Finnish Possesive Pronoun Suffixes

[Rob A.]

Moreover, let me suggest that your best plan of action is to get a copy of a good Finnish grammar published in English because unlike English, Finnish includes MANY grammatical rules and without knowing those rules the Finnish language will be completely useless to you.

Hey, my high-school level English grammar book would beg to differ by the weight of all its 230 pages – and that’s just high-school level:

I thought that English has some rules and crapload of exceptions to them.

As a native speaker I seem to remember that grammar lessons in the pre-high school grades seemed to spend a lot of time explaining how the rules DON'T apply in certain...though rather plentiful...situations....

Despite nominally being a Germanic language, English seems best explained as an amalgam of Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old Dutch, Middle French, and Latin....both "ecclesiastical" and "scholarly"...and maybe Greek, though for Greek, probably no more than any other European language....

...Probably the most critical "rule" in English is word order....almost like Chinese...screw up the word order and you just might be saying the opposite of what you may have intended....

[Upphew]

screw up the word order and you just might be saying the opposite of what you may have intended....

You may have intended saying the opposite might screw up the word just be of order and you what?!?

[Rob A.]

You may have intended saying the opposite might screw up the word just be of order and you what?!?

...and that, I might add, is easy for you to say....

[Rob A.]

Moreover, let me suggest that your best plan of action is to get a copy of a good Finnish grammar published in English because unlike English, Finnish includes MANY grammatical rules and without knowing those rules the Finnish language will be completely useless to you.

Hey, my high-school level English grammar book would beg to differ by the weight of all its 230 pages – and that’s just high-school level:

Of course, it's not that English is so hard to learn; but rather it's just that "foreign" languages are hard to learn....How else to explain why English speakers generally tend to be monolingual...and "foreigners" multilingual? It couldn't possibly be that "foreigners' are just naturally so much smarter...now could it???...

...There’s a continuum from all Finnish dialects to this neutral, “standard colloquial” form. Part by part, you can reduce the dialectal features from your speech to the point it no longer appears to be any specific dialect but the register still remains informal and colloquial. Also, you could say all Finnish dialects have – especially due to the influence of the modern mass media – shifted towards this standard, neutral form during the last 100 years or so. But even though they might have toned down a bit, dialects as such will probably never completely disappear – some local features of speech will always prevail, giving people local sense of belonging, group identity and such. (Mind you, your actual mother tongue is the informal, colloquial dialect you first learn as a baby or identify with in your formative years... not any “standard” form of language unless that was artificially driven into you or forced upon you during that time.)

Of course, dialects and languages develop in response to isolation...or relative isolation....which is no longer so signficant in the modern world. I think we can expect dialects and languages to gradually coalesce ....though it will probably depend mainly on how much the dialect and languages speakers want to retain their own patterns of speech and, presumably, their individuality....


Here's an interesting Inuit dialect map...



...apparently there are only about 90,000 speakers of Inuit, spread from far eastern Siberia to the east coast of Greenland ....and there are at least 14 dialects!! Though I suppose it's not hard to imagine why this might be..and mutual intelligibility follows the expected pattern....