Finnish

[Jamie123]

Anyone know Finnish? Perhaps did their mission in Finland and had to learn it?

Running statistical analysis on Finnish texts reveals some interesting properties - namely a much larger vocabulary and a closer adherence to Zipf's law than English, and Finnish texts are much less varied in their properties. I've had little time (or energy) to investigate but I've submitted a short paper for a conference in Cambridge this coming July.

What I do know about Finnish is:

1. It is not Indo-European, but is related more to the Slavic language family.

2. It is highly "aggluninative" (a lovely word which I've recently learned - it means that new words are made by sticking other words together. We have a bit of it in English (like "policeman" or "postmaster") but Finnish uses it much more.

3. The language is highly inflected. While Latin nouns have six cases and Classical Greek five, Finnish nouns have fifteen!

This certainly accounts for the much larger vocabulary, but I wonder about the rest - the strong Zipfian law and the lack of large statistical variations between texts. Is it a "purer" language? - unlike English which is a horrible mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Norman French, Dutch, Latin and Greek.

I'd be most grateful to anyone has any insights, or can point me to any helpful books on the subject. 🙂

Edited May 16 by Jamie123

[Carborendum]

22 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

Anyone know Finnish? Perhaps did their mission in Finland and had to learn it?

Running statistical analysis on Finnish texts reveals some interesting properties - namely a much larger vocabulary and a closer adherence to Zipf's law than English, and Finnish texts are much less varied in their properties. I've had little time (or energy) to investigate but I've submitted a short paper for a conference in Cambridge this coming July.

What I do know about Finnish is:

1. It is not Indo-European, but is related more to the Slavic language family.

2. It is highly "aggluninative" (a lovely word which I've recently learned - it means that new words are made by sticking other words together. We have a bit of it in English (like "policeman" or "postmaster") but Finnish uses it much more.

3. The language is highly inflected. While Latin nouns have six cases and Classical Greek five, Finnish nouns have fifteen!

This certainly accounts for the much larger vocabulary, but I wonder about the rest - the strong Zipfian law and the lack of large statistical variations between texts. Is it a "purer" language? - unlike English which is a horrible mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Norman French, Dutch, Latin and Greek.

I'd be most grateful to anyone has any insights, or can point me to any helpful books on the subject. 🙂

I have a nephew who served his mission in Finland. What particular question would you like me to ask him?

I have to note that just because he served his mission there, it is no guarantee that he is an expert in that language.  Only about 10% of missionaries truly learn their foreign language to the level of a professional translator.  But he could be one of them.  He's quite smart.

[Vort]

Maybe the smartest guy I have ever known was an LDS friend in State College, PA who served his mission to Finland.

Whenever anyone ever mentions Finnish declensions, I always think of this comic. (WARNING: European speech patterns prevail, making this comic perhaps inappropriate for the current venue. Mods, feel free to mod away.)

Edited May 16 by Vort

[Vort]

25 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

unlike English which is a horrible mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Norman French, Dutch, Latin and Greek.

FTR, I think English totally rocks.

[zil2]

23 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

3. The language is highly inflected. While Latin nouns have six cases and Classical Greek five, Finnish nouns have fifteen!

A friend from my college Russian classes was called to serve a mission in Finland.  She said Finnish was much harder than Russian (in part due to those fifteen cases).

Can't tell you more except that Helsinki is the place to go if you want to try a huge variety of restaurants from different cultures.  I assume this is because it's a port city, but don't know for sure.   Oh, and I bought my favorite pair of shoes ever there, but alas, the shoes are long gone - worn and tossed.  

[zil2]

3 minutes ago, Vort said:

http://i.imgur.com/QFm6SCE.png

"And now for the plural forms..."

[NeuroTypical]

1 hour ago, Jamie123 said:

Anyone know Finnish?

No, but I know why Norway started putting barcodes on their military seafaring vessels.

(It was so they could Scandinavian.)

I'll show myself out, thanks.

[NeuroTypical]

1 hour ago, Vort said:

Whenever anyone ever mentions Finnish declensions, I always think of this comic.

Yeesh - I thought French counting was bad.  (language starting around 3:10)

 

Edited May 16 by NeuroTypical

[Vort]

4 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

No, but I know why Norway started putting barcodes on their military seafaring vessels.

(It was so they could Scandinavian.)

I'll show myself out, thanks.

[Jamie123]

On 5/16/2024 at 8:35 PM, Carborendum said:

I have a nephew who served his mission in Finland. What particular question would you like me to ask him?

Thanks Carb - I appreciate this.

