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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 25 23 April 2009 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That may just be a case of Translationese.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Whiskeyjack Newbie Canada Joined 5730 days ago 36 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Spanish, Russian | Message 10 of 25 23 April 2009 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I was under the impression that they arent really mutuallably translatable, and there are alot of false friends... Might be wrong
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| Masked Avenger Triglot Senior Member Antarctica Joined 6132 days ago 145 posts - 151 votes Speaks: English, French*, Danish Studies: Finnish, Latin | Message 11 of 25 23 April 2009 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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They do look related in written form, but there's extensive vocabulary in Estonian that does not exist in Finnish, vowel harmony is gone and probably some important differences and nuances with the reduced grammatical case system.
That's how it looks to me anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Uthnapistim Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 5692 days ago 19 posts - 25 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: German, Indonesian | Message 12 of 25 23 April 2009 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This sounds about right, although I would estimate the percentage to be a bit lower still. A Finnish native reading an Estonian newspaper - assuming no previous contact with the Estonian language - might decipher about 5% of what is being said. That was at least my own experience when starting to learn Estonian by tackling articles from Postimees. I'm not originally from Southern Finland, so I had not heard or seen any Estonian in my childhood. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5836 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 13 of 25 27 April 2009 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hah, you live and learn! Ignorant Swedish person here! :-) I always thought they were like Swedish and Norwegian/Danish (=pretty much completely mutually intelligeable).
So Finnish language is really "alone" after all then, it doesn't have a "little brother" language in the Finno-Ugrian family like I had believed.. "Maybe decipher 5% of what's being said" That's even more different than Swedish and German! Several Estonians have mentioned that they used Finnish media during the USSR days. Somebody mentioned finding out the extent of Chernobyl in that way. I always thought that it went both ways - that the Finns could understand Estonian too! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Uthnapistim Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 5692 days ago 19 posts - 25 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: German, Indonesian | Message 14 of 25 27 April 2009 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I shoud add that that's only my subjective impression. I didn't actually do any quantitative analysis of how large a proportion of the text I understood when I first tried to read Estonian, nor do I have any factual knowledge of the amount of overlapping words etc. But I can for sure say that at least to many Finnish natives with no prior encounter with the Estonian language, it sounds and looks like just another foreign language, except for there being occasional words that sound/look 'funny' because they resemble Finnish words.
Estonian is definitely comparatively easy to learn for a Finnish native and vice versa. So I'm inclined to believe the explanation mentioned in an earlier post, that the Estonians learned a lot of passive Finnish as they had a strong interest in following the Finnish media. I doubt that either 'direction' from one language to another is intrinsically easier than the other. Edited by Uthnapistim on 27 April 2009 at 5:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Masked Avenger Triglot Senior Member Antarctica Joined 6132 days ago 145 posts - 151 votes Speaks: English, French*, Danish Studies: Finnish, Latin | Message 15 of 25 27 April 2009 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes... and no. It depends on how you look at it. There are minority languages in Sweden (Miänkieli) and Norway (Kven) so closely related to Finnish, they could be considered dialects of Finnish, yet are treated like different languages in those countries. There's always Karelian in Russia as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 25 27 April 2009 at 11:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I keep thinking that I had read somewhere that Finnish is believed to be slightly more conservative than Estonian. This is the basis for why linguists reconstruct words in Proto-Balto-Finnic in a way that results in them appearing more similar to modern Finnish ones rather than modern Estonian ones. In this way Finnish to an Estonian tends to look a bit like some obscure ancestor of modern Estonian since Finnish retains characteristics or forms that were used regularly in Old Estonian but are no longer used in the modern language. For example, Estonian no longer has vowel harmony while Finnish still does. Another point of divergence is that quite a few cognates shared by Estonian and Finnish differ not only in meaning but also in form. Over time Estonian-speakers started to show apocope (i.e. the process of not pronouncing the last syllable in words - especially when that syllable was not stressed). This change in pronunciation meant that a lot of words started to shorten and the agglutinative patterns in Old Estonian began to change somewhat in order to resolve ambiguities and accommodate apocope. On the other hand, apocope didn't affect Finnish quite as much (if at all). Therefore from a Finn's point of view, Estonian can appear like a strange form of Finnish where words are one syllable shorter than what a Finnish look-alike or cognate would be. Another complication of apocope is that case suffixes in Estonian may seem unrecognizable to a Finn or at least they may be noticeably different from what a Finn would be used to. When combined with the largely one-way exposure of Finnish to Estonia during the Cold War, the divergent path in the development of Estonian and Finnish dialects strengthens the biased direction in mutual intelligibility that we see today. That is to say Estonians are often better at grasping Finnish than the other way around with Finns and Estonian. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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