He's extremely soft spoken in that interview, like using conditionals to soften his statements. Maybe he was just nervous. He's also speaking quite formally, like a newsreader would, using fairly few contractions.
Using Finnish swear words is quite common in Swedish speaking Finns. Finnish expletives particularly sound stronger (probably due to the harder consonants): Perkele!, Saatana, Vittu!
Finnish has better swearwords.
They’re all bi(tri)lingual. You can’t really get by with just Swedish
That's entirely false. A lot of Fenno-Swedes do not speak Finnish well. And virtually no Finn speak Swedish. They all loathe it because they are forced to learn it at school. Adult Finns can at most say a few canned sentences in Swedish.
Nobody claims they all speak Finnish well, but the Swedish spoken in Finland is influenced by Finnish and typically includes some loans from Finnish.
The person I was answering to literally claims people are bilingual (Swedish + Finnish).
Being bilingual is a fuzzy concept: to many, it includes people who speak a language less well, but perhaps enough to get by.
For example, in a bilingual environment, it can be enough to understand two languages and to speak one.
I have never heard someone say "I am bilingual" when what they meant is "I studied another language in school and can somehow understand a few sentences". To me, and I believe, to most people, being bilingual means speaking two languages fluently.
Personally, I'd only call native-level speakers bilingual, but this has caused misunderstandings.
You can get by with just Swedish if you live in a city or town where a large percentage of the population are native Swedish speakers. In Ekenäs, for example, around 80% of the population have Swedish as their native language.
Along the coast of southern and western Finland there are many bilingual Swedish/Finnish municipalities where most of the native Swedish speaking population lives. And on the island of Åland the overwhelming majority of the population are native Swedish speakers.
On the other hand in Central and Eastern Finland you aren’t going to get by with just Swedish.
perkeleen vittupää! I need to use this the next time our junior wants to merge something copy pasted from an LLM that not only breaks something but doesn't even do what it's suposed to do.
Interesting how accurately it has preserved some early Germanic forms verbatim. Wonder if Finnish has been relatively conservative in the same way that nearby Lithuanian is a relatively conservative Indo-European language.
Finnish has been very peripheral and isolated due to geography. It is closely related to Estonian, but remains much more similar to their common archaic root, while Estonian has streamlined and developed due to more contact and exchange.
(Disclaimer: Finn)
at the time "proto-Germanic" is claimed to have been spoken, most of Germany spoke a slavic/celtic/local dialects unrelated to what was being spoken in Norway or Sweden and the association was constructed by german nordicists of the 18th century that drove popular indo-european philology based around grammar protocols established by international trade or diplomacy instead of words and tones used by natives in life and labor
At the time of proto-germanic, it would have been spoken only in the northern parts of present day Germany, besides southern Scandinavia. The language spread and diverged during the first millennium AD.
Nearly every word in every Uralic language pertaining to a tech level past the stone age is a loan word.
Japanese too. Once you get past the alphabet being different, there are an enormous number of loan words (mostly from English). I bet walking around Tokyo you could read half the signs if you spent a couple of days just learning katakana.
I was reading some Japanese sentence and I stumbled upon word "tsuitaa" which I knew had to be English loan word. I kept reading it aloud over and over in hope that I would figure it out. I didn't so I finally gave up and moved on, the next word was "feisubukku" which was easy and it made me immediately realize what the "tsuitaa" was.
God yeah, sometimes I'll read the katakana and sit there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what the damned English is, pronouncing it a hundred different ways until it finally clicks.
What is it?
"feisubukku" is Facebook so we are talking about web pages. Facebook and Tsuitaa are 2 social media sites.
"tsuitaa" = Twitter
Portuguese too. Most words related to christianity (and a few others too, like カボチャ or ボタン) were introduced in the 15th century by portuguese jesuits.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Po...
And don’t forget all the Sino-Japanese loanwords (kango, 漢語), which has made up a huge chunk of the vocabulary for centuries, long before the current influx of English loanwords.
