“Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by xxpor » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

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…

To add even more confusion, in my sort-of Philly accent, street is pronounced [ˈʃtɹit].

My uneducated guess on /ʒ/ is that /dʒ/ is the most common way of encountering it, so people aren't comfortable separating it out, even though it's still common. It probably doesn't help that the usual transcription is zh which basically doesn't exist in native English words.

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

#62

Post by sbierwagen » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

markus92 wrote: post #58

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 spellin…

Unfortunately English can’t have a single spelling authority, specifically because it’s so popular. It would have to be able to issue binding regulations to the governments of India, the US and the UK, which would be politically difficult.

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

#63

Post by sneakernets » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

johnzim wrote: post #34

lawlorino wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”.

When English picked up all those Anglo-Norman words, they were indeed spoken as written. Middle English texts seem to confirm this.

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

#64

Post by kwhitefoot » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

markus92 wrote: post #58

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 spellin…

> you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English

I see variations of this suggested for lots of languages, even my Norwegian teacher tried to convince me that Norwegian was spoken just as written. But this takes no account of regional differences in pronunciation. The words castle, boat, house, mouse, grass, for instance, all have different pronunciations depending on where in the UK one grew up. Which one is the spelling supposed to represent?

It seems to me that Dutch would be just as likely to have regional variations in pronunciation as any other language.

If Shakespeare had written phonetically he would be all but unreadable now.

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

#65

Post by beeforpork » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #5

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.

As a Finnish speaker, to me Estonian sometimes sounds like I'm having a stroke. Like I'm supposed to understand what is spoken but the words just don't resolve into their meanings.

Kõik üheskoos: üks, kaks, koli, neli!

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

#66

Post by markus92 » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #64

markus92 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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 spellin…

> you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English I see variations of this suggested for lots of languages, even my Norwegian teacher tried to convince me that Norwegian was spoken just as written. But this takes no account of regional differences in pronunciation. The words castle, boat, house, mouse, grass, for instance, all have different pronunciations depending on whe…

Of course there are regional variations, but when speaking Standaardnederlands (standard Dutch) they are relatively small and consistent, nothing like Norwegian. With consistent meaning that the same syllable will almost always be pronounced the same way within that region. Not like English, where "bread" and "great" have completely different ways of pronouncing the "(r)ea" sound, despite being written the same way. Poems rhyme usually, wherever you go within the language region.

Local dialects have larger differences, but if they are written (relatively rare), it usually uses some form of phonetic writing, and those aren't standardized anyways.

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

#67

Post by NoodleIncident » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #32

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 h…

From The Fine Article:

> The extent of irregularity came as a shock. I had always believed that the Finno-Ugric family of languages, to which Estonian belongs, was “agglutinative” – that is, with words being formed by adding strings of endings in a regular way. Estonian has far more irregularity than this would suggest: consonant gradation can make forms difficult to recognise, and every putative rule seems to have exceptions.

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

#68

Post by defen » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

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.

> As a Swedish speaker, I get this deeply rooted feeling of righteous indignation about not understanding spoken Danish. I'm only half-joking.

I have a Swedish friend who described Danish speakers as sounding "like they're speaking Swedish with rocks in their mouths"

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

#69

Post by distances » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

mb_72 wrote: post #41

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'm half-Australian, half-Estonian, but don't really speak any Estonian yet still live here (sorry, nationalistic Estonians!). My wife is Estonian, and our nieces speak English to each other quite a bit when I'm around (and, I suspect, some significant part of the time besides that). People like me are definitely 'part of the problem' with the Estonian language being not as used as it should be, however outside of Es…

Which highlights that multicultural families should keep using their native languages when talking to their kids. It's a big asset later in life! My niece is currently adoption three languages (mom, dad, kindergarten) and I know another kid that is exposed to four. They seem to have no trouble whatsoever switching to the correct language when they've figured out which one each adult is speaking with them.

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

#70

Post by distances » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

Yuval_Halevi wrote: post #28

I never thought about the langugue they speak in Estonia TIL there is a langugue called Estonian :)

There aren't many countries in Europe without their own language. Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus, Belgium, and the microstates -- can't think of anything else?