The "total object” and “partial object” distinction exists in Finnish as well. One famous example is the verb naida, "to marry": nain hänet (total/nominative) means "I married them", but nain häntä (partial/partitive) means I married only a part of them, or in more colloquial terms, "I fucked them".
“Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
21–30 of 98 posts
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#22I love the list of vowel-heavy words. You can also construct some similar words in Dutch. Or at least you used to before 1996, when a spelling change introduced hyphens into many of these: zeeëend - sea duck, or Velvet scoter (nowadays "zee-eend") koeieuier - cow udder (nowadays "koeienuier") zaaiuien - seed onions (still legal I think) kraaieëieren - crow eggs (nowadays kraaieneieren, I think) We also have the oppos…
I shuddered when I saw what a 4 letter word got mutilated into originally (russian) it was Борщ And coincidentally Borš in estonian. And in dutch it became borsjtsjsch? How? Why? Why do you need 8 letters to transmit a single phonem? No wonder dutch can construct these weird word combos. Edit, nvm, apparently last sch belongs to next word. Still creepy
"In English, Shcha [щ] is romanized as ⟨shch⟩ or ⟨šč⟩ (with hačeks) (occasionally ⟨sch⟩, all reflecting the historical Russian pronunciation of the letter (as a combined Ш and Ч)." The story in Dutch is similar, except "sh" and "ch" aren't phonemes in Dutch so they're approximated as "sj" and "tsj".
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#23A wonderful introduction to the Estonian language and some of its quirks.
I have minor quibbles, although my relationship to the language is as a non-native historian of the country, not a Finno-Ugric linguist or local. I always felt (rather unscientifically, of course) as though Estonian traded some of the agglutinative regularity that characterize Finnish and Hungarian for greater vocabulary familiarity for Germanic speakers. Despite what the author writes in her first endnote on foreign loan words, I've found a knowledge of German to be quite helpful when trying to guess the meaning of a word (or to extemporaneously construct one) using a calque from German.
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed the same in Finland
Same for me. It can be fun sitting on a tram and hearing teens/youths speaking in Finnish with English interjected somewhat randomly: "blah blah blah and then I died blah blah blah good game!"
This essential phenomenon is nothing new, of course. In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages.
But I do agree that some languages are more inured to this than others, such as British English. Having enough native speakers generating new OC in the language also helps prevent a fashionable trickle of loanwords become a flood that threatens to sweep everything away.
It's the same in Sweden, English has become so commonplace you see it everywhere. Probably half od all public adverts on bus shelters and the like are written in English for no apparent reason other than it's fashionable. "Yes" has become a fairly common alternative to "ja". But overall, I don't worry too much than Swedish is really under threat or that in a generation English will have taken any deeper root.
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I shuddered when I saw what a 4 letter word got mutilated into originally (russian) it was Борщ And coincidentally Borš in estonian. And in dutch it became borsjtsjsch? How? Why? Why do you need 8 letters to transmit a single phonem? No wonder dutch can construct these weird word combos. Edit, nvm, apparently last sch belongs to next word. Still creepy
"In English, Shcha [щ] is romanized as ⟨shch⟩ or ⟨šč⟩ (with hačeks) (occasionally ⟨sch⟩, all reflecting the historical Russian pronunciation of the letter (as a combined Ш and Ч)." The story in Dutch is similar, except "sh" and "ch" aren't phonemes in Dutch so they're approximated as "sj" and "tsj".
In German, sch and tsch are normal phonemes as far as I know, but they use even one more letter to spell them.
I checked the origins of all Dutch words starting with sj- some time ago because some of them look and feel native (and because I'm a nerd), but it turned out that indeed all of them are loan words, even e.g. sjorren which comes from Frisian. It looks like all surrounding languages do have these as phonemes, but Dutch doesn't. (Not sure about Plattdeutsch.)
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same for me. It can be fun sitting on a tram and hearing teens/youths speaking in Finnish with English interjected somewhat randomly: "blah blah blah and then I died blah blah blah good game!"
This essential phenomenon is nothing new, of course. In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. But I do agree that some languages are more inured to this than others, such as British English. Having enough native speakers generating new OC in the language also helps prevent a fashionable trickle of loanwords become a flood that th…
> In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages.
French is definitely the language of choice for pretentious twits who like to do this.
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
This essential phenomenon is nothing new, of course. In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. But I do agree that some languages are more inured to this than others, such as British English. Having enough native speakers generating new OC in the language also helps prevent a fashionable trickle of loanwords become a flood that th…
> In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. French is definitely the language of choice for pretentious twits who like to do this.
Quelle surprise! You read my mind.
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#28I never thought about the langugue they speak in Estonia
TIL there is a langugue called Estonian :)
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#29I love the list of vowel-heavy words. You can also construct some similar words in Dutch. Or at least you used to before 1996, when a spelling change introduced hyphens into many of these: zeeëend - sea duck, or Velvet scoter (nowadays "zee-eend") koeieuier - cow udder (nowadays "koeienuier") zaaiuien - seed onions (still legal I think) kraaieëieren - crow eggs (nowadays kraaieneieren, I think) We also have the oppos…
Don't forget this classic:
hottentottententententoonstelling
Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an Estonian speaker, I feel the exact same way about Finnish. I guess it's universal :)
No it isn't :) As a Finnish speaker with some exposure to Estonian language, I can understand written and spoken Estonian better than any other language I've had such little exposure to. I'm not very good in speaking Estonian and I can't write it at all.
Out of curiosity, how did you go about picking up this fluency in Estonian? Are there any good sources of particularly easy Estonian to get started? I'm semi-interested.
Granted, I'm also super lazy, but Finnish and Estonian should be close enough to just have some threshold to get over until it's pretty smooth, I guess?
Fwiw, I'm native in Swedish, but I speak and write Finnish daily.
To go on about my earlier comparison, I can really visit the site for a Danish or Norwegian Bokmål newspaper like Politiken ( https://politiken.dk ) or Verdens Gang ( https://www.vg.no/ ) and start reading with a feeling of just moderate confusion. Academic text would require some extra effort. The "voice in my head" or mode of reading doesn't really even change, because I've never attempted to communicate in either Danish or Norwegian per se.
For Estonian Postimees (https://www.postimees.ee ) I'm stuck pretty much immediately. I can pick up words and some context, but that's it.
At my first job, at an internal IT Service Desk for a certain Nordic energy company, I dealt with Norwegians and Danes. But it was a business context where everyone just seemed to agree to just make a polite effort at having a maybe slightly "clear in a Swedish way" common Scandinavians language, because switching to English would feel a little silly. I guess some of the older dudes working in the field somewhere in Norway might not have spoken English.