Hi all! After a short hiatus to focus on grant-writing, I am back. Since I last wrote, we've both had a number of Finnish lessons. I am enrolled in a weekly course that meets on campus, quite close to my lab and Brent is in a more intensive course that meets twice weekly at a community college around the corner from our apartment. Though we are not likely to encounter Finnish anywhere else in the world and everyone we have interacted with speaks English (children are required to learn both English and Swedish in school), the classes were very cheap, and the street signs are all in Finnish (and Swedish, but more on that later). Grocery shopping was (and sometimes still is) a challenge. When nutmeg = muskottipähkinä, you certainly have to go with a list translated by Google. Though sometimes helpful, Google translate definitely has limits.
The language is related to practically nothing. I say practically because it is in the small family of Finno-Urgic languages that came from over the Ural mountains and through present-day northern Finland where the Sami people live. Included in the family are also Hungarian and Estonian. Finnish was a spoken language until sometime in the 16th century when a bishop (Agricola) wanted to translate the bible into Finnish. In order to do this, the language first needed to be codified. Thus the language was preserved.
We have both taken language courses in the past: I learned Spanish and Brent took French. Our experiences were similar in that we began by learning the alphabet, sounds the letters make, a few basic greetings, and a lot of vocabulary. Here we didn't encounter the alphabet or have formal instruction on the sounds until much later. Brent can conjugate any verb or noun you like and I can carry on a greeting conversation repeatedly. We compared notes on greeting exchanges, and we came up with some differences. It turns out that there is a formal, written form of Finnish and an informal, spoken form of Finnish. Brent is learning the formal while I'm learning the informal. These aren't just contractions as in English, most words have a shortened form. Some words are easy: I'm sorry/excuse me = anteeksi (AHN-texi, formal) or anteeks (AHN-tex, informal). However, when they begin shortening conjugated words, it becomes more of a challenge for us non-native speakers to follow. For example, nouns can have up to 15 different conjugations (i.e. your house, my house, of the house, to the house, at the house, etc. you get the idea), and start shortening all of those, and we have a lot of words to learn.
Another thing to be worried about is pronunciation. Just a change of one vowel, or addition of one can lead to very different meanings. For example:
Minä näin sinut = I saw you
Minä nain sinut = I will marry you
You can see why I was concerned about learning the sounds that the letters make. Especially since Finns take promises seriously. Another potentially embarrassing exchange occurred with my boss. After a few days of listening to my coworkers greet each other and the boss in the mornings with a cheerful, 'Huomenta!', I decided to try it out, too. My boss came in to the lab and I said what I'd heard, 'Huomenta', and she said ,'What?'. Oh no, what did I just say?! 'Umm, good morning!' She went on to explain that her hearing isn't the best anymore, and she wasn't expecting to hear Finnish out of me. Whew. And as best as I can tell, I didn't say anything that sounded offensive.
So, though we express some displeasure at Agricola from time to time, the little bit of Finnish that we have learned thus far has been beneficial. It may be some time before we can carry on useful exchanges in Finnish, but learning a new language is always fun and is a critical part of integrating into a culture.
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