| Finnish For Foreigners |
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| By Timo Roth | ||||||
| Friday, 31 March 2006 | ||||||
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'It's difficult!!' complains Abiba Seyawah, 25, housewife from Somalia, student at a Finnish course at Oulu’s Oulu-Opisto. With the number of immigrants in Finland having more than quadrupled since 1990, and more than a hundred universities around the world currently teaching Finnish, a bunch of foreigners are learning the language. But what have they got themselves in for? 65 Degrees North’s Timo Roth rummages through his notes, hoping to debunk the idea that Finnish is crazy, complicated, and useless… Finnish, the second–biggest Uralic language, spoken by 5.5 million worldwide, is directly related to Hungarian, Estonian, and numerous minority Russian–area languages. Loan words, however, do connect the tongue to its Scandinavian neighbours. According to Hannele Branch, lecturer in Finnish at the University of London, ‘most loans in present-day Finnish have come from the Germanic and Scandinavian languages, especially from Swedish.’ Unsurprisingly, many of the newest Finnish loanwords have also resulted from English language influences. ‘Bussi,’ for example, looking and sounding similar to the English ‘bus,’ has simply been adjusted to the Finnish pronunciation. 'At least it's logical,' remarks Federiko, Italian dentist. You always stress a Finnish word on its first syllable. The same principle applies to sentence stress: a phrase begins more stressed than it ends. Naturally, execution requires practice. Unlike German, stress in questions does not increase, but decreases towards the end of a sentence. Another phonetical curiosity is that difference in the length of a Finnish sound can make difference in meaning. Vowels and consonants can occur in two different lengths, and practice is necessary to distinguish between them. A learner may mix up ‘muta’ (mud) with ‘muuta’ (more, other), or ‘mutta’ (but) with ‘muuttaa’ (change). 'I can never get the grammar right,' exclaims Edina Bäaliat, 26, charity worker from Hungary. Finnish grammar is considered difficult, but has also been thought beautiful. In 1955, JRR Tolkien wrote to the poet W.H. Auden, “it was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.” Readers of Finnish text can look forward to noticing the pairs of little dots above letters. These are fond of each other and usually occur together. This closeness, dubbed ‘vowel harmony,’ means that only certain vowels can appear together in a word. Specifically, vowels from the group ‘a,’ ‘o,’ and ‘u,’ are incompatible with vowels from the group ‘ä,’ ‘ö,’ and ‘y.’ Vowels ‘i’ and ‘e,’ however, are easy, and go with either group. Vowel harmony can produce words that are audio-visually appealing, like “yltäkylläisenä.” Consonant gradation, another Finnish feature, seems systematic but reveals deepening exceptions. Depending on the form, ‘p,’‘t,’ and ‘k’ usually change into other consonants, lessen in number, or vanish completely. For example, ‘kuppi’ meaning ‘cup’ can become the inessive form ‘kupissa,’ meaning ‘in the cup.’ The consonant ‘p’ has been dropped. But change ‘saapas,’ ‘boot,’ to its inessive equivalent of the English ‘in the boot,’ and consonant gradation works in the opposite direction: the number of ‘p’s grows instead of lessens, giving ‘saappaassa.’ Finnish has fifteen cases, the nominative, partitive, genitive, accusative, translative, essive, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, abessive, comitative and instructive, most of which indicate direction of movement or location. In a literal Fin–English translation, you give money at somebody, have your possessions on yourself (‘minulla on...’), and thank people out of things (‘kiitos ruoasta’ – ‘thanks for the meal’). But perhaps the biggest leap for learners is the object case. The object of a sentence can be accusative or partitive. Accusative is a single specific item, an apple, an orange. Partitive is part of an “uncountable” or unspecific mass, such as milk, bread, or porridge. For relief, you can always indulge in more gratuitous literal Engish translations of Finnish phrases. Finnish speakers drive a beard instead of shaving it, enjoy medicine when sick, and put the windows closed. Or imagine mixing up similar sounding words when asking for a seat in the bus, as in “onko tuo poika vapaa?” (paikka–seat, poika–boy). If this short taster of the language has you zonked as Tolkien, plenty of opportunities are available for study. According to Discover Finland, a webservice maintained by the Centre for International Mobility (CIMO) under the Finnish Ministry of Education, “in Finland seven universities offer degree studies…and most offer Finnish courses at their language centres.” And that’s not counting the many online courses, self–study guides, or lessons at local community colleges like Oulu Opisto. To quote Volkar Lehari, Oulu resident from Germany, “Finnish needs self-motivation and patience but some Finns are nice enough to help.”
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