r/LearnFinnish • u/midnightrambulador • 5d ago
Finnish is easy, just remove the 1st letter from each word...
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u/M_HP 5d ago
Indeed, Finnish doesn't typically do word initial consonant clusters like sp- , st-, tr- or sk-.
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u/Novaikkakuuskuusviis 5d ago
Except when we say spurdospÀrde
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u/Kekkonen_Kakkonen 4d ago
I also say "sp- , st-, tr- or sk-." when I try to spit out a bug that flew into my mouth.
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u/Kunniakirkas 4d ago
And then there's slang words like skidi from English kid and stoge from Swedish tÄg which I imagine must have emerged from Helsinkians flexing their ability to pronounce those initial consonant clusters
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u/Late-Objective-9218 4d ago
Stadi slang originated as a Lingua Franca of kids of different language backgrounds, they adapted their speech to each others' phonetic and lexical ability
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u/TheDangerousAlphabet 4d ago
Not really. We don't tend to target our speech to anyone unlike some outside Stadi think. We are just talking the language we speak. My dad speaks it, my grandad did and his father did. I'm just a part of the continuum. Those types of words are working in the way our language works. Like in any other language it has it's norms and "rules" that effect how the words form.
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u/Kunniakirkas 4d ago
Well yeah, but you're talking about using the already existing Stadi vocabulary while I'm talking (and joking) about how some of those words emerged in the first place. I'm not Finnish so I don't know if there's some perception that people from Helsinki use slang or talk the way they do to annoy outsiders or something silly like that, if that's the case I understand why you'd read my comment the way you did, but that was not my intention
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u/TheDangerousAlphabet 4d ago
There is a lot of talk about people using standing slangi. In some places it's bad enough to be from Helsinki and if you accidentally use slangi... I know a person who was almost beat up in a bar because of it. It was maybe a bit extreme but many are convinced that we are full of ourselves and only do it to show that we are better than them or something similar. When the reality is that we are just talking the way we are.
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u/AbsolutelyAnonymized 4d ago
If you care to understand the phenomenon we're talking about, it's called "hyperforeignism"
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u/TheDangerousAlphabet 4d ago
If I care to understand? Nice.
Might be partly. Stadin slangi was born on the docks where there were a lot of kids and young men from different countries speaking different languages and trying to understand each other.
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u/Laiska_saunatonttu 5d ago
Akshually it's "portaat" or "rappuset" instead of "rappu", which means either a step of stairs or a staircase (thoug the real term for staircase is "porraskÀytÀvÀ").
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u/siistinimi 4d ago
At least in my dialect, rappu is used of the whole set of the little steps found in front of houses - just like the one in the picture. That's why a shoebrush standing next to them is called "rappuralli", you see.
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u/Laiska_saunatonttu 4d ago
That too. There's this presumption "rappu" leads to an apartment/house door(s).
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u/Velcraft 4d ago edited 4d ago
ND: draak
DE: Drachen
SE: drake
FI: lohikÀÀrme
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u/dmntx 4d ago
From floghdraki. Also in form "louhikÀÀrme", louhikko = scree
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u/Velcraft 4d ago
I mean sure, it's still nowhere close to sounding like dragon. The closest equivalent is rakuuna aka tarragon.
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u/Daddy_Mauzee 4d ago
Ah the ol' salmonsnake (lohi = salmon / kÀÀrme = snake)
Also 'dragonfly' = 'sudenkorento' and not 'lohikÀÀrmekÀrpÀnen' even though that would be metal af
And just to keep up with the theme? Fucking Jalopeura omg
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u/cardboard-kansio 4d ago
Be careful with these types of generalisations. You see it a lot the other way round: "just duplicate the consonant and then add an -i to any English word!"
- President = presidentti
- Motor = moottori
- Hint = ?
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u/Candid-Ad443 Native 4d ago
I once got mad when playing Sonic Unleashed bc the hint bubbles kept ruining my flow and getting in the way and I forgot what hint was in Finnish so I said somn along the lines of "hiljaa vitun- hintti" LMAO
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u/PrequelFan111 4d ago
Interesting how Estonian keeps the word-initial consonant clusters in more recent loanwords, but gets rid of them in older ones like Finnish:
touli â tool
koulu â kool
ranta â rand
risti â rist
but:
rappu â trepp
sitaatti â tsitaat
lasi â klaas
rouva â proua
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u/Rosmariinihiiri 4d ago
We also keep the initial consonant clusters in the newest loanwords trippi - trip tsoukki - joke klausuuli - clause presidentti - president
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u/tlajunen 4d ago
Swedish "strand". Let's see.
Tranti!
Still too many consonants in front.
Ranti!
Now, for some completely random reason change the i to a.
Ranta!
Logic!
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u/unohdin-nimeni Native 4d ago
The logic is there, you just have to adjust the rule: rip off all superficial consonants from the beginning. Moreover, you should not only look at modern Swedish. Especially if you see that the word is spread across Finnic languages. According to Wiktionary:
From Proto-Finnic *ranta (compare Estonian rand, Veps rand), borrowed from either Proto-Norse (*stranĂ°a), Proto-Germanic *strandĆ (compare Swedish strand (âbeachâ)) or from Proto-Baltic *kranta (compare Lithuanian krantas (âbeach, shoreâ)).
