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Mick’s 2012 log Teams *jäŋe / *ledús & Žá

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mick33
Senior Member
United States
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1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 89 of 108
27 September 2012 at 10:20am | IP Logged 
I have returned, as promised, to write more about Finnish grammar. I decided I wanted to have a look at the long form of the first infinitive even though I haven't seen it much and I'm fairly sure that it isn't used much in spoken Finnish. The first infinitive is used to to say something like "in order to" "as far as" and is formed by adding both the suffix "kse" and a possessive suffix* to the form of a verb found in dictionaries. Thus I get words like "tietääkseni" (in order for me to know, or as far as I know) or "muistaaksemme" (as far as we remember).

I'll write about the fourth infinitive later, I'm starting to fall asleep at my computer desk. Hopefully I will dream about speaking Finnish, those kind of dreams are always fun.

Hyvää yötä ja kauniita unia
Mick
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mick33
Senior Member
United States
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Speaks: English*
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Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 90 of 108
29 September 2012 at 10:38am | IP Logged 
I didn't dream about speaking Finnish the last two nights, so obviously I'm still not listening to enough Finnish. I also want to start confusing my family and friends by adding random Finnish words and phrases into my English but that hasn't happpened either, so maybe I'm not making much progress yet.

I'm wondering how common the fourth infinitive actually is, I can't find many examples in written Finnish and I am not sure that it's a good idea to keep looking for them right now. What I've done instead is to read from my copy of Karlsson's Finnish: An Essential Grammar, and visit uusikielemme.fi again to get more info.

To use the fourth infinitive I need to start by using the conjugation that goes with the pronoun hän (he or she) and then adding the suffix "-minen" to it. So below I will list three common verbs in three forms; the unconjugated form, the conjugation for the pronoun hän (also known as the third person singular but that's too formal for me) and the basic form of the fourth infinitive.

olla-on-oleminen (to be)*
haluta-haluaa-naluaminen (to want)
tietää-tietää-tietäminen (to know)

*I know "olla" is irrregular but I wanted to use it here since it's so common.*
So that's the basic form of the fourth infinitive. There's more to explain but I lost the notes I wrote out earlier so I'll have to try to find them in the morning and then continue this.

Finnish isn't the only language I need to hear more of, I also need to listen to a lot of Hindi. The rhythm of the language is so different and I'm not used to it yet. I like the sound of Hindi, and other languages of India, but I'm afraid to try to pronounce anything because I don't get the rhythm right. I expect my first attempts to speak to be unnaturally slow and to emphasize the wrong syllables, but I don't even know which syllables to stress yet or how I'll ever get my tongue and lips to move so quickly.

Hei sitten
Mick

EDIT: Corrected two verb forms. See message #95 below.

Edited by mick33 on 08 October 2012 at 11:27pm

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mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5917 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 91 of 108
01 October 2012 at 9:52pm | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:
To use the fourth infinitive I need to start by using the conjugation that goes with the pronoun hän (he or she) and then adding the suffix "-minen" to it. So below I will list three common verbs in three forms; the unconjugated form, the conjugation for the pronoun hän (also known as the third person singular but that's too formal for me) and the basic form of the fourth infinitive.

olla-on-oleminen (to be)*
haluta-halua-naluaminen (to want)
tietää-tietä-tietäminen (to know)

*I know "olla" is irrregular but I wanted to use it here since it's so common.*
So that's the basic form of the fourth infinitive. There's more to explain but I lost the notes I wrote out earlier so I'll have to try to find them in the morning and then continue this.
I never did find my notes, though I did reread Teach Yourself Finnish and I noticed that on page 215 it does in fact explain a little bit about the fourth infinitive only the author uses the term verbal noun and as I already wrote here it is only presented with the verb "pitää" + another verb inflected in the fourth infinitive and then using what looks like the elatiivi ending sta/stä. Of course Finnish allows more verbs to be used with the fourth inifinitve and here I will list an example from uusikielemme.fi's page on it just I can recognize this form if I ever encounter it: 1.Aloitan laihduttamisen huomenna (I start/begin dieting tommorrow). Laihduttamisen is the genitiivi form which drops "nen" and makes it become "sen". The page also shows that it is possible to use the partitiivi and inessiivi cases as well but only gives individual words for these case endings so I won't worry about them.

That's enough about specifics of Finnish grammar for a while, maybe I won't revisit it again unless I decide to study the Finnish language at a university someday. I'll just stick with listening to, and reading, more Finnish and also delve more into Hindi.

näkemiin
Mick

EDIT: Had to fix some embarrassing typos. I usually only make typos when I stay up late typing these posts, but this message was originally posted around noon so I can't blame my bad typing on being too tired this time.

