#Estonian language

[mapsontheweb]

Illustrated map of Europe (in Estonian).

[unhonestlymirror]

[hildegardladyofbones]

i'm watching a video about the downfall of ZA/UM and the creator being american makes this way funnier than it has to be. He called tõnis TOENAS. like. if you come across a letter you haven't seen before then it's a sign to start looking up pronunciation guides

[jackiehadel1]

TALLINN, ESTONIA 🇪🇪 STREET ART: “Õ” by ANDREAS LUIGAS

Note from artist: 📌: Paldiski mnt 169 🗓️: 29April2023

[lighthouse-guardian]

personally i don't vibe with the english they/them because when referring to a known person it feels kind of intentionally ambiguous. which is not my relationship with gender. i want uncaring ambiguity. irrelevance. i want language to be completely and utterly uninterested in my gender. like in estonian where grammatical gender just does not exist. yeah this is a great idea everyone go learn estonian right now, starting today i will not be accepting any pronouns except tema/teda

[367arte]

Inspired by these asks @pomefioredove

[hringum]

Loanwords in Finnish 🇫🇮

Many say that Finnish is a language that coins new words from already existing ones rather borrowing from other languages. But there are still loan words in the language nevertheless, especially lately with English dominance as the global language. 

Around 26.3 % of all finnish vocabulary is borrowed from other languages;

70.6 % Germanic (Swedish, Proto Germanic, Old Swedish, Old Norse, English, Low German)

14.4 % Balto-Slavic

15 % Other ( Proto-Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Saami, and unknown origin)

26.3 % is an above average score when it comes to the number of borrowed words. Other languages for comparison

Romanian 41.8 %

English 41 %

Japanese 34.9 %

Finnish 26.3 %

Dutch 19.1 %

Hawaiian 13.6 %

Mandarin Chinese 1.2 % 

🇫🇮 sänky (bed) ← source word Old Norse sæing (other cognates; 🇪🇪 🇸🇪 säng, 🇳🇴 🇩🇰 seng) 

🇫🇮 äiti (mother) ← source word Proto-Germanic aiþį̄ (other cognates; 🇪🇪 eit, 🇮🇸 eiða) 

🇫🇮 sielu (soul) ← source word Proto Germanic saiwalō (other cognates; 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 soul, 🇸🇪 själ, 🇮🇸 sál, 🇳🇴 sjel, 🇩🇰 sjæl, 🇩🇪 Seele, 🇳🇱 ziel)

🇫🇮 kirkko (church) ← source word Koine Greek κυριακὸν (kuriakòn) (other cognates; 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 church, 🇪🇪 kirik, 🇮🇸 kirkju, 🇸🇪 kyrka, 🇳🇴 🇩🇰 kirke, 🇩🇪 Kirche, 🇳🇱 kerk, 🇷🇺 ки́рха (kírxa), це́рковь (cérkovʹ), 🇵🇱 cerkiew)

🇫🇮 joulu (christmas), juhla (party, celebration) ← source word Proto Germanic jehwlą (other cognates; 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Yule, 🇪🇪 jõulud 🇮🇸 jól, 🇸🇪 🇳🇴 🇩🇰 jul, 🇩🇪 Jul 🇳🇱 joel)

🇫🇮 herra (sir) ← source word hērro (other cognates; 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 hoar 🇪🇪 härra, 🇮🇸 herra, 🇸🇪 🇳🇴 🇩🇰 herre, 🇩🇪 Herr, 🇳🇱 heer  

🇫🇮 kellari (basement) ← source word - cellārium (other cognates; 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 cellar, 🇪🇪 kelder, 🇮🇸 kjallara, 🇸🇪 källare, 🇳🇴 kjeller, 🇩🇰 kælder, 🇩🇪 Keller, 🇳🇱 kelder,  🇫🇷 cellier, 🇪🇸 cillero) 

🇫🇮 rengas (ring) ← source word Proto-Germanic hrengaz (other cognates; 🇮🇸 hringur, 🇫🇴 ringur, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 ring. 🇩🇪 Ring, 🇳🇱 🇸🇪 🇳🇴 🇩🇰 ring, 🇫🇷 harangue, 🇮🇹 arengo)

🇫🇮 miekka (sword) ← source word (other cognates; 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 meak (scythe), 🇪🇪 mõõk, 🇮🇸 mækir, 🇷🇺 меч (mech), 🇵🇱 miecz)

Other non-onbious loan words I could find include; helvetti, kuningas, juusto, aukko, äyri, lyydi, huilata, tila, mursu, vesi, katu, porsas, hylly, kaupunki, peili, ranta, puhvi, peti, patja 

source; https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/118581152/220419_Emprunts_lexicaux_Finnois_Aix_Marseille_.pdf

[valgeristik]

when you put ur mind to it. u can draw so many links, it turns out, Vetted Gaza Evacuation Fundraiser List

[mortysmith]

I LOVE SELF INDULGENCE I LOVE CATERING TO ME AND ME EXCLUSIVELY

[aroundtheworldinstamps]

I know this might not look too flashy, but this might be my favourite stamp sheet. These Estonian stamps are a language tree of the Uralic languages.

