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I dont think it is a matter of close-minded people! It is a matter of an educated and imaginative person or an uneducated and un-imaginative one. Generally, Greek is one of the languages that you can really mis-pronounce and the (educated) people will still understand you! Something, that is 100% impossible with French lets say (it happend to me in Paris ).

BTW, trápeza means bank.
trapézi means table.
trapézia or trapézya means tables.
If you ask an un-imaginative person by mis-pronouncing the word, it is expectable that he doesnt understand...

The same thing happens in many languages and many places all over the world...


BTW, I feel really happy when I hear "foreign people" speaking or trying to speak in Greek and I always do MY BEST to understand them and help them. Because I feel they respect ME if they try to speak in MY language in MY country. So, I feel OBLIGED to show them the equivalent high respect too.

P.S. Spoimala, Páskha in Greek means Easter but it is actually a Hebrew word!
If you are searching for Greek words in Finnish, see if you can find finnish words that resamble to these English (but in reality Greek) words:
music, planet, system, lexicon, philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, automatic, helicopter, biology, europe, geometry, trigonometry and many many more...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rodos1979 on 2004-06-13 10:29 ]</font>

well, I don't 'speak' greek - though I've been there often enough that I ought to
I didn't ask it in the wilderness and people there were quite used to tourist-like question asking.
The language relies much more on proper pronounciation than german.
The case found a lucky end when after pointing at my wallet and saying 'exchange', the former irritated face lightened up and a greek 'ahhh trápeza !' came out - and of course he gently described the way
Strangely enough, this really 'unimportant' event has stayed on my mind all the years.

cheers, Tom

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2004-06-13 10:08 ]</font>

On 2004-06-11 08:36, paulrmartin wrote:
same words, different meaning. Is it a matter of inflection(how the words in the sentences are accented)?

It's sligtly different. We have more forms of verbs than in English:
I go - ide
You go - idziesz
He goes - idzie
We go - idziemy
You go - idziecie
They go - ida.

So as you see we don't need pronouns. Verbs themselves describe their state. But it's not always. In some cases they are required: You have a blue pen and I have a green one. In this example the pronoun is required to stress my position.

BTW, I feel really happy when I hear "foreign people" speaking or trying to speak in Greek and I always do MY BEST to understand them and help them. Because I feel they respect ME if they try to speak in MY language in MY country. So, I feel OBLIGED to show them the equivalent high respect too.

Exatcly! And I'm trying my best, to make finnish language more familiar as you can see

P.S. Spoimala, Páskha in Greek means Easter but it is actually a Hebrew word!
If you are searching for Greek words in Finnish, see if you can find finnish words that resamble to these English (but in reality Greek) words:
music, planet, system, lexicon, philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, automatic, helicopter, biology, europe, geometry, trigonometry and many many more...

I was not looking for greek words in finnish. My cousin studied greek and was laughing as 'paska' in finnish means shit

Yeah, those words are almost similar in finnish. All but Lexicon. What is it?

Today I was at a choir meeting "East-West", where some german choirs met an Estonian choir. We've had a workshop and studied sone estonian songs. Strange and dark language but so beautiful sounding ... Spoimala, is it true that Finnish and Estonian people can understand without problems?
I was very impressed and additionally learned something about the "Estonian singing Revolution" - during the end of the U.S.S.R. 100000s of people went to central places and sang their forbidden Estonian songs.
Sometimes music can be stronger than weapons.

@spoimala: lexicon means dictionary

My old history/religion teacher was in his 60s, when he asked for spagheti in Italy. Unfortunately he midpronounced it a bit, and they thought he asked for testicles.

hmm... religion teacher?

Spoimala, is it true that Finnish and Estonian people can understand without problems?

I wouldn't say without any problems. We have MANY words in common, many words have TOTALLY different meaning... and many words are utterly different. Grammar is pretty similar I think.
I think it's like "Germany's german" and "switzerlands german". One could say estonian is a dialect of finnish (or vice versa)... But maybe the difference is a bit bigger than with dialects.

Thank you, Spoimala, it was really interesting for me.

Today I got home from a 2 weeks stay in Finland.

I have a story for you about what happened in a supermarket. My girlfriend and I found some animal shaped "pillows". One of them - easiest described as a snake with a mamal head - had its tail going thru three flowers (with nothing in the center). Somebody must have had some fun I guess. We start wondering, when animal head this "snake" has. My girlfriend asks, if it is a horse or a cow. I think it looks more like a mix of a mule (muldyr in Danish) and a cow (ko in Danish), so happily and a bit loud I say 'Mulko' with a big smile. My girlfriend's head changes colour. What I just said sounded very similar to the Finnish word mulkko - wich in English means ... d|ck.

I noticed, that Finnish sounds deeper than Danish - but not due to dropping sentences - more due to the use of wowls (sorry, I know I spell this one wrong - I mean a,e,i,o,u,...).