Jukka Aho wrote:Rob A. wrote:However as the link Upphew posted indicates, it can be complicated and is not consistent.
Usein säännöt sallivat kaksi vaihtoehtoa (esimerkiksi CEN:n ja CENin) mutta monet eivät käytä niistä kumpaakaan vaan keksivät omia vaihtoehtojaan (esim. CEN:in)! =
"Often rules allow two alternatives (for example CEN:n and CENin) but many use neither of these, instead create their own alternatives (for example CEN:in)!"
Well those inconsistent people are the same that would use “of” instead of “have” in English or “there” instead of “their”, have problems with “it’s” and “its” etc. So you’d get big red marks all over your paper if you were to use your “own alternatives” for the case suffixes and someone would be assigned to score your text... not to say people with only a feeble grasp of spelling and punctuation won’t do some strange things in the wild.
To the OP....as you can likely surmise from this exchange, there isn't a lot of room in Finnish for "inconsistency"....
English is much less consistent...as can be attested by attempting to write an English sentence without using the vowels. Often the meaning is not affected at all. I would suggest, though I'm still at the novice level, that would be nearly impossible to do in Finnish....
Jukka: Just this morning on the radio I heard about a website dealing specifically with the use of English homophones.... It is called something like:
"
www.getyourdamnhomophoneswrite.org/com/net???" ....but I couldn't find it.... Maybe your sleuthing skills are more refined than mine...???...
Here's an interesting diagram:
...a list of one of the more iteresting English homonyms...homograph??...homophone??..:
bow – a long wooden stick with horse hair that is used to play certain string instruments such as the violin
bow – to bend forward at the waist in respect (e.g. "bow down")
bow – the front of the ship (e.g. "bow and stern")
bow – the weapon which shoots arrows (e.g. "bow and arrow")
bow – a kind of tied ribbon (e.g. bow on a present, a bowtie)
bow – to bend outward at the sides (e.g. a "bow-legged" cowboy)
bough – a branch on a tree. (e.g. "when the bough breaks...")
bō – a long staff, usually made of tapered hard wood or bamboo ...[I've never heard of this word before...borrowed, I guess, from an Asian language.]
beau – a male paramour
[edit: typo]