Going anti-clockwise from the bottom middle stamp, we have:

The Samoyedic Languages: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, and Kamasin

The Ugric Languages: Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi

The Permic Languages: Komi and Udmurt

The Mari and Mordvinic (Erzya and Moksha) Languages

The Sami Languages (Nortern, Southern, Skolt, Inari, Lule, Ume, Pite, Ter and Kildin Sami)

The Baltic-Finnic Languages: Veps, Karelian, Izhorian, Livonian, Finnish, Estonian and Votic

Languages in brackets weren't mentioned in the stamp, but I thought I'd elaborate anyway

Edit: put Ingrian instead of Izhorian. Should've known better, sorry

[mehilaiselokuva]

the word yö is sucha pain for me bc i wanna sai øø (as a native estonian) rather than yø. Also who uses ü and ö togheter its so weird combination for my tongue. But i aint trying to insult finnish

Hi!

I feel the same way about Estonian, where did your vowel harmony go? I cannot just use ä and a in the same word! for me y and ö in the same word is just natural since they're both back vowels. And don't get me started on õ!

[hildegardladyofbones]

Hiljuti on koerad hakanud haukuma. Nad rebivad õhku ja hoiatavad mööda minnes, lõustad napsavad tulevikku järele. Igavesti puutumata, kaunikesti tühine, ihaldatav taeva surmani- vältimatu. Päike kütab asfalti ja keti metall kaotab tahkuse. Vaba pole meist keegi. Vabadus on vaid nendele, kelle kodu on kõrgel, kaugel, mitte kusagil. Koerad hakkasid haukuma ja päike põles aknast sisse, ainus päris surm. Tahke pole mitte miski, aga kinni istun ma siiski.

[grosses-schwanz]

The Silmarillion, but Maglor plays the accordion instead of the harp.

[allthingslinguistic]

Summer 2024 travel plans and Language Guinea Pig Diaries

In August and September, I'm doing a bunch of travel to various European countries. In order, they are:

Glasgow, Scotland for World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), where I'll be on a panel about Languages as World-Building and doing assorted meetups

Helsinki, Finland for the Societas Linguistica Europea annual meeting

Tartu, Estonia for a colloquium talk on Applying Linguistic Methods to Linguistic Communication at the University of Tartu and a two-part workshop on lingcomm for participants of Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics (MEDAL)

Nijmegen, Netherlands for some meetings with linguists

Florence, Italy to visit friends

Madrid, Spain for the publication of the Spanish translation of Because Internet by Pie de Página

I hope to run into lots of interesting people at these events! If you're already in one of these places and I know you, including from the interent, feel free to reach out and see if we can fit something in!

This whirlwind list of events and places has also gotten me thinking: this trip is going to be a fun chance to learn some more about some languages! I'm already fairly familiar with Spanish and Scottish English (I doubt people will speak much Broad Scots to me with my Canadian accent), and I'm confident on my ability to brush up on them by a bit of exposure and possibly watching a relevant movie on the way there, but the other four languages are going to take a bit more doing. Here's my initial situation, in order of familiarity:

Italian - I studied it for two years in undergrad and spent about a week in Italy shortly thereafter, and by the end of the week I was finally beginning to feel like it was starting to "click" but then I haven't really touched it since then. So I feel like it would come back with exposure but I wonder if there's something I could do in advance to help it come back sooner/faster rather than taking the whole week of being there again

Dutch - I went through the whole Duolingo tree on rapid-speed back when you could skip through lessons for new material only and not practice drills over about a year in 2019-ish just for fun and as an excuse to look up lots of Germanic roots (I studied German before I knew any linguistics so it was fun to triangulate there). Never actually been anywhere Dutch was being spoken but I did find I could get the gist of youtube videos about linguistics in Dutch so it probably needs "activation" similar to Italian

Finnish - No background except for a few linguistics factoids (case! vowel harmony!), and that it's a Uralic language (related to Hungarian but not to any of the Indo-European languages, so this is a fun chance to learn some things about a language family that's unfamiliar to me)

Estonian - Also no background, also Uralic, clearly the fun thing to do would be to learn enough bits of Estonian and Finnish that I could compare them with each other (also since I'm meeting with linguists in both countries, this would be a fun topic for small talk conversation)

At the same time, there are a lot of language learning strategies floating around out there, and I have two nearly matched pairs of languages on this list: Italian and Dutch, both of which I am pretty good at cognate languages for and have studied some a while back, so I could test two activation strategies, and Finnish and Estonian, both of which I have essentially zero familiarity with, so I could test two strategies for getting somewhere near a basic functional ability.

