PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Who said finnish is difficult language? Here's some study
http://koti.mbnet.fi/villes/files/ep%E4 ... 6h%E4n.txt

(Hmm, I think in the last few words 'with' should be 'without' in the translation)

Hah! Finnish is a most peculiar form of communication. Personally I believe it is from outer space. Some failed experiment or some such

Is this the longest word in Finnish? German language has also long nouns. I've once saw a word, something about a 'potato sack' or something with about 100 letters!

_________________
Sir samplaire scopernicus

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: samplaire on 2004-06-08 07:37 ]</font>

Would be interesting, I've never seen a single german word with 100 or more letters!
But you're right, Wojtek, in Germany there are existing terrible words, and every year there is a contest about the "non-word of the year".

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän

WHAT!?? WHHAAAT???

ya, Finnish is quite strange.. they have a rule that says you can stick words together, and that's how you end up with huge words.. or, atleast that's what I was told when I was in Finland. You see big words all over the place. Even shops have relatively long names.

Well, it's kinda like prefix and suffixes, just that you can keep adding. Finnish is supposed to be the hardest language in the world to learn to speak by the way. (so I heard) Wished I could learn to speak it some day tho.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: kensuguro on 2004-06-09 12:52 ]</font>

Nisse, really? Not that strange. Except that it has many borrowed words from swedish
(I heard 'nordästersjökustartilleriflygspaningssimulatoranläggningsmaterielunderhållsuppfö ljningssystemdiskussionsinläggsförberedelsearbeten' is the longest word of swedish, what the hell is that?)

Samplaire, it is said to be. But it's not real word. Pretty synthetic. And I think that kind of competition should be gone over infinitives.
I think the longest REAL word is kaksitariffikolmivaihevaihtovirtakilowattituntimittari, which is 'dual tariff, three-phase, alternating current, kWh meter'

Ken, welcome to Finland to study. I can give to private lessons
Yes, we can make compounds pretty freely, but usually only with two words.

very strange as well: finnish and hungarian seem to be related to each other, and have lots of simularities... no other language comes even close to these two, if i recall correctly.

huh, we are speaking about short words. Look here: http://www.fun-with-words.com/word_longest.html

Check speacially the chemical terms and place names. I wouldn't want to live in these villages.

Hehe Spoimala, I think that long swedish word is just a finnish myth
You can write words together in swedish too, but I´ve never seen any as long as those finnish ones.

Looks rather simple to me actually. I mean, once you know the words and how to assemble them(grammatical rules) you probably get a very detailed and precise way of getting your exact meaning across, right?

I love languages

me too can't believe I really hated that stuff at school - bored me to death back then

borg

One of the Baltic languages is kind of finnishish.

The finnish language actually have some great strengths. I never realy understood, why some languages have masculinum, femininum nd neutrum. It is (IMO) just plain bull*hit, wich makes the language hard to learn to foreigners. This is actually one mayor reason, why so many Danes hate their German lessons. Teacher spend too much time beating the kids over wrong sex of the word, and thus the kids never get any flow. Finnish has just neutrum. That is just so great.

Finnish has the pronouncation very closely related to the spelling. This too is great. Danish is very hard to learn, because spelling and pronouncation does not follow very well.

Finnish has the pronouncation very closely related to the spelling.

Oh my God!! So, do you actually pronounce ALL these letters? Basically, I find all these extremely big words in any language ridiculously difficult because I make an assumption that may be not correct.
Basically, I am assuming that there is ONLY ONE stress on only one of the syllabes of the word (which is what happens in Greek). So, the biggest greek word that comes to mind at the moment is otorinolaryngología, which is pronounced with one and only aspiration and only one stress.
If this is not true for the big words of your languages, then they are not really so difficult... you just make them difficult by writing all this words without spaces. For example, if I had to put a stress on each of the words that make otorinolaryngología, den it would become "óto ríno láryngo logía" (óta=ears, rínos=nose,lárynx, logos=the speech, to speak about something, the science that speaks about something), and I would not write it as a simple word...

what also struck me about the Finnish language is that although there is basically only 1 stressed syllable in a word (or combo words), since the words are so long, the pitch keeps dropping as the sentence is spoken. So, if a sentence has 5 stressed syllables where the pitch rises, it would have like 15 syllables where the pitch drops, making the end of the sentence extremely low in pitch. (and you almost run out of breath)

The same goes for Germanic languages usually, where only a question or exclamation goes up in pitch and regular sentenses go down.

Btw, shortest poem is in Dutch/Flemmish:

U nu.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

That's quite long

Royston

In Polish usually questions are the same as sentences only the pitch differs them

Idziesz do domu.
You are going home.
Idziesz do domu?
Are you going home?

So for us it is a bit difficult to get used to the form. Or:

What are you looking at?

in Polish has such form:

At what you are looking?

And it's a simplification because in Polish we don't have to use you, they, I. Or at least not all the time. So the question should look like:

At what are looking?


@@@@@@@@
Do Finnish people understand Hungarians?



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: samplaire on 2004-06-10 09:01 ]</font>

Samplair

So people who have a deficit in percepting pitch can get into quite a bit of trouble.

person a asking in a doubting woice:
"Is this fish ok?

person b misunderstanding:
"This fish is good"

person b eats the fish - instant diarea