"tea has gone cold"

[AldenG]

kylmä means "cold", so kylmetä means "to become cold", but
jää means "ice, and jäähtyä doesn't mean "to become icy".

You have to love the illogical inconsistencies of every language.

Scientists say the sun has been cooling since about 1978. Does that mean it's cool now?

I might be more persuaded that jäähtyä ought to mean to become ice or become icy if it didn't have an 'h' in the middle of it.

[Rob A.]

kylmä means "cold", so kylmetä means "to become cold", but
jää means "ice, and jäähtyä doesn't mean "to become icy".

You have to love the illogical inconsistencies of every language.

Scientists say the sun has been cooling since about 1978. Does that mean it's cool now?

Just a minor hiccup.....the long range trend is that the sun increases it's luminosity by 1% every 110 Million years.....and in about a billions years the oceans will boil away and life will be found only in limited refugia....

But if you really want to worry about something....it's this ....LIPs..."large igneous province" ...huge volcanic eruptions which can cover 100,000 sq km or more, and can be relatively consistent baslatic eruptions or rather explosive silica-based eruptions...they can go on for decades or longer.....either way, probably an "extinction event" to some degree.... and these events occur on average every 17 Million years ... The last such "event"?....Oh, about 17 Million years ago....

Just thought you would like to know...

OK,OK...back to the topic....

I might be more persuaded that jäähtyä ought to mean to become ice or become icy if it didn't have an 'h' in the middle of it.

So what does the "h" signify? Some of these verb forms in Finnish are very useful in making subtle distinctions about the nature of the action they describe..... English does this in different ways, and so it becomes another "learning curve" for native English speakers learning Finnish....

Another example is jäädyttää...the causative aspect of jäätyä...something is causing the action to happen... Or jäähdytellä ...the frequentative form ...the action is happening repeatedly... I think it takes quite a while for a non-native speaker to absorb all of this...so I suppose the first task to get the basic idea across ...and maybe use other words to indicate the nature of the action..... and slowly absorb the nuances and variations as time passes....

[AldenG]

So what does the "h" signify?

Relative to jäätyä, I hear the 'h' in jäähtyä to weaken the meaning of the verb.

Admittedly it helps knowing that that is the actual difference in meaning between these particular verbs -- to freeze (into a frozen state) versus to cool.

As usual, I can't come up with other examples at the moment I need them.

[AldenG]

Here are some links for the phenomenon to which I was associating jäähtyä. I'm not sure they prove or even indicate that jäähtyä means what it means for the reason I've always figured it did, because I'm not finding a category for exactly that. But these next two links are the very kind of thing I was thinking of in my comment about the 'h'.

suuri -> suurehko somewhat large; large-ish

vanha -> vanhahtava getting somewhat old, tending toward oldness

These seem to be called moderative endings.

Jäähtyä doesn't seem to me to be an instance of momentane -ahtaa verbs like huudahtaa, nor can I find a writeup on a -htua class of verbs. But once we start pinning these things to the mounting board, it can be hard for me recognize exact species and genus.

One gets from the links that sometimes the -ahta- part of these words is about the suddenness and momentariness of the act where in other instances such as vanhahtava, it is more is about weakening the meaning of the base word.

[Jukka Aho]

jäistyä = to become icy

Not a word

I know, I made that up.
However can you deny that it would be understood as "to become icy" by Finnish people? I know that I would understand it just fine.

Google actually finds a couple of hits:

• jäistyi

[AldenG]

Anybody know what pilots call the building up of ice on an airplane's wings?

[Valinnan vapaus]

Here are some links for the phenomenon to which I was associating jäähtyä. I'm not sure they prove or even indicate that jäähtyä means what it means for the reason I've always figured it did, because I'm not finding a category for exactly that. But these next two links are the very kind of thing I was thinking of in my comment about the 'h'.

Another thing to consider is that words from other languages that influenced our language were sometimes borrowed in one form and sometimes in another, slightly different form, such as a lot of the slightly different dialectic forms I think. And later the forms that ended up becoming staple in the common language may have originated in different dialects etc... so that's why you sometimes fall by the wayside looking for syntactic connections between all words that look similar and mean something very similar.

Perhaps jäähtyä came around in a time when the [cold] root kylmä hadn't appeared in Finnish words.

And by the way, about how to express "To become icy". I think you'd just say jäätyä even though the thing itself (say a wintery road) hasn't changed state from liquid to solid.

Tiet alkavat jäätyä. Vaihda nyt viimeistään talvirenkaat.

[Rick1]

Anybody know what pilots call the building up of ice on an airplane's wings?

Atmospheric icing

[AldenG]

Anybody know what pilots call the building up of ice on an airplane's wings?

Atmospheric icing

But I meant in Finnish.

[Rick1]

Ilmakehäjäätäminen

[Upphew]

Every time I see this topic, this song starts to play in my head

[Bavarian]

Not quite on cue, but a relevant IS article:

Mies kylmettyi jäätyään tunneiksi jumiin autoonsa