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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6690 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 18 04 January 2009 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I wouldn't like anyone to be baffled by them either, but you are trying to make it sound too easy. Someone who has learned the basic elements like "anti", "dis" etc. in English can use them without worrying whether one of them originally came from Greek and the other from Latin or whatever. It is hard to follow the reasoning behind your claim that these different origins lead to significant added difficulty. Another aspect on this is that words like "antidisestablishmentarianism" will only occur very infrequently in English, and in texts at fairly advanced levels, while in Finnish, starting maybe at intermediate level and up, these compound constructions will be an everyday occurrence and make up a noticeable percentage of the word count.
Measuring the amount of logic precisely is not possible so this kind of claim is just a statement of an opinion with no proof. I think a very good case could be made for some languages being more logical and more consistent than others but that would be for a different thread. Still, more logical is not always the same as easier. And if it's a different kind of logic from what you are used to it may not help all that much.
Subjective though they are, some tastes are more popular than others. I have no idea if it applies to Finnish, but in general there could be a case for saying that some languages (Italian, French maybe) are generally more pleasant-sounding than others to a majority of people.
I can't really be bothered to dig them up now, but I remember seeing comparisons showing that the same text in language A ends up X per cent longer in language B on average. That would seem to be inherent in the respective languages.
Ah, but when you have identified the right preposition in another language your work is done, you just throw that preposition in at the appropriate spot and carry on talking... ... whereas in Finnish when you have identified and chosen the right case you are at best only halfway there. You still need to select which word to affix the case suffix to, choose the appropriate suffix for that word, modify the chosen suffix in order to preserve vowel harmony, often modify the word stem too, because some of the stems don't take kindly to some of the suffixes and want to disguise themselves a little. In some cases two or more suffixes are chained together causing some additional complication. Then, it is often necessary to apply the same chosen case to several words in the sentence and so you need to repeat this process for each one of those words. It is interesting actually to compare what happens when you are editing a text and change your mind about how to express a certain passage. In English the change might involve changing one word for another, changing a "to" to "in", going back and removing an "a" and maybe dropping an "-ing" ending on a verb somewhere. To make the same change in a Finnish text I might need to use a different case for a certain part of the text. I then need to go over a number of words in the sentence and adapt the suffixes on each one. I think this is somewhat similar to someone composing a piece of music, and deciding to change a certain passage into a different key.
It's still one more complication on top of all the other ones.
OK, valid points.
Yes, absolutely right. And for some learners this can be a very big obstacle. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| hcholm Heptaglot Groupie Norway Joined 5857 days ago 43 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Swedish, Danish, German, French, Polish Studies: Czech | Message 18 of 18 05 January 2009 at 4:54am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
My main point is that it't not as easy as many say, or as difficult as many say. From an English/IE point of view, I'd say Finnish is average to moderately difficult when comparing to other European langugages, but much easier than non-IE languages from other parts of the world. Strictly speaking, I would argue that all languages are both "easy" and "difficult", though.
Selecting these elements is non-trivial and difficult in English. For a word like frequent, the negation is the prefix in-, because of the Latin origin. It's not the Greek an-/a- or Germanic un-. It's lexically conditioned, you have to look it up. In addition, the rules of Latin give you a choice between in-, im-, ir- and il-. So there are at least 7 different, but similar prefixes here, but then for a word like trivial, you must use non-, with a hyphen. To make an adverb of frequent, you add the Germanic -ly, now at the end. To make a noun, you must look up in a dictionary to find frequency (or is it frequence..?).
That sounds like an interesting discussion! Useless, maybe, but nevertheless interesting.
French and Italian have very different phonetics. There are no strictly linguistic reasons why they should be considered more pleasant than others. The reason is obviously the extra-linguistic cultural connotations these languages have. One reason one might hear with Italian (for Italian? about Italian? concerning Italian? on Italian? these prepositions are killing me...) is that the vowels are "clear", i.e. they are close to the most common cardinal vowels, in a regular, symmetric system. But if that was a criterion, French would be one of the least pleasant-sounding languages in Europe.
I've seen such comparisons, but they are rather meaningless. They say more about spelling rules than anything else. Comparisons would give some meaning only if you compared phonemic transcriptions. Latvian isn't more concise than Finnish just because they can write ā instead of aa. (I'd like to see ā etc. in Finnish, that would be interesting!) The best would be to use some kind of morphemic transcription, and then counting the morphemes, but that seems like an impossible task.
Most of this is true for quite a few IE languages as well, except for vowel harmony. In IE languages you would have the added complexity of identifying gender and stem class, which are usually mixed together with a variety of plural markers in a complete mess. Edited by hcholm on 05 January 2009 at 4:54am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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