Languages! Are! Weird!

As I noted, though, there's added difficulty in that there's a large number of word groups that you basically have to know by heart (though I think most Finns never even notice that they know these.)

This Wikipedia page lists the noun cases in Finnish. The example they use is the same one I picked - "talo" ("house"). Here's the same word in Wiktionary. Open the "declension" box to see all the forms it takes. You'll notice that it's marked as "type valo" - meaning that it behaves the same way as the word "valo" ("light"). So here's the article for that type. This article lists all the types.

Here's a similar list for verbs. So again, even if you learn all the forms that a particular verb can take, you'll only know how to treat verbs of the same type. Let's pick an article at random from that list and see all the forms that that verb can take: tulla ("to come"). The Wiktionary article for that word has a box that opens into all the forms it has.

Using all of these correctly, I would say, is what makes Finnish difficult. I think it's actually almost the only thing that really makes Finnish difficult - at least if learning new vocabulary that probably isn't related to anything you know is not hard for you. For instance, we have very loose rules about word order. Generally, you can have the words of a sentence in just about any order without changing the meaning, and only very rare word orders will sound strange or wrong to a Finnish speaker.

edited 3rd Feb '14 5:33:56 PM by BestOf

My language doesn't have the sort of conjugation in positive and negative forms that Finnish has, so it would take time for me to adapt and memorize it well. We also only tend to have one form of infinitive and participle, regardless of being inessive or abessive, of being past, present or agent.

That's why I used the comparison in the first place.

As to , Finnish is hardly unique in this regard of having multiple verb classes; German, English and several other Germanic languages have weak vs. strong verbs, Spanish has the -ar/-er/-ir endings, and so on. Even if the sheer volume proves daunting to a learner, the concept itself won't prove too difficult for most European language speakers, unlike the postpositional case thing.

edited 3rd Feb '14 8:05:26 PM by somerandomdude

It's not unique, but because there are so many types of verbs and nouns (and adjectives and numerals as well, BTW,) I think Finnish is a really difficult language.

Sometimes I meet people who want to learn Finnish, and I just don't get it. There are about 5 million Finnish speakers, and the only language that becomes much easier to learn if you know Finnish is Estonian - and it has just 1 million speakers. It's hardly worth learning these languages even if you intend to live here.

Because it's a relatively isolated language and is thus exotic.

The same reason anyone wants to learn Basque or anything like that.

To this Russian, Polish sounds like a collection of Inherently Funny Words and Buffy Speak. No offence meant, I'm sure that Russian sounds the same to the people of Poland.

Let's see...

What is Russian word for ugliness means "beauty"

What is Russian word for shop means "crypt"

What is Polish for "good housekeeping" in Russian sounds like "Very mean-spirited wife"

And so on

edited 4th Feb '14 7:54:05 AM by Beholderess

What's the last one? I know that "sklep" means cellar in Russian, also, I'm amazed at the amount of weird-ass loanwords in Russian, especially the one for a train station - it's so counterintuitive that nobody would guess it.

Also, we make some mutual fun at our languages with the Czechs too. Czech words for airplane (letadlo), excavator (rypadlo), train (vlak) and hammer (kladivo) crack me up. However, the funniest one must be the Colorado beetle (mandelinka bramborova).

Yep. Here's how weird a language can be, in this case Japanese. Just look at this table that shows the number system.

The same number can be said three different ways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals

Two different ways. It's the same in English - we have 'One' and 'First'. 'Two' and 'Second'. 'Three' and 'Third'. And so on and so forth.

That has nothing to do with numbers, but with Japanese incorporating Chinese in a strange way. You see, every kanji in existence has at least two readings - the original Chinese one, and the Japanese one. The Japanese pronounciation is 99% of the time complimented by hiragana, while the Chinese one is either independent or complimented by another kanji which is also going to be read in its Chinese reading. Most have about three different readings. Those aren't three readings, they're two. The On reading is the preferred one in 80% of those.

Also, multiple readings for diferent types of numbering is hardly unique to Japanese. Greek does it too.

edited 4th Feb '14 12:42:24 PM by lu127

My impression of Russian is that it sounds kinda cute.

When it comes to complicated numbers, I don't think anyone beats the Danish. We had a very basic introduction to Danish in elementary school and even the teacher admitted she felt sorry for all the Danish kids who had to grow up with these numbers.

DISCLAIMER: It was a while since I had to learn this stuff and I may get some details wrong.

The first weird thing is that Danish puts the multiples of one after multiples of ten but still put it after everything else. So 41 would be "one and forty" (exceptwith Danish words) but 241 is "two hundred and one and forty". Besides this, Danish numbers up to 49 is pretty much what you'd expect, which just makes the following madness even more confusing.

You see, Denmark has a long history of maritime trading, and back in the old days traders counted everything in Baker's dozens (groups of 20). So 60, instead of being named after the number 6 or ten or anything like that is named after the number 3 (since 60=20x3). Saying that "sixty" and "eighty" are called "threes" and "fours" is a rough translation good enough for the purposes of this post. This naturally means that "fifty", "seventy" and n"inety" becomes "half threes", "half fours" and "half fives" (presumably because 50 is halfway between two and three baker's dozens, and so on), even though the word "hundred" is the same as in English. Thus the number 291 is pronounced somewhat like "two hundred and one and half fives".

