uudelleen

[AldenG]

^^^

That is what's known as an "Annie Hall moment," where Marshall McLuhan appears from behind the potted plant.

I always thought uudelleen was 'just' an adverb (again, anew etc) but Abondollo in his "Colloquial Finnish" book talks about it as - "an adverbial expression with a possessive suffix".

uudelleen = uude | lle | en = at its new (literally)

Well, if the ending is a possessive suffix, I tried googling uudelleni, uudellesi, uudellenne, uudellemme. I do get some hits with them but I just can't get my head around the situation when you would use these words!

There are quite a few adverbs formed by inflecting an adjective like a noun. (It is the 3p possessive suffix that makes the inflection noun-like.) They resemble the sum of their parts but I daresay one never really thinks of them that way. Rather, the only people who think of them that way are beginners learning Finnish by the nuts-and-bolts method who insist on understanding everything as the sum of its parts, even though language is most fundamentally an imitative process rather than an analytical one. Everyone is good at imitation -- we are that way almost from birth. Only some people go on to become good at analytical thinking, and we (for I am one, and I began my Finnish studies that way) often become over-reliant on that trait to the point of atrophy in other important modes of understanding and experiencing. Analysts tend to resist the imitative mode of learning because sometimes we have partially suppressed that innate capability.

uudestaan, aikaisintaan, viimeistään...

You can see where they came from, but they have very specific meanings. Particularly the latter two make complete sense as the sum of their parts; but if you learn them in context, as native speakers do, and as most people who get beyond a certain point of fluency have begun doing somewhere along the way, you are understanding and using the whole word before fully understanding the parts.

Another thing that characterizes these adverbs (here I go being analytical again) is that they are fully self-referential. They look like their parts relate grammatically to other elements of the sentence but in fact they are completely self-contained. That is why they never change form or influence the form of other words in the sentence. (Generally you can just pop them in or leave them out.)

[Rob A.]

There are quite a few adverbs formed by inflecting an adjective like a noun. (It is the 3p possessive suffix that makes the inflection noun-like.) They resemble the sum of their parts but I daresay one never really thinks of them that way. Rather, the only people who think of them that way are beginners learning Finnish by the nuts-and-bolts method who insist on understanding everything as the sum of its parts, even though language is most fundamentally an imitative process rather than an analytical one. Everyone is good at imitation -- we are that way almost from birth. Only some people go on to become good at analytical thinking, and we (for I am one, and I began my Finnish studies that way) often become over-reliant on that trait to the point of atrophy in other important modes of understanding and experiencing. Analysts tend to resist the imitative mode of learning because sometimes we have partially suppressed that innate capability.

Yes.... While having an "analytical outlook" has lots of benefits... Well, at least the benefits are obvious to the analytical ... With language learning, though, you need a broader approach... With French...as mangled as my version of it is...I just speak and the words come out...butchered grammar and mispronunciations and all...I don't think about it except for vocabulary issues....but then French is so similar to English it's relatively easy to do this... As for Finnish ...well what can I say??....

uudestaan, aikaisintaan, viimeistään...

You can see where they came from, but they have very specific meanings. Particularly the latter two make complete sense as the sum of their parts; but if you learn them in context, as native speakers do, and as most people who get beyond a certain point of fluency have begun doing somewhere along the way, you are understanding and using them to mean what they mean before you have a fully dissected understanding of them.

Another thing that characterizes these adverbs (here I go being analytical again) is that they are fully self-referential. They look like their parts relate grammatically to other elements of the sentence but in fact they are completely self-contained. That is why they never change form or influence the form of other words in the sentence. (Generally you can just pop them in or leave them out.)

...and, of course, some "analytical" grammarians have come up with a "case" system for Finnish adverbs:

http://users.jyu.fi/~pamakine/kieli/suo ... rbien.html

Though I think you'll admit there is some advantage to seeing the words classified with their common elements compared and explained.... This might work better with Finnish than with English, as I get the sense, rightly or wrongly, that there has been less "semantic drift" in Finnish than in English...

[Aside: In my current Sinuhe exercise...which I'll post soon... I'm having the usual problems remembering the exact meaning of some of the "small words"...eg...jolloin....knowing that the -loin ending ...(I purposely won't call it a suffix...) has a temporal aspect about it would help, if I looked at the word that way....though, still, until I can recognize such words "intuitively" I probably will not quite remember the exact meaning....]

[AldenG]

As far as using such a word with a different possessive suffix: you can contrive or sometimes find a naturally occurring situation where you could do that, but then it wouldn't be an adverb at all. It would be an adjective standing in for an implied noun.

Anna tupakka.
En anna viimeistäni. (where it refers to "my last one," referring back to tupakka)

Not quite what I'd say if asked, but it illustrates the point.

(I see Rob slipped in a word here, but this continues my previous reply.)

[AldenG]

...and, of course, some "analytical" grammarians have come up with a "case" system for Finnish adverbs:

http://users.jyu.fi/~pamakine/kieli/suo ... rbien.html

I've always been drawn to alternate ways of looking at things. There's an obvious place for the analytical approach, since it's required in order to compare languages and divine more universal truths about how they tend to be organized. And it's interesting in its own right.

The trouble, of course, is 30+ years of failed attempts to teach Finnish to foreigners by the grammar-centric route despite 20+ years of expert protest against that route. Knowing about Finnish and knowing Finnish are simply two distinct skills.

I should have been a poster child for the potential success of a grammar-centric approach. And I would have been if I hadn't stumbled onto a shortcut. But once I got far enough to learn by reading Sinuhe instead, I never looked back. I came to realize how much time I had wasted by focusing too much on nuts-and-bolts too early, thinking I would learn to build a car by studying how the lug nut screws onto the lug. Only much later did I begin to understand what my experience reflected in the larger context of how the human being acquires a language in nature, be it a verbal language, a musical language, or social adeptness.

Those of us who're particularly good at the grammatical approach are drawn to it not least because it gives a sense of control and lessens the stress, the sense of un-anchoredness, of learning by absorption and imitation. I should have remembered what I saw in college, with side-by-side groups taught German by different approaches, and the group learning by imitation advancing about 50% farther in the same time as the group learning by the traditional route. Of course the instructor leading the alternate group didn't get tenure in the end. That's how these things tend to go, isn't it?

[AldenG]

Naturally none of this (other than the Annie Hall moment) is intended to comment in any way on Dr. Abondolo, his book, or his teaching methods, as I haven't yet had the privilege of seeing any of them. The book seems to have been first published about 20 years after I was reading Sinuhe the first time.