It’s kind of difficult to explain. Like, the words for “I love you” are so uncomfortably formal, in a sense. It doesn’t roll out of the mouth in the slightest.
Linguistics isn’t my forté, but I’ll try to expand on this;
Words really do have more meaning and weight in Finnish than they do in English. Finnish words are precise to another level. You mean exactly what you say. There are no take-backs.
I am not kidding. There are synonyms, but even synonyms come with heavy connotation on what the tone of a word is. There are words that come with decades worth of baggage for you to even begin to understand how deeply ingrained their meanings are. We are talking almost N-word levels of ingrained meaning and connotation. When a newspaper journalist makes a mistake and tries to do a take-back, you could never sound as fake is it sounds to a Finnish speaker. You know exactly what you said and meant.
Though we often say that “Finnish is spoken as it is written”, we mean pronunciation. No one speaks written Finnish. Why? Because written Finnish is extremely formal and rigid.
There are vast differences between the spoken and written variants of Finnish. Written Finnish is the standardized, default written format of Finnish. Most published books, like those in school and in shelves are written in that format. That way every Finnish-speaker can understand, even though most dialects can be understood by everyone regardless. It’s the one we are taught in school.
Written language was sort of developed separately from the spoken language, and that shows. It doesn’t quite behave like the spoken language. Spoken Finnish often drops entire words, syllables, vowels, you name it. Meaning and direction of conversation is provided by the speaker and what is spoken, many things can be left unsaid. That’s partly why Finnish personal pronouns are genderless. Since Finnish is an agglutinative language, words bend tremendously and allow for new, understandable words to be created on whim. A lot of dialects affect consonants and vowels, yet it still remains perfectly understandable. Figure that one out.
The way written Finnish behaves sounds incredibly odd in many cases. Written Finnish is clunky. Personal pronouns sound out of place when following the proper format. It doesn’t allow for letters or words to drop. The order of words also seems very stiff when compared to the spoken language. It has some inconsistencies. Very business-y. Because of that, it’s usage is strictly on non-spoken formats. Hence it’s specifically called the written Finnish. No one talks written Finnish.
To perhaps illustrate how rigid written Finnish is, news are read either in local dialect or in plain Finnish (selkosuomi). It’s our language’s equivalent of plain English. It’s on the formal end, but you can actually speak it and not sound like an alien invader. Trust me, we’ll know.
The best way to compare this is if an English-speaking native heard Middle-English. That is how different the tones and verbs behave and sound between spoken and written Finnish.
No one talks like that. I cannot re-iterate that enough. It’s very grating to the ears. Personally, I find Finnish audio-books unpleasant to listen to for that same reason written Finnish is not spoken.
So now that you know these two basic concepts of Finnish language, I can explain why we don’t say “I love you”.
Saying “I love you” in Finnish sounds weird, because “Minä rakastan sinua” is written Finnish.
No one speaks written Finnish.
It’s not meant to be said.
Therefore, the words for “I love you” are never spoken in that particular format.
Even though that is the literal translation, it sounds like “It is I that loves you”. The nearest you might hear is where you drop the “I” from “I love you”, which, actually, still translates to “I love you”, because of how Finnish verbs and conjugation works. “Rakastan sinua” instead of “Minä rakastan sinua” sounds better, because it drops the formal “I”, bringing it a little closer to a spoken format. The word “you”, “sinua” is still in it’s formal version here, but since that is something you cannot exclude, you have to say “Rakastan sinua” or resort to a spoken variant of “you”, so it becomes “Rakastan sua”. To which one would reply the equivalent of “So do I” or ”I too (love) you” “Minäkin (rakastan) sinua”, where the word “love” can be dropped out because the meaning is carried from the previous sentence.
However, It’s still rarer to use.
Instead of “I love you”, we usually say that “You are loved” or “you are dear (to my heart)”, “olet rakas”, because that’s how our language and culture works.
English does not have words for “rakas” that could bring the heart-felt implications like Finnish does. Connotation is everything. Closest you can translate to is “dear” but it’s a very hollow in comparison to “rakas”. It comes with heavy romantic, endearing and sickly sweet connotations. That’s why it’s often supplemented with additional words if you don’t mean it as a declaration of undying romantic love. But the heaviness still remains.
Like, if a friend calls me “rakas ystävä”, “a dear/loved friend”, that is a huge fucking deal. The implications of that level of endearment means that it’s ride or die.
By all means, when a Finnish person says that they love you, it means a hell of a lot more than it does in English. Personally, I find the heaviness of those words intimidating, in a sense.
It’s like a declaration of war but with roses and cuddles.
Finnish is like a heavy, carved boulder. You move it only with precise intention. English is like conveniently small pebbles, easy to throw around all willy-nilly. Effortless. You can’t take “I love you” back, but it sounds lighter and gets the meaning across. Me saying that in Finnish takes years of careful planning, support structures, proper tones and a future intent. It’s almost more accurate to say that in Finnish, you carve a whole new boulder for every single person you say it to. Hence, you usually don’t say it.
It’s also a cultural thing. I’m under the impression that Japanese words and meanings for “I love you” are also very complex for English speakers, due to linguistic and cultural differences.
There are many ways to tell someone that you love, care and cherish them, ranging from platonic to romantic, we just don’t say it in the same clear-cut format as English speakers do.
And to us, love is more about “show, don’t tell.”
-R
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