It's interesting that whereas old kango are Chinese loanwords, many newer ones are made-up words, and some even got backported into the Chinese language!
The newer words were usually made up to explain Western philosophical and scientific concepts. A lot of this work was done in an academic context, so whoever came up with an appropriate translation first got to be cited by everyone else.
"there are an enormous number of loan words (mostly from English)."
Actually, no. Most of the loan words are from Chinese, if you look at the full vocabulary of Japanese. Old Chinese. It's a huge part of the Japanese vocabulary. Then you have a lot of loan words (from later times) from Portuguese, Dutch, and even German. And English. But even words like the word for beer (ビール), which sounds something like "beer-oo" isn't from English. It's from Dutch "bier".
In any case, the modern loan words are nearly always written in katakana, while loan words from traditional Chinese aren't. You don't see them as easily, while you can quickly spot modern loan words and there aren't _that_ many. Even though new loan words tend to come more from English nowadays.
The word for copper is a native uralic word and thus it's hypothesized that the uralic speakers unlocked the bronze age independently.
Native copper could be found pretty readily in prehistory
Számítógép?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/g%C3%A9pely
Also there are many cases when a word is just a calque. Like vízfej. I wouldn’t call this a Hungarian word in the strictest sense, because it exists only because of other languages, even when víz and fej are Hungarian words. It clearly comes from German, or maybe Latin, or even Greek.
That pre-dates IT revolution. I seen Hungarians using quite a lot of loanwords too.
The word kalsarikännit told me how compact the Finnish language can be. They even have a word for this! :-)
Clickbaity title: In the text he analyses that Finnish has preserved loaned aspects that the indo-germanic languages have lost ages ago. So we indo-germanic speakers don't know them.
That there are plenty of words in Finnish which have indo-germanic roots is without doubt. A majority of things introduced after 1500. But recognizing similarity of single words is not knowing a language. The structure of the language is so different, that even common grammatical concepts like singular and plural or subject and object don't really match to define the rules. Finnish has five house, but fives trousers. The list goes on and on with concepts far too difficult to explain here.
> Clickbaity title: In the text he analyses that Finnish has preserved loaned aspects that the indo-germanic languages have lost ages ago. So we indo-germanic speakers don't know them.
"Indo-Germanic" is a dated and ethno-nationalist and mythical term, popularized by the Nazis, implying a false stronger affinity between the Indic and the Germanic languages than between either and the other Indo European languages, and used in service of the Nazi master race mythology [1].
The correct term is Indo-European.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Indo-Germanic_People
Sorry, need to put that term on my black^W forbid list. Used it completely unconsciously.
I'm curious where you learned the term. It's not a term most people know these days.
I only know it from studying about how the Nazis appropriated and twisted the legitimate field of historical linguistics to support their objectives.
I've only heard it used to describe that ideology, or sadly, by acquaintances who subscribed to portions of that ideology.
I don't know for sure. I am pretty sure I did not learn it in school. I read German press daily from the 1970s to the 1990s, less frequently thereafter. So I guess that's the origin. I have never been interested in linguistics as a science. I speak 4 foreign languages, so I have some experience in comparing languages.
A sibling comment says that indo-germanic remains a standard scientific term in German, there is no nationalist background. I cannot comment on the correctness of that claim, but it would explain why I used it. German press is not suspect of nationalism, quite the opposite. (There are of course exceptions, but I have never read those. I am part of the pre 1990 generation that feels uncomfortable when seeing German flags flown by individuals in public.)
> A sibling comment says that indo-germanic remains a standard scientific term in German, there is no nationalist background.
I replied to the sibling about why I think the English word has strong nationalist connections.
I don't know about its German equivalent (Wiktionary claims it's a synonym for Indo-European), but this discussion thread is in English, and furthermore concerns linguistics, and it that context, it has nationalistic connections.
Even the Internet thinks so: the second link on google when you search for the term is a Wikipedia article about the nationalist myth it represents. What appears when you search for it in German?
