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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
42 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 69.3 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finglish
Especially in the IT world. Printteri tilttasi, klikkaa linkkiä, koodi bugittaa, buuttaa serveri!
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
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.
https://pingtype.github.io/finnish.html
(Disclaimer: Finn)
I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure it exists in English as well.
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.
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.
For a brief attempt at a Finnish webshop I also happen to know "Osta Nyt" (Buy now) and "Verkkokauppa" (Online store).
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.
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.
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.
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 have great respect for that first person to shake mammoth bone in another person's face saying "luu". They nailed it.
Read it again:
> The Finnish city of Turku [...] derives its name from [...]