Edited by mick33 on 04 October 2012 at 8:52pm

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mick33
Senior Member
United States
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Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 92 of 108
05 October 2012 at 9:13pm | IP Logged 
My focus on Finnish and Hindi is going well so far. I'm listening to more Finnish and sometimes I think about saying Finnish words before I think of the English words ... YAY!!!! Other than that, there's nothing much to write about Finnish now.

Let's move on to Hindi. When I wrote about Devanagari script in April, I missed a few important details. The first thing is that Devanagari is an abugida or a syllabic script where each basic letter is listed as a consonant with a default, or maybe implied, vowel. In Devanagari the implied vowel is "a" which is a schwa sound in Hindi. With that in mind न usually represents a "na" sound unless it is found at the end of a word where it would indicate just the consonant sound. The same pattern holds for all 36 consonants so there's no reason to type out every consonant character here (although I am writing them all down in a notebook). What if I need another vowel or need only a consonant in the beginning or middle of a word? Here's where things get really interesting and a little more complex. For a brief example here's the word नमस्ते (namaste, a common greeting). The first two characters represent the sounds "na" and "ma" , but the next characters स्ते (ste) are a little different. First character is changed from its standard form of स to connect to the त to get the स्त (st) then "e" as a separate sound is ए but when combined with त it becomes ते . That is how नमस्ते is put together. Learning Devanagari (as I used to write about Finnish) isn't difficult and after I spend more time learning the characters both separately and in various combinations it will naturally get easier. I will probably spend part of this afternoon on learning the vowels and the conjuncts and then I can write about those as well in a future post.

I also watched the popular Bollywood movie 3 Idiots with English subtitles and I may watch it again without subtitles. When I watched it the first time, I noticed something that initially seemed a little weird; Hindi speakers often mix Hindi and English when speaking. I was unsure what to think of this. It could mean that English is taking over and has way too much influence, but I think it's more likely that people simply use whichever words or phrases happen to occur to them at any given moment without being concerned about which specific language they are speaking.

फिर मिलेंगे
nähdään taas
Mick

Edited by mick33 on 06 October 2012 at 2:26am

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hribecek
Triglot
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Czech Republic
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 Message 93 of 108
06 October 2012 at 10:13am | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:

I also watched the popular Bollywood movie 3 Idiots with English subtitles and I may watch it again without subtitles. When I watched it the first time, I noticed something that initially seemed a little weird; Hindi speakers often mix Hindi and English when speaking. I was unsure what to think of this. It could mean that English is taking over and has way too much influence, but I think it's more likely that people simply use whichever words or phrases happen to occur to them at any given moment without being concerned about which specific language they are speaking.

फिर मिलेंगे
nähdään taas
Mick

When I was in India, I went to watch several Bollywood films at the cinema and I noticed the same thing. It does seem very strange when they do it. It's not like they throw in an English word every now and then but that they speak Hindi say for 5 minutes and then suddenly say a whole English sentence like "I went to the cinema and saw a film". Then they switch back to Hindi.

They had no subtitles for those films so I only understood the several English sentences from the whole films!
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mick33
Senior Member
United States
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1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
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 Message 94 of 108
07 October 2012 at 10:39am | IP Logged 
So this mixing of Hindi and English is common in Bollywood films. I agree with you, that is strange especially since I assume Hindi has a pretty large vocabulary. Hmm.... Maybe this topic deserves its own discussion thread.
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Serpent
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Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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 Message 95 of 108
07 October 2012 at 4:00pm | IP Logged 
Omnomnom devanagari... wish I had more motivation for Hindi or Sanskrit themselves...
mick33 wrote:
olla-on-oleminen (to be)*
haluta-halua-naluaminen (to want)
tietää-tietä-tietäminen (to know)
It's hän haluaa, hän tietää :) but the 4th infinitive forms are correct, though you chose words that are very uncommon in this form :D
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mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5917 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 96 of 108
08 October 2012 at 9:45am | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
It's hän haluaa, hän tietää :) but the 4th infinitive forms are correct, though you chose words that are very uncommon in this form :D
How embarrassing! I thought I knew that the correct forms were hän haluaa and hän tietää, but I must have forgotten. It's also good to know that these words aren't common in the 4th infinitive, but now that I think about it I haven't seen the 4th infinitive in written Finnish very often at all.

Mick


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