Knowing the right questions to ask is tricky, which is why I've thought it over for a few days. These are the sorts of things I am curious about:

• In English we have many words with very similar meanings:
  • "Big" and "large" mean almost the same thing, but there are subtleties: we would say "big wheel" for a carnival attraction or a child's scooter, but we wouldn't say "large wheel". Similarly we might say "there is a thief at large" but never "there is a thief at big".
  • I remember once as a kid asking by father why the label Lee and Perrins sauce bottle said "Original and Genuine" when those two words mean the same. He told me that no two English words mean exactly the same: we wouldn't for example say that "genuine sin" means the same as "original sin" - though "genuine Picasso" could be interchanged with "original Picasso". 
  • Similarly "Contrition" and "remorse" are similar enough to be confused, and people do often say "remorse" when they really mean "contrition". (One could be remorseful about something without being in the slightest bit contrite.)
  • Similarly "resolution" and "will" don't mean quite the same, though people do confuse them. For example, you can resolve to do something, and yet still not do it willingly. I'm sure that wasn't always the case: the name "William" for example is usually said to mean "Helmet of Resolution" - coming from the German Wilhelm = will helm = "helmet of will". The subtlety of distinction had (presumably) not yet emerged when the name was coined. Are there similar things to these in Finnish?
• In English we write and talk differently depending on our audience.
  • When we talk to children we use different words than we would use with adults.
  • Similarly we would write a technical or academic paper using different language to what we would use when talking about the same things.
  • Some people use a form of Early Modern English when praying (the, thou, thine) that they would never normally use.
  • You would use different language in a love letter to your girlfriend/boyfriend than you would use in a letter to your boss. Again, do these kinds of differences appear in Finnish, and if so to what extent.

Sorry if that's rather a lot. I could probably research these things myself, though I doubt very much I have the skills to learn Finnish properly. I've just started to read J.R.R. Tolkien's adaptation of the Finnish legend of Kullervo - it says in the Intro that Tolkien never particularly mastered Finnish (and we're talking here of a man who invented languages of his own!) so I doubt I'd have much of a hope. One year I came equal bottom of the class in French! (Though in my defence, I did come top in English the same year.)

Edited May 22 by Jamie123

[NeuroTypical]

https://finlander.swedishfinnhistoricalsociety.org/forum/the-living-room/jokes/10416-the-finn-who-would-not-take-a-sauna

[Jamie123]

On 5/16/2024 at 9:32 PM, Vort said:

Don't ask me why, but I texted that joke to my wife. She said "That's not funny". I said "Why not? It's no different from 'parrots eat 'em all'!" She said "I get the joke, but with all the wars going on in the world I don't find it funny."

You'd think after 20 years I'd know better than to try!

[Carborendum]

48 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

do these kinds of differences appear in Finnish, and if so to what extent.

I'll forward the question to him.  But I can tell you right now that the answer is yes. 

I speak three languages and I am familiar with four others.  And they all have such characteristics.  I don't see how you can have a well-developed language that doesn't do that.  And since Finnish is so grammatically complex, I doubt it would be absent such characteristics.

I'll get back to you when my nephew does.

Edited May 22 by Carborendum

[Jamie123]

2 hours ago, Carborendum said:

I'll forward the question to him.  But I can tell you right now that the answer is yes. 

I speak three languages and I am familiar with four others.  And they all have such characteristics.  I don't see how you can have a well-developed language that doesn't do that.  And since Finnish is so grammatically complex, I doubt it would be absent such characteristics.

I'll get back to you when my nephew does.

Another thought: we often use the same word to mean different things - for example "head" could mean what's on top of your shoulder, or it could mean the person in charge of some group or organization, or it could mean the top of a sheet of paper, or it could mean a toilet on board a ship. In the latter three, the word is used by analogy. Another example, "tolerance" could mean the act of putting up with things that irritate you, or it could mean a range of values of some quantity which are acceptable for a particular purpose (like the tolerance of a resistor).

It is regularity of the language that interests me most. Particularly the Finnish documents are much truer to Zipf's law than the English ones. I have done some statistical tests that prove this is true, but I am interested in what causes it. There must be something about the language that makes it so.

By the way, I got the email today to say the paper has been accepted. I won't present it myself. I have a colleague who would get much more out of a trip to Cambridge than I would.

P.S. what I've read of Kullervo so far is very strange. It starts with a family of swans. (In the original they were apparently swans and chickens, but Tolkien's version only mentions swans.) A hawk and an eagle carry off two of the cygnets to different countries, where they appear to grow up as humans. No explanation for what's going on. The remaining cygnet stays with his mother and grows up evil - again somehow becoming human along the way. I've not had much time for reading, but I gather so far the Finns have some very strange ideas!

Edited May 22 by Jamie123

[pam]

We used to have 2 members of the forum (brothers) who both spoke Finnish. One of them did some translating for me a few times.

[Vort]

9 hours ago, NeuroTypical said:

https://finlander.swedishfinnhistoricalsociety.org/forum/the-living-room/jokes/10416-the-finn-who-would-not-take-a-sauna

He was a Fahrenheit Finn.

