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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

#51

Post by thaumasiotes »

mcv wrote: post #16
alecmg wrote: post #13

Earlier 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

Yeah, it's 'borsjtsj'. No idea why. Presumably it's the closest approximation of that phoneme in Dutch, but it seems unlikely that anyone trying to pronounce the Dutch transliteration would get anywhere close to the Russian original. Borsjt or possibly even borsj would probably be better.

There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it.

People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true:

    mission
    contrition
    sure
And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophonic reduction of the sound sequence /sj/. It's not a coincidence that "sj" is the standard Dutch spelling of the same sound. The English standard orthographical equivalent, "borshch", is less accurate than the Dutch is.

It's very interesting to compare people's view of /ʃ/ with /ʒ/, another perfectly normal native English phoneme, but one that most people insist is foreign and hard to pronounce. The only difference I see is that a standard American education covers the idea that /ʃ/ is a real sound and should be spelled "sh", while /ʒ/ is generally not mentioned. But of course the existence of the sound is not actually related to whether your teacher mentioned it in elementary school.

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

#52

Post by jbarberu »

apecat wrote: post #2

As a Swedish speaker, I get this deeply rooted feeling of righteous indignation about not understanding spoken Danish. I'm only half-joking. As a Finnish speaker, I don't get that feeling with Estonian. The written form is different enough to warrant a deeper look before I start whining about how annoying I find language studies in general.

With Danish it really depends where in Denmark the speaker is from. I usually have a hard time understanding anything at all, but some accents are funny sounding but understandable.

As a (non-fluent) Spanish speaker I get a similar experience hearing Portuguese, the words sound similar but different and the speaker sounds slightly drunk.

Greek sounds very close to Spanish but none of the words mean anything, it's really weird :)

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

#53

Post by monknomo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #51
mcv wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's 'borsjtsj'. No idea why. Presumably it's the closest approximation of that phoneme in Dutch, but it seems unlikely that anyone trying to pronounce the Dutch transliteration would get anywhere close to the Russian original. Borsjt or possibly even borsj would probably be better.

There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it. People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true: mission contrition sure And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophoni…

I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?

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

#54

Post by toxik »

wwwhizz wrote: post #19
mcv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I didn't include it in the normal words. It is absolutely cheating. As for the spelling: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsjtsj (Edit: That page also mentions a soup called 'sjtsji'.)

I stand corrected, I didn't know you could spell it that way. What a weird language we have :)

Your weird uncle Swedish spells it perhaps even worse, borsjtj. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsjtj

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

#55

Post by thaumasiotes »

monknomo wrote: post #53
thaumasiotes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it. People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true: mission contrition sure And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophoni…

I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?

Borscht is also the name that I know (though as an American, I can't speak to the UK). "Borshch" is the orthographical equivalent to Russian Борщ and Dutch borsjtsj.

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

#56

Post by theandrewbailey »

jbarberu wrote: post #52
apecat wrote: post #2

As a Swedish speaker, I get this deeply rooted feeling of righteous indignation about not understanding spoken Danish. I'm only half-joking. As a Finnish speaker, I don't get that feeling with Estonian. The written form is different enough to warrant a deeper look before I start whining about how annoying I find language studies in general.

With Danish it really depends where in Denmark the speaker is from. I usually have a hard time understanding anything at all, but some accents are funny sounding but understandable. As a (non-fluent) Spanish speaker I get a similar experience hearing Portuguese, the words sound similar but different and the speaker sounds slightly drunk. Greek sounds very close to Spanish but none of the words mean anything, it's rea…

> Greek sounds very close to Spanish but none of the words mean anything, it's really weird :)

I don't hear Greek that often, so the suggestion also struck me as weird. Some analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPMqoHPJzac

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

#57

Post by jraph »

simias wrote: post #43
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…

From personal experience I think English speakers have troubles approaching synthetic languages in general because the English language is very analytic. I lurk in a few language-learning forums and I try to help anglophones learning French from time to time, they're often overwhelmed by the conjugations and to a lesser extent the grammatical genders which are omnipresent in French grammar. On the other hand I've bee…

> If somebody asks me "tu parlons anglais ?" it's definitely going to sound very wrong to me but I'll probably be able to figure out what you're attempting to communicate.

If web browsers had feelings, they would possibly often experience this with the HTML soup being thrown at their parsers. "Hey, I think I know what you're attempting to communicate!"

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

#58

Post by markus92 »

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…

'sproeiauto' is still legal, one of the few Dutch words using all vowels in a row.

One of the interesting differences about Dutch spelling compared to English, is that there's an official institution (Nederlandse Taalunie, literally Dutch Language union), that sets the spelling and spelling rules for most words. The spelling of Dutch thus is the same in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname. The uniformity in spelling means that for most Dutch words (not loan words), you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English that never really changed their spelling of words, despite some shifts in pronunciation. Readings older Dutch texts is takes slightly more effort, because the spelling of some words can be completely different from what it is now.

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

#59

Post by jfk13 »

monknomo wrote: post #53
thaumasiotes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is good reason for the Dutch transliteration. Compare English, where /ʃ/ is a very common phoneme, but due to deriving the alphabet from Latin (which had no /ʃ/), there is no letter for it. People are taught that the sound is spelled "sh", but that's not quite true: mission contrition sure And as all of those examples illustrate, in addition to being a phoneme in its own right, [ʃ] is also the English allophoni…

I usually spell it borscht, do they do it differently in the UK?

I don't think so. I'm British and know it as "borscht"; I've never (consciously) seen "borshch" until now.

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

#60

Post by ajscanlan »

RHSeeger wrote: post #38
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...

Not just adjectives, vowels too! E.g. tick tock vs tock tick, chit chat vs chat chit, ding dong vs dong ding [1]

[1] http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160908-the-language-rules...

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