Easiest Finno-Ugric language? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Easiest Finno-Ugric language?
Tags: Uralic Languages \| Estonian \| Easiness \| Rare Languages \| Hungarian \| Finnish
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

15 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

Serpent
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Message 9 of 15

27 May 2012 at 10:22pm | IP Logged

Chung wrote:

In Finnish, inflection is largely agglutinative and depends on vowel harmony, but takes into account consonant gradation as well as the stem's final vowel in some instances.

Sometimes not only the final vowel :) otti vs antoi :)
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Vihelik
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Message 10 of 15

27 May 2012 at 11:12pm | IP Logged

Марк wrote:

But can we say that inflectional and derivational morphology is more regular than in many IE languages?

I am not sure that levels of regularity in derivation can be compared. Every language has derivational morphemes that are more or less productive. What can be compared is the number of derivational affixes. This varies from extremely low in isolating languages, such as Mandarin, to I-don't-know-how-high. My impressionistic opinion is that the number of derivational affixes in an average F-U and I-E language is roughly comparable.

As for the inflectional morphology, there are approximately 30 F-U languages (1/3 of them Samic languages) and 440 I-E languages. In the I-E language family in particular, the inflectional complexity and regularity varies from the very low end resembling isolating languages (e.g., English) to relatively high. How does one define the average? The same is true in the F-U languages, how do you define average? Hungarian has 6 grammatical persons (sg and pl) and more than 20 nominal cases. On the other hand, the closely related Mansi has 9 grammatical persons (sg, dual, and pl) but only 6 nominal cases. These numbers describe only complexity and not regularity. It may very well be that a language with a large number of cases/tenses/moods treats them extremely regularly, yet another languages with only a small number of cases/tenses/moods has each of them follow a huge number of inflectional patterns. I suspect that there is much variance in the regularity of inflectional morphology in both language families.

Edited by Vihelik on 27 May 2012 at 11:28pm
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Chung
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Message 11 of 15

28 May 2012 at 3:13am | IP Logged

Vihelik wrote:

Марк wrote:

That's certainly not true. They must be considered as easier: they do not have genders, prepositions and are very regular.

Whereas it is true that Finno-Ugric languages lack gender, at least Estonian has both postpositions (ca 70%) and prepositions (ca 30%). A number of adpositions can be used both prepositionally and postpositionally with differences in meaning.

Indeed. I had my preconceptions about Uralic as a whole shattered when I studied Estonian after having done Hungarian as the first foray into the group. Here was an Uralic language without vowel harmony, a sometimes opaque application of consonant gradation, prepositions, and a bit less agglutination than is stereotyped for the family. On this last point I felt a bit odd marking possession without suffixes unlike in Hungarian. It seemed weird for me to do it just with a genitive form of the personal pronoun mimicking the role of a possessive adjective (e.g. a barátom (Hung.) vs. mu sõber (Est.) "my friend"), but that's what I picked up while learning Estonian. By the time I got to Finnish though, my mind was more open to what typology an Uralic language could show.

Vihelik wrote:

Prepositions are usually associated with SVO languages and postpositions with SOV languages. The presence of both in Estonian indicates complications in word order. In fact, independent clauses tend to be predominantly SVO, whereas relative clauses are always OSV.

For anyone else interested, this monograph examines the development of prepositional use in Estonian and refines our understanding of the process including the influence of Russian prepositions.

Vihelik wrote:

Native speakers of Estonian take delight in showing off by using irregular and lesser used forms. Language games include challenging each other with lesser known paradigms. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a textbook that describes any of them, probably for a good reason, that is, not to overwhelm a second-language learner. As a result, most non-native speakers, even the most fluent ones, speak a highly regularized yet somewhat impoverished variety of Estonian. For example, among the large number of Russians and Finns who speak Estonian I have never met one who uses the irregular yet otherwise pretty common instrumental case (except for a few set phrases, such as palja jalu 'barefoot').

There's a common instrumental in Estonian? I can't find any reference to this anywhere. Everything that I can find points to subsuming under the comitative -ga with just fixed expressions remaining which began as instrumental phrases.
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Vihelik
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Message 12 of 15

28 May 2012 at 3:30am | IP Logged

Chung wrote:

There's a common instrumental in Estonian?

Oops, not instrumental, but instructive case (Est. viisiütlev kääne). It describes the manner in which an activity is carried out. Whatever the label, it is not included in the school grammar. The noun has its own idiosyncratic case ending, the preceding adjective is in the genitive case. Examples:

inst: palja jalu barefoot ← nom: paljas jalg
inst: lehvivi hõlmu with the skirts of his coat flapping ← nom: lehvivad hõlmad

The instructive case is often used instead of the inessive to say 'in X language'. The standard inessive form for 'in English' is inglise keeles. The common instructive parallel form is inglise keeli.

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Chung
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Message 13 of 15

28 May 2012 at 4:02am | IP Logged

Vihelik wrote:

Chung wrote:

There's a common instrumental in Estonian?

Ah, that makes sense. It's pretty uncommon in Finnish too with the theoretically correct usage in an instrumental sense effectively crowded out by using the adessive. As in Estonian, it's most often found in set expressions (e.g. Terveisin ~ "[with] Best regards" from terveiset "greetings" (plurale tantum)). There's a way to use instructive in the second infinitive but this is pretty uncommon too. I've read that what we interpret as a kind of coordinating adverb in Estonian and Finnish (kui, kuin respectively) seems to have arisen as an interrogative pronoun's (*ko- ~ *ku-) declension into instructive.
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Vihelik
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Message 14 of 15

28 May 2012 at 6:51am | IP Logged

Chung wrote:

As in Estonian, it's most often found in set expressions (e.g. Terveisin ~ "[with] Best regards" from terveiset "greetings" (plurale tantum)).

Interesting, I didn't know that Finnish, too, had it. In Estonian, the instructive case appears to be developing from "set expressions" into a productive process.

Chung wrote:

I've read that what we interpret as a kind of coordinating adverb in Estonian and Finnish (kui, kuin respectively) seems to have arisen as an interrogative pronoun's (*ko- ~ *ku-) declension into instructive.

Also very interesting, where did you read about it?
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Chung
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Message 15 of 15

28 May 2012 at 6:37pm | IP Logged

Vihelik wrote:

Chung wrote:

Also very interesting, where did you read about it?

I read about it in a copy of "The Circum-Baltic Languages: Grammar and Typology" by Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm's (eds.) at my university's library. Fortunately, Google Books has the relevant section on the instructive for preview here.

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