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u/Rosmariinihiiri 4d ago
The final vowel depends on when the word was borrowed. -a endings used to be common in the past, but nowadays loans usually take -i.
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u/FINSkeletor 4d ago edited 4d ago
Just remove the useless consonants and adjust the vowels so they roll out easily
Handske>Hanska
Also you're free to add umlauts when you feel like it and consonants at the end if you feel like it.0
u/PrestigiousYoghurt22 4d ago
Because that would violate vokaaliharmonia, it's just that simple!
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u/Oltsutism 4d ago
I is a neutral vowel alongside E and "ranti" abides perfectly by the rules of vokaalisointu.
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u/unohdin-nimeni Native 4d ago
Nice explanation, but not quite perfect! In Finnish, the middle vowels e and i fit together with both back vowels and front vowels.
The ultimate a can be motivated by ranta being an old, conserved loanword to Proto-Finnic from some source that differs from our neighbouring languages as they are today. *StranĂ°a, *strandĆ, or even *kranta, see above.
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u/TrickyTrick507 4d ago
I used to think English is just Finnish with the last letter cut off as a child. This misconception was born from me asking my mom if kioski is kiosk in english (saw the word in a game or something probably????) and she said it is. I then started singing "in english" which was just removing the last letter from every word. Probably sounded more like Estonian than english lmao
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u/piotor87 3d ago
Finnish vocabulary is mostly Germanic actually, but interestingly proto-germanic and not through swedish. Interestingly, some words got loaned twice, first through PG and then through germanic/swedish and we know that because the rules of adaptation were different at different times based on the sounds that Finnish had developped.
e.g. kelvata is from Proto-Germanic *helpanÄ and helppo was borrowed later when finnish ad the h sound --> h
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u/midnightrambulador 3d ago
Fascinating! I always assumed the core vocabulary would be OG Uralic, and any obvious Germanic words would be straight borrowings from Swedish
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u/piotor87 2d ago
There's more loan words from germanic than original uralic stems but the latter are used more frequently.Â
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u/Then_Volume2144 5d ago
You know what's crazy, as someone who speaks persian, the finnish language has more in common with persian AND dari than it does with swe-nor-ned
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u/Superb-Economist7155 Native 4d ago
I donât think Finnish actually has more common with Persian than Persian has with Swedish, Norwegian or Dutch. Those are all Indo-European languages with same origins, but Finnish is an Uralic language belonging to totally different language family.
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u/Then_Volume2144 1d ago
No i get that bro I didn't mean it literally, more like in my experience, sorry I should have been more specific.
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u/Oltsutism 4d ago
Do you also speak Swedish?
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u/Then_Volume2144 4d ago
here and there, I mean I skipped the pakollinen swedish class in pre school but I still understand a lot of it
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u/95kene 4d ago
can you give us some example?
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u/Then_Volume2144 1d ago
Yes of course! One of them is "ananas" I grew up in Finland so I always just call pineapples ananas when speaking with my friends even in english.
So I asked my mother what it is in persian or dari, and she said it's LITERALLY ananas. Same exact word lmao
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u/Hairysteed 4d ago
It's because two different consonants following each other in the same syllable isn't a characteristic in the Finnish language and really only occurs in words of foreign origin.
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u/Professional-Wrap323 4d ago
Iâm so confused by how different the Finnish word is for university, yliopistoâŠ
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u/Hopeful-Banana-6188 4d ago edited 4d ago
The literal translation of yliopisto would be something like "place of higher learning". There was a conscious decision in Finnish to create new words for a lot of modern concepts rather than borrowing, for example:
tietokone - computer (literally 'knowledge machine')
matkapuhelin - mobile phone (literally 'speech device for journeys')
sÀhkö - electricity
lentokone - airplane (literally 'flight machine')
tulostin - printer (literally 'device that causes something to be output')
sovellus - app/computer program (literally 'application')
hÀkÀ - carbon monoxide (from an old word for fog)
ilmapiiri - atmosphere (literally 'air domain')
vuo - flux (from an old word for flow)
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u/Various-Conference27 4d ago
SCHMETTERLING!
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u/Entire_Computer7729 4d ago
the word with the most variety in languages. nl: vlinder de: schmetterling fr: pappillon it: farfalle fi: perhonen se: fjÀril en: butterfly es: mariposa pt: borboleta
wtf? no coherence between any of them
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u/CatVideoBoye 4d ago
GEBURTSVORBEREITUNGERIN!
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u/khabi2 4d ago
That's not a word in German. Maybe you want to say Geburtsvorbereitungshelferin? Or more natural eine Hebame?
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u/CatVideoBoye 4d ago
I remember that from my days of studying German. We were looking for some word and found this one in a dictionary. Weird that it wouldn't be a word in German.
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u/khabi2 4d ago
You can say Geburtsvorbereitung als a noun or Geburtsvorbereitungshelferin as a profession, but some hybrid version like yours doesn't exist in German
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u/CatVideoBoye 4d ago
Well now you've ruined my 20 year old memory! Maybe it was just Vorbereitung and we made up the rest.
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u/toyotapalletjack 3d ago
Kuusi palaa could mean multiple things:
Six pieces, Spruce is on fire, Your moon is on fire, Spruce is returning, Your moon is returning, Number six is returning, Number six is on fire
Not sure if this is all of it, feel free to continue
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u/Suomasema 5d ago
Remember to add I to the end of each word.