#angloposting

[vieraslaji]

when people call me "fluent" in Finnish I'm going to start responding that I couldn't possibly be fluent because I only know the names of like, five kinds of tree

[vieraslaji]

searching my finnish cookbook for karjalan piirakka and this sent me to the fucking floor

[vieraslaji]

suomi mainittu (as having helped start the Great Seattle Fire)

[vieraslaji]

I'm so glad the New York Times is talking about the issues that matter

[vieraslaji]

these are just sort of thoughts that i'm having so please don't take me as any kind of expert on this, I am just a guy

anyway

i'm staring to think "mic'd" might be my new favorite word in the English language? not for its own sake but because of what it tells us about english orthography. because obviously it's not normal to use an apostrophe to indicate past tense in English, but mic'd is such a weird word that you literally can't do anything else.

-ed? that's miced, the past tense of "to mouse" (i mean it's not, the past tense of "to mouse" is "moused" but you get my point). "-ce" requires a soft c pronunciation.

okay, so maybe we add a K to indicate that it's a hard c sound? micked? nope, that's pronounced like nicked. double letters (or ck, in the case of c) after a vowel indicate a short vowel sound even with an e after them.

what about miked, then? take out the c, so it's a long vowel and retains the hard k sound? maybe, but a) that's just a name and b) it's getting kind of too far away from the original shortening of "microphone."

English had a similar problem with the past tense of "to sic (on)" and we kind of solved it by sometimes saying "sicced" (double letter keeps the vowel short and kiiiiind of negates the soft c-ness of the -ce situation) and sometimes taking the apostrophe route with "sic'd". i guess everyone looked at the possibility of adding another meaning to "sicked" and went yeah nah.

but mic'd is more fun in my opinion, because we went from a shortened noun (mic) to a verb (to mic, aka to amplify someone's voice by means of a microphone) to a state of being represented by a past participle (to be mic'd, aka to have one's voice amplified by means of a microphone, usually worn rather than held). and now mic'd is in the dictionary (or at least wiktionary), an official english word with an apostrophe in it because our spelling rules, loosey goosey as they are, wouldn't let us do anything else.

anyway that's my ted talk as to why mic'd is cool and should get added to the OED. don't talk to me about cc'd/cc'ed/cc-d because I hate it. emails are a curse.

[vieraslaji]

i'm not one for callouts but oh my god shut uppppppp why are you even in a language learning community if this is the kind of dogshit advice you give. go away and leave finnish alone

[vieraslaji]

because I'm not fluent (B2? C1? we may never know) in Finnish, my brain spends a lot of time playing word association games when I'm trying to remember if I've ever heard a word before. and as someone who would have loved to become a linguist, it fascinates me.

like, what is happening neurologically when I can't think of täristä (to vibrate) and so my brain instead supplies the closest synonym it knows, vapista (to shiver)? I'm not translating directly, because I don't know the Finnish word for vibrate, but somehow my brain has taken the semantic meaning of "vibrate", switched over into Finnish Mode, and chosen something semantically similar. that's so cool; how does that happen?

[vieraslaji]

it just occurred to me most Finnish learners probably don't know about this - you can listen to most of the major radio stations in Finland from anywhere in the world with the (free!) Radio Suomi app on the app store and play store. some of the music stations you can only access through another app but such is life I guess :/

it's a great way to find new popular Finnish music or random Finnish dialogue to listen to, and because it has yle news and talk stations from every region of the country, it's helpful if people are aiming for a particular dialect!