Moving on to my langauage, I've heard the hardest part when learning Swedish is figuring out which article to use. You see, instead of "a" and "an" we have "en" and "ett" with various nouns belonging to each article. Which article each noun belongs to also affect alot of things like how it's definitive version looks like (we switch between definite and indefinite by changing the noun instead of by changing the article like the English with their "the"), what adjectives to use along with it and so on. Unlike English, which decides article after what letter the noun begins with, Swedish has no rules whatsoever for what article to use and you need to learn it by heart for every single noun in the language.

We also have four different types of plural endings. The first three are "-or", "-ar", and "-er", and the fourth one is "not having a pluralised ending at all so the singular sounds exactly like the plural". If you guessed that which plural to use is just as arbitrary and random as which article to use you are absolutely correct. I've sometimes not known how to say a word because I've only encountered the singular version of it before and not the plural. Thankfully, these kind of words are usually so rare that no one else nearby has heard of the plural form either, so you can just improvise it and hope noone notices.

edited 4th Feb '14 4:38:53 PM by Druplesnubb

English did something similar. "Four and twenty black birds baked into a pie."

I could never figure out if that was supposed to be 24 blackbirds or 420 (haha blaze it) blackbirds.

The more I study another language, the more I realize how frakked up English is. It's like the linguistic personification of anarcho-syndicalism.

Also, I like to take advantage of my ability to formulate simple sentences in Russian to say non-threatening things in a very menacing tone. I might say "I like to study literature at the library" in the same tone I would say "I will spit on your corpse and piss on your grave."

edited 4th Feb '14 10:02:33 PM by MaxwellDaring

I have an icon that describes English as a language that drags other languages into the alley and beats them up for grammar. It gets weirder when you consider that a lot of our words are loanwords, with the French influenced ones supposedly connoting fancier versions of what we use the German influenced ones for. Cook vs Chef, for one. (Though I'm not sure loanword is quite the right way to describe those at this point in time.)

-*Still not getting how odd English's grammar is*-

I find it interesting that one of the few words in English that maintains gender is the french loanword blond/blonde.

Also 'parently in Old English the word for a doctor was Læce (Læchay) nowadays pronounced leech. Seems people named the animal after who was around them.

If I could do anything to English spelling I'd encourage diacritics and grave markers. Also I'd want to bring back ash and thorn. Such useful letters.

edited 5th Feb '14 2:20:43 AM by Blackcoldren

Is ash the letter that looks like a D with a t cross over it? Because that was a cool one.

Also the umlaut would be good too.

No, it's the letter that looks like a fused with an e

edited 5th Feb '14 6:09:44 AM by Xopher001

The one that's pronounced as "aye" if I remember correctly,....yeah I only ever learned the Icelandic way.

Let me guess: the Old English word for a lawyer was "Vulture"?

I have another fun fact, since we're at it. A couple of centuries ago, the modern Polish word for a woman meant, guess what, a whore. I'm kinda surprised no feminist has yet whined about it. I think the change in meaning happened somewhere in the 1700s, but don't quote me on it.

Back to the topic of Russian and Polish comparisons, the Russian word for "to remember" is Polish for "to forget". Apparently Poles want to forget what the Russians would like to remember.

Hussy is a compound word for house and wife. From huswif (hoosweef) the f was dropped and you ended up with what became hussy.

In English the ash (æ) is the hard a sound or the dull-a as I've heard some call it. It's the a in bat in American English.

If it has a macron above it, it's more like the a in and. Of course, OE manuscripts often don't have said macron, so you're left to make an informed guess from context.

Hmm Smörgåsbord comes from Swedish. I didn't know how to spell it so I looked it up. I never really tho't about the origin of the word.

On the subject of numbers, French is pretty odd as well. It doesn't seem to like the digits 7, 8, and 9.

11 through 16 have their own terms (onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize), but 17 through 19 are dix-sept (ten-seven), dix-huit (ten-eight), and dix-neuf (ten-nine).

After that, every number that ends with a 1 digit is "[x] and one"— vingt et un (twenty and one), trente et un (thirty and one), and so on. (Everything in between doesn't do that— 22 is vingt-deux, 23 is vingt-trois.)

Then you get past 69. 70 is soixante-dix (sixty-ten), 71 is soixante-et-onze (sixty-and-eleven), 72 is soixante-douze (sixty-twelve), all the way up to 79, soixante-dix-neuf (sixty-ten-nine).

80 is quatre-vingts (four-twenties), 81 is quatre-vingt-un (four-twenty-one), 90 is quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenty-ten), 91 is quatre-vingt-onze (four-twenty-eleven), finally ending at 99, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (four-twenty-ten-nine). Then 100 is simply cent, and the whole thing starts over again.

edited 5th Feb '14 10:29:47 AM by Blueeyedrat