I understand you didn't use it nationalistically, of course. Sometimes things good and bad are both lost and gained in translation.
> What appears when you search for it in German?
If you search for "indogermanisch" you're going to get the Wikipedia article canonically named "indogermanische Sprachen" first. The second result I see is the English Wikipedia article called "Indo-European languages" and the rest of the articles also appear to be very scientific.
Maybe the term has some weird connotations in English, but that's certainly not true everywhere and it's also not necessarily true in linguistic discourse because English only became relevant as a scientific language relatively recently (German and French used to be much more common) and there's still to this date a lot of linguistic research being published in languages other than English (e.g. why would somebody who researches the German language publish in English?).
> Maybe the term has some weird connotations in English, but that's certainly not true everywhere and it's also not necessarily true in linguistic discourse because English only became relevant as a scientific language relatively recently (German and French used to be much more common).
This discussion is in English though, not German or French.
Historically, the term Indo-Germanic was used first, and it's still used prominently used e.g. in German.
From Wikipedia :
> Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India.[10][11] A synonym is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French (indo-germanique) in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European, although in German indogermanisch remains the standard scientific term.
I have no problem saying that Indo-European is a preferable term nowadays, but to claim that the term "indo-germanic" is ethno-nationalist is just absurd. Using two extreme branches of a family to describe the family is a very common practice in linguistics.
> I have no problem saying that Indo-European is a preferable term nowadays, but to claim that the term "indo-germanic" is ethno-nationalist is just absurd.
It's not absurd because it was used ethno-nationalistically, by both Indians and Germans in the past. I've certainly heard it used in English exactly that way. In English, and especially in linguistics contexts, its nationalist associations are clear.
Furthermore, it's also patently incorrect: there is no higher affinity between the Indic and Germanic branches of Indo-European.
"Indo-European" is a term derived from the geographic span of the language family, not a particular language at either end (there is no "Indian" or "European" language). In contrast, the latter half of Indo-Germanic specifically refers to the Germanic sub-branch, to the exclusion of the many other Indo European sub-branches.
The fabrication of that supposed affinity to the exclusion of the other branches was a specifically nationalist exercise, different only in degree to more egregious things like the appropriation of the swastika (whose name and most prominent use is Indic). We know this because the Indo-European family was uncovered by William Jones when he observed the affinities of Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, not the Germanic languages (those connections then quickly followed). So its identity was always broader than Germanic from the moment of its discovery.
Therefore, Indo-Germanic doesn't make sense for the same reason Indo-Hellenic or Indo-Celtic don't make sense.
The oldest sub-branch affinity we can deduce in the Indo-European language family is the centum/satem split, which Indic and Germanic languages are on opposite sides of, and even that split is difficult to track down to single branch point, it could be an independent development in different sub-branches.
If it had been initially called Indo-Celtic or Indo-Romance and those names had stuck, it would be equally fine, but that's not what happened historically.
You're fighting against windmills, there are no perfect names for huge language families, this gets even worse when we look at certain language families in other continents. It's very common to just pick two subbranches (or geographic regions), combine them and call it a day (e.g. Sino-Tibetan).
> If it had been initially called Indo-Celtic or Indo-Romance and those names had stuck, it would be equally fine, but that's not what happened historically.
Yes, and in English, the language of this discussion, Indo-European is the term that is used, not Indo-Germanic.
I know "Korpiklaani" and "Tuomas Holopainen", I think I'm set
Eh, that modern web design.
A large photo of some lake, that isn't even named, which contributes nothing to the article -- you need to scroll two pages to get over it, and it's before the first sentence of the article.
Maps that contain text and provide real context to the article's premise -- so small that the page needs to be zoomed in. Original images are slightly bigger, so the website actually makes them even smaller than they are.
It so matches the times we live in today.
Just to clarify the significance of the photo: the body of water in it is Neitokainen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neitokainen
It is a lake in Finland that has the shape of Finland.
The scale of the image, which makes it impossible to fit in one screen, makes this hard to spot if one's not intimately familiar with Finland's geography.
