I'm a Finn and not language person, so I have always wondered why some linguists and philologists (like Tolkien) love Finnish language despite it being so weird and hard to learn. Here is interesting opinion from one foreigner:
First to give some weight to my opinion, I should mention that I've studied most of the major language families in the world to some depth. I've studied indo-european languages quite extensively (including all scandinavian languages), I have a degree in Icelandic, teach it for a living, and have studied Finnish for many years.
In comparaison to other languages, Finnish is very regular. It is extremely efficient - you can create new words very easily and all the parts 'click' together perfectly. One of the reason for the great practicality and efficiency of the Finnish language is that for one thing, it uses many small ways to integrate endings seemlessly into the words - vowel harmony means only certain vowels can be added onto certain nouns (a o u can only have a o u in the word, whereas ä ö y can only be around other ä ö y, and i e are neutral). Every way in which a word can end in Finnish also has a second 'open' form that is used when the seal of the word is broken (nominative) to add more stuff onto it. The word kuningas 'king' can be 'broken open' to kunkinkaa- and then you add endings (kuninkaalle, kuninkaana, etc.).
So it's kind of like a really slick puzzle where each part fits specifically with a word and various rules make it all seem like one big beautiful well integrated whole.
Another beautiful thing about Finnish is the purity of its sounds. It's extremely clear. You can chose to speak Finnish in such a way that every single vowel is completely distinct from the other, no sound is ambiguous, everything is just the way it should be.
Finnish also has a LOT of words. LOADS of words describing sounds in nature. LOADS of words for various types of movement (jump, jump once, jump around, jump casually, etc.). It is the PERFET language to talk about the forest, mushrooms, types of soil, types of bark, birds, water, weather. I can think of SO many words related to trees, bark, where the tree lies, how big it is, is it dead on its side, dead lying on another tree, dead with the middle rotten away, the bark rotten away, etc.
Finnish is also what is called a linguistic icebox. When you put a new word into Finnish, it remains unchanged for many thousands of years. The word kuningas 'king' is nearly identical to the proto-germanic form (*kuningaZ).
So in other words, Finnish is incredibly clear, very 'integrated' (words seamlessly melt into one another with high specificity), really rich in derivations (you can create hundreds of words based on one root), really rich in words for sound, movement, nature, trees, plants, etc., and it has changed very little for a very very long time.
Sure, it's spoken with a rather low voice and your culture might label Finnish as ugly, but it's just really different from the germanic languages, and in my opinion, infinitely more beautiful!
What he is describing are aggulutinative languages. They are not that unique.
I feel like a broken record, but I think Arabic qualifies (my specialty). I also think of German, Turkish, Russian.
What is interesting, at least with dialectical Arabic and a general trend in languages where synthetic languages (agglutinative languages are a subset of that) move to analytic (like English, where you have clusters of words bonding to have a meaning, instead of morphology changes on the word) over time (I was studying with an Arabic dialectologist who worked with US DoS to write their books; perhaps the leading non-native on this stuff). She said if you read, this is not an uncommon trend as hinted earlier.
English is a good example of eventually dropping agglutinative (synthetic to analytic). I am not sure if this is happening to Finnish, but as an Arabic speaker it is very fun to use an agglutinative language with a special pattern system. Imagine basic word meanings are objects, and you can subclass them into a person doing it noun (k-t-b -> k-aa-t-b, writer), or a place where it is done (k-t-b -> m-k-t-b or m-k-t-b-a, office and library respectively) or something that is the passive object form (m-k-t-oo-b, something written down). There are even versions for receivng action passively, and many variants for verb types. You can build verbs on the fly. It is fun to watch US movies, here a weird word, and guess the root into the right pattern.
I have heard Finnish is cool, but not for quite the same reasons (at least it is very general). But keep that agglutination and fight the power!
The term agglutinative language has a specific meaning in linguistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language. Under this definition, IE languages (Russian, German), Arabic wouldn't be be considered as such. Typical examples are Turkic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, most native American languages. And the language isolate Basque.
But you are right in the sense that other languages do exhibit agglutinative aspects, usually in nouns (Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz). One giveaway is how words get marked for mood, person, and tense. In agglutinative languages the basic form almost never changes.