[Carborendum]

On 5/22/2024 at 4:20 PM, Jamie123 said:

It is regularity of the language that interests me most.

My conversation with my nephew was a lot longer than I expected.  He took a long time to simply say "yes."

So, I separated your request into three categories:

• Synonyms.
• Usage of a single word for different meanings.
• Type of words one would use when speaking to different audiences.

The answer eventually ended up being "Yes."  The only difference is that they just don't do it in the same way.  For instance, your example of "Head" is not used in Finnish.  But they do similar things with other words which we would not.

While there are synonyms, they have a limited vocabulary.  So, there are not anywhere near as many synonyms as in English.  But to add nuances, they make up a compound word, very much like they do in German.

A similar issue comes up in speaking with children vs adults, formal and informal, etc.  While they do have it, their limited vocabulary makes their methods a little different.

Bottom line, yes.  But they do it differently than we do.

[Jamie123]

Thanks very much, and thanks to your nephew too. I really appreciate this.

1 hour ago, Carborendum said:

But to add nuances, they make up a compound word, very much like they do in German.

They call this "agglutination" (a word I learned only recently). From what I've read, Finnish is famous for its levels of agglutination. The individual word elements they call "lemmas".

I recently found an interesting paper (A. Corral, G. Boleda, R. Ferrer-i-Cancho, Zipf’s Law for Word Frequencies: Word Forms versus Lemmas in Long Texts | PLOS ONE) where they have compared the Zipf laws for several languages including English and Finnish. My own code only looks at complete wordforms - theirs automatically splits words into their individual elements to study the frequencies of those elements, and does this for multiple languages! (I fear that may be beyond my abilities - though maybe I could persuade them to share their code!)

To give you an idea of the sort of thing I'm looking at, here is one of my graphs:

What I call the "beta index" is the log-log slope of the numbers of unique words exhibiting a particular frequency plotted against that frequency (e.g. 10,000 words appear once, 5,000 appear twice, 1000 appear 3 times etc.). The "alpha index" is the log-log slope of the frequency of a word plotted against its "rank" (rank 1 being the most frequent word, 2 being the second, 3 the third etc.) The Finnish cluster is more compact than the English (even accounting for the fact that far fewer Finnish items appear) suggesting there is less diversity in the alpha index, and also the beta indices are significantly higher.

Corral et al. found similar results for their wordforms, and to some extent their lemmas too (though oddly their beta indices for English are significantly higher than mine - though their study is based on only 3 English and 3 Finnish texts).

Plenty of room for investigation here - just so little time to spare though 😒

Edited May 28 by Jamie123
Resize graph

[Traveler]

On 5/16/2024 at 1:36 PM, Vort said:

FTR, I think English totally rocks.

I think English is a horrible illogical and obtuse language that breaks all its own rules.  I am embarrassed that it is my first language and that it is considered so important in this world.  --- Right along with the imperial measurement system.   I look forward to the millennium that will replace corruption with something logical and pure.  😎

 

The Traveler

[Carborendum]

On 5/16/2024 at 2:35 PM, Vort said:

Maybe the smartest guy I have ever known was an LDS friend in State College, PA who served his mission to Finland.

I wonder if that is a requirement, as they say, it is one of the hardest languages for foreigners to learn.  "Only babies and missionairies can learn to speak Finnish."

This nephew of mine is one of the smartest people I know.  I always knew his father was one of the smartest men I've ever met.  My other BIL may be smarter than he is.

The other day I was in a conversation where this came up.  And I realized that of all the people that I know, this nephew & his older brother, as well as my oldest son are probably the smartest people I've ever met.  I can only keep up with them because I have 30 years of education and life experience on them.  But this BIL of mine is at another level beyond.  And I believe my son and the older nephew will surpass my BIL at some point.

Edited May 28 by Carborendum

[Carborendum]

40 minutes ago, Traveler said:

I think English is a horrible illogical and obtuse language that breaks all its own rules.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

[Traveler]

6 hours ago, Carborendum said:

You say that like it's a bad thing.

If you want to use English where you go in the next life after you die – I sure you will be accommodated.  

I can imagine that in Hell that the cooks are British, the police are French, they use imperial measurements and quite likely they speak English.  😉

 

The Traveler

[mordorbund]

[Traveler]

11 hours ago, mordorbund said:

This is very stupid – everybody knows you speak German to your dog.  I also think you are better off arguing with men in Greak.

 

The Traveler

[Carborendum]

37 minutes ago, Traveler said:

This is very stupid – everybody knows you speak German to your dog. 

Actually, the most highly trained dogs in the world are trained to respond to commands in Dutch.

37 minutes ago, Traveler said:

 I also think you are better off arguing with men in Greak.

Is that what they speak in Grease?

Edited May 29 by Carborendum