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“Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

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Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#31

Post by Yetanfou »

lawlorino wrote: post #26
samsari wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

I say it is time for a Latin revival - quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#32

Post by dmitriid »

I always find it strange how language materials insist on presenting agglutination as cases. I was lucky enough to not have it when I studied Turkish, so for me the

- -da is "in", not "locative case"

- -(y)a is "towards", not "locative case"

etc.

I personally find that insisting that students learn proper case names greatly hinders the learning process.

Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative, and I feel abject horror reading about "essive", "comitative", "abessive" and other cases. Stahp! :)

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#33

Post by Mirioron »

>When I asked our teacher how children learn which case to use, her rather wonderful reply was that “it comes with mother’s milk”.

As a native speaker, I think the real answer is experience. You pick up most of the patterns simply by using the language. I think that's how most people learn English as well. English grammar rules are mostly a mystery to me and many of my peers from school. Estonian grammar is slightly less of a mystery, but that's because it is a mandatory subject even in high school (ages 16-19).

About the title:

"Kas sa sõid koogi (ära)?" - "Did you eat the (whole) cake?"

"Kas sa sõid kooki?" - "Did you eat cake?"

"Ära" in the first sentence has the meaning of "nothing left" or "gone". "Ära" doesn't have to be included, but in practice, it almost always is. It's similar with the abessive ("without") case. The example given in the article is "riik on ilma juhita". The word "ilma" means "without" and can be left out. The abessive case of "juhita" is enough - "riik on juhita" - but in practice "ilma" is often included.

All in all, people generally don't care too much if you get the grammar just right. Mostly right is good enough. Many native speakers even have problems with words such as "kelle-ga-gi" vs "kelle-gi-ga" (the first is correct: -gi/-ki is always at the end). Some grammar rules can even result in words that many native speakers will say are incorrect, eg "keni" - the partitive plural of "kena" (neat). People are simply more used to the -id/-sid partitive plural "kenasid".

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#34

Post by johnzim »

lawlorino wrote: post #26
samsari wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

To be fair a huge percentage of the language is already French words. Brits just stubbornly refuse to pronounce them “correctly”.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#35

Post by dmitriid »

alecmg wrote: post #13
mcv wrote: post #6

I 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

Because there's no close sound to щ /ɕː/ in many European languages.

Some languages approximate it with /ʂ/ (think "sh" in English). For example, Romanian: borş.

Most languages approximate it with a combination of /ʃ/ ("sh"), /t/, and /tʃ/ ("ch"):

- "sh" and "ch",

- "sh" and "t", or

- all three, "sh", "t" and "ch".

Or an approximation thereof.

In Swedish: Approximation for /ʃ/ is "sj" /ɧ/. Approximation for /tʃ/ is "tj" /ɕ/ which yields "borsjtj". Though they could've gone for just "bortj" :)

Dutch is "Borsjtsj": Approximation for /ʃtʃ/ (sh t ch) with sj /ʃ/ and t

German is "Borschtsch": Approximation for /ʃtʃ/ (sh t ch) with sch /ʃ/ and t

etc. etc.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#36

Post by iicc »

himlion wrote: post #17
FabHK wrote: post #3

Wonderful article, exposing some of the oddities of this non-Indo-European language in the middle of Europe, without becoming too technical. If you're interested in an entertaining overview of all of the world's languages, I can recommend the course Language Families of the World by The Great Courses - 34 byte-sized (half hour) lectures. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of...

Certainly looks interesting, but in an era where I've been conditioned to expect free content $335 is a bit steep to indulge in a casual interest.

Maybe it's a price anchoring tactic to make the subscription plan ("The Great Courses Plus" - which includes this) look like good value.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#37

Post by SamBam »

alecmg wrote: post #13
mcv wrote: post #6

I 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

Is it really? Googling for "borsjtsjsch" gives me just this thread. You've created a combination of letters never seen before by Google!

https://www.google.com/search?q=borsjtsjsch&nfpr=1

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#38

Post by RHSeeger »

Mirioron wrote: post #33

> When I asked our teacher how children learn which case to use, her rather wonderful reply was that “it comes with mother’s milk”. As a native speaker, I think the real answer is experience. You pick up most of the patterns simply by using the language. I think that's how most people learn English as well. English grammar rules are mostly a mystery to me and many of my peers from school. Estonian grammar is slightly…

> You pick up most of the patterns simply by using the language.

I only recently learned that there are rules to the order of adjectives in the English language [1]; it was never taught to us in school, we just used them enough that I know it by what sounds right. Ex "the big, red balloon", not "the red, big balloon".

[1] https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjecti...

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#39

Post by Sharlin »

apecat wrote: post #30
exDM69 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

Even basic Estonian vocabulary is surprisingly different from Finnish. Educated guesses only help you so far due to a large number of false friends and false cognates (some of them rather amusing, eg. hallitus meaning "government" in Finnish and "mold" (as in fungus) in Estonian, or Estonian pulmad meaning "a wedding reception" but Finnish pulmat meaning "problems" or "troubles"!)

Many words in standard Estonian do have true cognates in Finnish, but the Finnish counterparts have a slightly different or more specific meaning, or are nonstandard or colloquial. A typical example would be maja which in Estonian means "house" or "building" but in Finnish has the more specific meaning of "hut" or "cabin"—a dwelling more rudimentary and temporary in nature.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#40

Post by soylentcola »

sunaurus wrote: post #8

An interesting thing I've noticed is that a lot of the younger generations in Estonia use English a lot when expressing themselves, especially when talking to their peers. I constantly hear everything from single English words in sentences, to fully English sentences used in-between Estonian ones. I'm sure this is something that's happening everywhere (because of things like Hollywood and most of the internet being i…

I hear this when my gf is speaking with her mom or friends back home in Hungary. I'd put Hungarian up there with Estonian in terms of "difficult for English speakers to learn" but I'll still pick up some bits of conversation thanks to the English loan words peppered throughout the Hungarian.
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