You make a good point, I realized later when I was less tired and I was confusing the general type (synthetic) with agglutinative (specific sub-category).
Finnish has various forms of consonant gradation, e.g. kyky (ability) -> kyvystä (from skill), or saapas (boot) -> saappain (by boots). I'm no linguist, but I'm pretty sure that hinders Finnish from turning very analytic. This is in contrast to say, Quechua, which is so regular I'm not sure how they decided which things are inflections and which are their own words.
>In comparaison to other languages, Finnish is very regular.
Sanskrit (another Indo-European language) is another language that is regular, or maybe I should say its grammar rules are fairly systematic. It's as though the language was designed by a mathematician or computer scientist - orthogonal, etc. - speaking loosely, of course - I'm not a linguist by any means. But I did study Sanskrit for some years in high school.
Also:
>really rich in derivations (you can create hundreds of words based on one root
Similar to Sanskrit again. You can create words not only based on one root, but by combining various words, roots, stems, prefixes, suffixes, etc. Of course other languages may have this too.
Another interesting thing I read about Sanskrit is that some of the verses in shlokas [1] have multiple layers of meaning, e.g. a superficial meaning and deeper meaning(s).
Sanskrit comes across as logical because it's almost always learned as a second language for scholarly purposes. It has a small number of native speakers, but when you learn Sanskrit you're probably not specifically learning to talk to them.
A more obvious example of this is Latin, which sounds so scholarly because for centuries it was used only by scholars. If the toddlers of a nation were somehow taught to speak Latin for everyday purposes, the living language that resulted would give Latin teachers a heart attack.
Heh. Well, I don't think my school was exceptional in that way, though it was reasonably good. It's just that this was in India and Sanskrit and Hindi were two of the languages taught. Can't remember now whether it was an elective or not.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Nordiccountries/comments/2bm3e4/dane...
Ok this might get long.First to give some weight to my opinion, I should mention that I've studied most of the major language families in the world to some depth. I've studied indo-european languages quite extensively (including all scandinavian languages), I have a degree in Icelandic, teach it for a living, and have studied Finnish for many years.
In comparaison to other languages, Finnish is very regular. It is extremely efficient - you can create new words very easily and all the parts 'click' together perfectly. One of the reason for the great practicality and efficiency of the Finnish language is that for one thing, it uses many small ways to integrate endings seemlessly into the words - vowel harmony means only certain vowels can be added onto certain nouns (a o u can only have a o u in the word, whereas ä ö y can only be around other ä ö y, and i e are neutral). Every way in which a word can end in Finnish also has a second 'open' form that is used when the seal of the word is broken (nominative) to add more stuff onto it. The word kuningas 'king' can be 'broken open' to kunkinkaa- and then you add endings (kuninkaalle, kuninkaana, etc.).
So it's kind of like a really slick puzzle where each part fits specifically with a word and various rules make it all seem like one big beautiful well integrated whole.
Another beautiful thing about Finnish is the purity of its sounds. It's extremely clear. You can chose to speak Finnish in such a way that every single vowel is completely distinct from the other, no sound is ambiguous, everything is just the way it should be.
Finnish also has a LOT of words. LOADS of words describing sounds in nature. LOADS of words for various types of movement (jump, jump once, jump around, jump casually, etc.). It is the PERFET language to talk about the forest, mushrooms, types of soil, types of bark, birds, water, weather. I can think of SO many words related to trees, bark, where the tree lies, how big it is, is it dead on its side, dead lying on another tree, dead with the middle rotten away, the bark rotten away, etc.
Finnish is also what is called a linguistic icebox. When you put a new word into Finnish, it remains unchanged for many thousands of years. The word kuningas 'king' is nearly identical to the proto-germanic form (*kuningaZ).
So in other words, Finnish is incredibly clear, very 'integrated' (words seamlessly melt into one another with high specificity), really rich in derivations (you can create hundreds of words based on one root), really rich in words for sound, movement, nature, trees, plants, etc., and it has changed very little for a very very long time.
Sure, it's spoken with a rather low voice and your culture might label Finnish as ugly, but it's just really different from the germanic languages, and in my opinion, infinitely more beautiful!
Upea suomenkieli, kaikkein kaunein kieli!