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Finland joined NATO, but what language do they speak anyway? [1]
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Date: 2023-04-07
Published as a dedication to annieli for her work for us: she had a title "Finland joins NATO: 'Ei koskaan enää yksin' – ‘Never again alone’. To give a counterpoint to that concept and a sample of what Finnish sounds like and what a written text to it looks like, here's an example:
Sä olet lehti ruokalassa — You're a newspaper in the canteen
Resuiseksi selattu — browsed tattered
Pukuhuoneen korttipakka — a deck of cards in the locker room
Loppuun pelattu — all played out
Sä olet yksin yksinäinen — you're all alone and lonely
Mä olen yksin yksinäinen — I'm lonely and alone
Mä olen onnen kerjäläinen — I'm a beggar for happiness
Kurjuuden kuningas — king of misery
Sä olet baarin kaljalasi — you're the beer glass in the bar
Janoisin huulin hiottu — ground with thirsty lips
Muslimien musta kivi — the black stone of Muslims
Sileäksi suudeltu — kissed smooth
Sä olet yksin yksinäinen — you're alone and lonely
Mä olen yksin yksinäinen — I'm alone and lonely
Mä olen onnen kerjäläinen — I'm a beggar for happiness
Kurjuuden kuningas — king of misery
First, a Finnish concept that exists only in Finnish, ‘kalsarikänni’: ‘kalsarit’ means underpants, ‘känni’ drunkenness. You're sitting on the sofa at home in your underwear, and the six-pack of beer bottles is approaching an empty package, you're already a bit drunk and you're exactly in the mood to sing along here with Tuomari Nurmio...
If you want to learn Finnish, you have just a first problem: there is no word for ‘yes’ and ‘no’: to say ‘yes’, you have to repeat the verb of the question in the correct person, and to say ‘no’, you have to learn a verb:
am I late? — olenko myöhässä? / olet — you are / et ole — you are not
are you at home? — oletko kotona? / olen — I am / en ole — I'm not
That the negation is really a verb is shown by the comparison with the verb ‘to be’:
olen — en ole / I am — I am not
olet — et ole / you are — you are not
on — ei ole / he, she is — he she is not
olemme — emme ole / we are — we are not
olette — ette ole / you are — you are not
ovat — eivät ole / they are — they are not
For the third person there are two pronouns, but there is no distinction between gender, but between person and thing: ‘hän’ stands for all persons, ‘se’ for things:
pidän hänestä — I like him, I like her / pidän siitä — I like it
If you want to learn Finnish, you have another problem than saying yes and no: it's not always easy to find a word in the dictionary:
älä juo kylmää vettä! — do not drink cold water!
‘älä’ is the command form of the negation verb that has no base form, juoda 'drink' and kylmä ‘cold’ could be found in the dictionary, but not ‘vettä’, which would be look up under vesi 'water'.
Responsible for this is mainly what is called consonant gradation: depending on whether a syllable is open or closed when suffixes are added, the consonants at the syllable onset change:
kat-to — roof / ka-tol-la — on the roof
pa-ta — pan / pa-das-sa — in the pan
so-pu — harmony / so-vus-sa — in harmony
sel-kä — back / se-läs-sä — on the back
As these examples show, as in Hungarian, which is related to Finnish, prepositions are often represented by suffixes, for example for talo 'house'.
talossa — in the house / talolla — at the house
taloon — into the house / talolle — to the house
talosta — out of the house / talolta — away from the house
Apart from Hungarian, Finnish has other relatives, outside Russia the Sámi languages and Estonian, in Russia Karelian, the Mordvinic languages Moksha and Erzya, Mari, Komi, Udmurt, Khanty, and Mansi, more distantly related the Samoyedic languages, with Nenets as the largest group. Like all other minorities in Russia, speakers of these languages preferentially end up in the meat grinder of the fighting in Ukraine, and especially in the Udmurt region there have been various protests against the war.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/7/2162611/-Finland-joined-NATO-but-what-language-do-they-speak-anyway
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