I have about a month until I start this cycle with a flight to Helsinki. One month, four languages. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's my tentative plan so far:

Activation, Italian and Dutch - I'm pretty sure what I need for these languages is largely as much audio imput as possible (given what's feasible around like, all the other things going on in my life). I've decided to aim to watch one or two youtube videos in Italian per day, focusing on relatively concrete, daily life topics (such as gelato making) and to listen to one episode of a podcast in Dutch per day, aiming to get through the back catalogue of Kletsheads, a podcast about multilingual children.

Why these strategies? Well, I'm meeting up with linguists in the Netherlands but not in Italy, so it makes sense to try to learn more linguistics vocab there. Also, I'm curious about the effect of medium between video and podcast: will being able to see people talking and what they're talking about have much of an effect on how much I can understand? Will I find it easier to integrate one or the other of watching videos vs listening to podcasts into my life at a practical level? Plus, will concentrating on a single, more academic topic vs watching a scattered, unsystematic list of videos have effects on my vocabulary?

Basic function, Finnish and Estonian - I'm probably looking for some phrases to say to people in shops and restaurants and the ability to pronounce things written on menus adequately and match heard words/placenames to written versions on signs. I started doing a very minimal one lesson a day on Duolingo for Finnish in January, when planning for this trip started, for the very simple reason that I was already familiar with Duolingo and it doesn't have Estonian, so I decided to just start by doing a thing I was familiar with until I got around to doing more research. I've been casting around trying to figure out a source of basic Estonian phrases online when a friend mentioned learning French on tiktok, so I searched for "learn estonian" and voila! I think I'll also aim for a video or two of Estonian phrases per day but I want to do more rewatching than with Italian or Dutch, since I'm aiming to remember specific common phrases. So maybe one rewatched video and one new video, per day? They're shorter on tiktok than on youtube.

Why these strategies? This is a comparison of Duolingo's more systematic approach with lots of repetition and gamification and word-by-word translation in a relatively sterile environment versus a more organic and free-styling approach with more grounding in real people and faces and full phrases where I'm not really trying to understand the individual words. There are lots of factors to compare and it's not a completely fair comparison since I started Duolingo in January and I only thought to start the TikTok idea this week, but hey, learning anything still counts as progress.

Summary: I have four languages, each focused on a different app: YouTube, my podcast app, Duolingo, and TikTok. Hopefully for the video apps, this will help their algorithms kick in and start recommending me further useful videos. The difference between the two video strategies is that for Italian, I'm watching monolingual videos that are aimed at people who already speak Italian and just want to learn something about the topic, whereas for Estonian, I'm watching bilingual videos aimed at English speakers who want to learn some words or phrases in Estonian.

Am I going to get these four languages mixed up? Probably! I'm hoping that choosing a different app/strategy for each is a little bit helpful on that front.

Do I think these strategies are optimal? Probably not! But I'm aiming to choose things that feel relatively clear to implement consistently, rather than getting bogged down in researching language learning methods instead of actually getting exposure to the languages. I'll probably do a basic "look up some key phrases and try to learn them" a day or two before entering each place too. And maybe shift other aspects depending on how things are going, stay tuned!

At any rate, I figured it would be more fun to blog about my attempts to use myself as a guinea pig for a few different language learning strategies here than to just do it in my own head (and hopefully help me with staying motivated). And maybe people will have tips of either language learning strategies that have worked for you in general or specific ideas for these particular languages, so this is the beginning of a series that I'm calling #Language Guinea Pig Diaries and future posts will also be posted under that tag!

[gu6chan]

the thing that gets me whenever i hear about finnish is hearing that spoken and written finnish is "different". Like when I first heard about this i was like "Yeah duh as it is with literally every language to ever exist" but it turns out it's like ..... DIFFERENT different????? how does that work. what happens if I go to finland and transcript something spoken as is. will they take me out back and shoot me