You know more Finnish than you think

Summary

Linguistics illuminates the linguistically obscure – or so I’ve always thought. It’s a common theme of my online output that a little bit of historical linguistics goes a long way, making helpful connections and breaking down psychological barriers. This theme was present in two old posts of mine that used etymology to elucidate two Old English texts, namely Beowulf and The Wanderer. Now, as an unplanned third installment, allow me to show you how familiar a whole language can be. This is the infamously tricky Finnish language. There are more Finnish words that you, as an English speaker, can recognise than just sauna. Fiendish Finnish? To call Finnish “tricky” is only fair depending on your perspective. It has gained a reputation for difficulty through a general European point of view. Most of Europe today is a patchwork of spoken languages belonging to the Indo-European family, from English and Irish in the west, to Russian and Greek in the east. The few holes in this Indo-European blanket, like Hungarian and Basque, will not unreasonably seem very different in their vocabulary, grammar and sounds. Finnish is another such gap on the map; faced with Finnish numbers from 1 to 5 (yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi), an English-speaking learner may go running back to the safety of Indo-European. Adopting the viewpoint of an English speaker for this post, Finnish does seem alien and arcane. People for whom it will not seem strange are of course the speakers of Finnish, and of languages within Finnish’s own family. Clustered around the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, this family is called Finnic. Approximate spread of Finnic languages It contains roughly eleven members (counting languages is always hard). Two have achieved the hallowed status of national languages: Finnish and, over the water, Estonian. Karelian has official standing in the Republic of Karelia, part of the Russian Federation, but it and other Finnic languages in that country are severely endangered by R...