The lake itself is also interesting, but the fact that it was artifically shaped like this, makes it a little bit less interesting.
I lived in Finland for three years; not a chance of absorbing even the most basic things. I can mumble a handful of words and that's about it. Most of those words are in the article.
I'm Dutch. I learned English in school. And some basic French and German. And a bit of Latin. My French was actually getting decent by the time I quit studying it. Good enough to read some simple books. But I've forgotten most of it. I moved to Sweden in 1998 and lived there for 2 years and picked up a basic understanding of the language. Easy; lots in common with German, English, and Dutch. And the grammar is very simple and regular. I can still pick apart written Swedish/Danish/Norwegian pretty easily (they share the same grammar and a lot of vocabulary).
When I moved to Finland where Swedish is an official language, I used that for official things like taxes. It's otherwise completely useless in daily life as no Finnish speaking Finn will bother speaking Swedish and there are only a 10% or so Swedish speaking ones who all speak decent Finnish. In fact I took my Swedish beginners class in Sweden with a few Finnish exchange students. They all had to learn it in school but clearly not to the point where they were any good at it. Mind you, this was a class for beginners with essentially no Swedish skills whatsoever.
Getting by with English is easy in Finland. Essentially everyone speaks it and so few foreigners are able to master Finnish that it's just easier for everyone to stick to English for the locals rather than patiently waiting for the foreigners to string a few words together. They'll just roll their eyes and switch to English at the first hint of you being foreign.
In other countries, you actually get a lot of shit for not mastering the local language. Not a thing in Finland. I live in Germany where that very much is a thing.
Germany is my fourth country and my German sucks; so I get plenty of shit from the locals. I get by with my high school German, very bad grammar, and ability to map enough of it back to Dutch/English that I can work my way through an email or document. My spoken German is extremely limited. I lack the vocabulary, grammar, etc. I'm OK with that. I've accepted that I'm not magically going to be turning into a person that is good at or enjoys studying a language for thousands of hours on end. Which is roughly what it takes. I actually have a busy job. I don't have the spare time. And what little I have, I need for resting and doing enjoyable things.
We have the power of AI these days. It's easier than ever to interact with people around the world. We're not that far off from a usable babel fish type universal translator solution being practical enough that you can just travel to outer Waziristan and strike up a conversation with a local sheep herder. It's getting there for written text. But real time verbal exchanges are still challenging. Kind of looking forward to that getting fixed.
Well.. with AI, or whatever good statistical translation tool you use, it's possible to have a one-to-one conversation, kind of. A Japanese friend (not young, speaks only Japanese) stayed for quite a while in northern Europe and communicated with their host via a hand-held translator. It worked out well enough, they're still in contact long after.
But you can't be part of a group of more than two people and do that. You can't inject your opinion about something in real time when the chatter is going on. You can't even get a translation in your ear about what people are saying, as while you're waiting for the translator to start translating (with Japanese the verb, and thus the action, comes last..) the next person is already talking.
There'll never be a Star Trek universal translator. And today's AI doesn't understand context enough to handle pronouns and gender when translating between languages which don't have them, or handles them differently.
You probably already have the babel fish in your pocket, most modern Samsung phones now will do a very acceptable real-time english-german translation - both in-person and during a call.
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS10000935/
I'm aware; I have a Google Pixel phone. Real-time translations are still fairly useless for business meetings. I've also been experimenting with various AI transcription tools in online meetings, live subtitles, etc. They all suffer from the same problem: you need a lot of context to translate spoken language and that context is simply not there in a fragments of a conversation. It's in the category of better than nothing. But when you need to respond to somebody it's very distracting to be dealing with bad translations.
You get mis-understood and weirdly translated names, acronyms, jargon, etc. And that's on top of people with bad accents, microphones, etc. It's getting better but right now it's more of a LOL whut?! than that it's actually useful.
But it's clearly on a path to crossing into useful and from there to indispensable territory. Hopefully soon. Because I need this stuff in a hurry.
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