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@holdwine @evergrove is this accurate?? 🤣🤣
@niuniente
#fjsdfs #when i studied in denmark #they spent an entire class showing us simple words and how similar they were across danish #norwegian #etc. for the express purpose of ragging on how different the finnish word was #the teacher literally said ‘we can more or less understand across these languages. if you see one that sticks out like a sore thumb it’s finnish #also the delivery on this video is just delightful (via @destinyandcoins)
I find it hilarious that denmark has to stoop to ragging on the finns (instead of doing it for I guess shits and giggles like the others), because all the other nordic languages rag on them for sounding like they’re mumbling with a mouth full of marbles. XD
Oh! Oh! That’s because Finnish is from a different language family! The Uralic languages!
:D
Yup! The roots of the majority of European and many nearby languages is Indo-Eropean, which is the root of everything from English to Russian to Hindi to Persian and more!
Finnish however, as you said, has its roots in a different branch than Indo-European, the Uralic languages. There aren’t many of them - Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are the most widely spoken, but there’s a handful of others as well, mostly spoken by local ethnic groups in northern Scandinavia and Siberia.
Poles and Lithuanians eying one another across the table xD
Every time I come across posts like these I’m just reminded of the beautiful infographics made by Minna Sundberg
BTW the Finnish word lohikäärme does not come from the separate words lohi (salmon) and käärme (snake). According to current knowledge, this word comes from an old Swedish word floghdragi (flying snake). Finnish has loaned the word, left the first part untranslated but changed it a little to suite Finnish pronounciation better, and it just accidentally is the same word as salmon. The second part of the compound has been translated to käärme (snake).
So yeah, as funny as it is that it is a salmon snake, that’s not really it.
ps. Finnish also has a similar word to the Swedish drake: traakki. It is not widely used but it appears in some plants’ names for example.
Source: https://www.kielikello.fi/-/kysyvalle-vastataan (in Finnish)
Actually, I want to talk a little bit more about Finnish compounds since they are fun and very different from english ones so this might be interesting and quite educational for some of you!
Unlike in English, in Finnish compounds are very normal and widely used. I personally like this since it makes many words easier to understand ‘cause they are a lot more describing than their englsih counterparts. Let me give you some examples:
plane - lentokone (fluing machine)
concussion - aivotärähdys (brain jolt)
conspiracy - salaliitto (secrect alliance)
There are also some comppunds that Finns don’t usualy even recognize as compounds (although they most certainly are).
garden - puutarha (tree enclosure/farm)… it was hard to find a translation for tarha…
world - maailma (land air)
Also in Finnish compunds are ALWAYS and I really mean always written together. This also gives the opportunity to make very usable new words.
You know that “German has a word for everything” meme? I am not 100% sure but I have understood that the German works in a similar way. Of course there is a word for “the happy feeling you get when you eat cauliflower” because that can just be maybe up by compounding the keywords: kukkakaalinsyönti-ilo (cauliflower eating happines).
Cauliflower is also a great compound! It literally means flower cabbage.
German does work in a similar way! In fact, the exact same way for some of the words you mentioned. We have:
plane - lentokone (flying machine) - Flugzeug (flying thing)
concussion - aivotärähdys - Gehirnerschütterung (brain jolt)
cauliflower - kukkakaali - Blumenkohl (flower cabbage)
And also:
dictionary - sanakirja - Wörterbuch (word book)
railway - rautatie - Eisenbahn (iron way)
So yeah, we have a word for everything for this exact reason! And there are a lot of words you can just translate literally into finnish and it’s still a valid compound word, which is nice when you’re German and learning Finnish! Basically,
