vijayjohn wrote:But no, it pretty much just means they had a cow and grew some plants. Owning a cow involves a lot of work! The typical Malayalee house is basically surrounded by a mini-jungle misleadingly called a "garden," except in the front (definitely not in the front these days since people have driveways!).
That's cool, at least as long as the mini-jungle isn't filled with mosquitoes...
Naava wrote:There's also less fields left than when I was a kid because people (including my brothers) have bought land from us and built a house there. The place is starting to look less and less like countryside, though there are still lots of fields and forests nearby.
There's still a lot of trees in Roihuvuori, including a small forest area around the watertower, but they're also being cut for literally no reason other than to make a random road with a dead end. How the fuck does that even make sense!? If it was a road that cut through the forest to connect two roads that weren't connected before, that would still be annoying and sad since it's destruction of nature, but at least there would be a point to it. Just cutting down trees for no reason? Why?! And pretty much everyone was against the destruction of the forest back when there was like a vote on it, but of course, that was ignored... well, the project was put on hold for a couple of years, but I guess after some time had passed, the Big Deciders realised they didn't need to ask people's permission because they're not building houses like they originally planned. I guess it's government-owned land, anyway, so they can do whatever they want with it, but still, what's the point of cutting up trees and not even building anything?
Naava wrote:Maybe there are more rules than irregularities?
Maybe? I also prefer to learn by heart rather than by using logic. Eg. I know that it's в школу when you're going to school but в школе when you're in/at school, but I have no idea what those cases are. It was quite annoying when my teacher didn't accept that as an answer, we had to know the case. If you tried to give the answer as it is, he would always say "yes, but what's the case you use here with в?" but if you answered with nothing but the name of the case like "genitive" or "accusative", he was happy to accept it.
I guess I could try that approach, just learning the translations of phrases and whatnot, since anything idiomatic always throws me off the loop no matter what; maybe not learning the literal meaning or trying to find the logic behind them would help with that.
Naava wrote:Depends on where they lived. My dad's family has lived in Southern Ostrobothnia for hundreds of years so I think it was somewhat easy to find their names. I don't think that'd be the case with my mother's mother's family because she herself is from that part of Karelia that now belongs to Russia. Even though I know where she was born, the parish registers must've been lost or destroyed by now. :/ And her ancestors, then... it gets even harder because I don't even know if there's been any registers like that in other countries. Even if there were, I wouldn't know where to look from other than "Sweden" and "Poland" which doesn't help much.
It's kinda funny how there are people in other countries who can trace their entire ancestry to like the middle ages or even earlier and find their relatives around the world, but in Finland often having a general idea of where one's great grandparents were born is considered in-depth knowledge... or at least that's the impression I've gotten.
Naava wrote:She didn't know about Proto-Uralic language at all. That's why I would've expected her to believe that Finnish belongs to "Scandinavian language family" or something like that, but no, even she knew that it's related to Estonian and Hungarian. I don't remember if she called them Uralic or Finno-Ugric but in any case, she hadn't thought that it means they've been one and the same language long ago.
Interesting.
Naava wrote:Hungarian grammar is like Finland on all the drugs in the world
So if you take Finnish and add some alcohol, you get Estonian, and if you add drugs, you get Hungarian?
Basically.
Naava wrote:You'd still better lengthen the trill, though, because otherwise it could be interpreted as *keros, which isn't a meaningful word, but... well, it'd just sound weird
Actually, it is the (spoken Finnish) inessive of kero. I don't really know how to translate that into English. The treeless top of mountains in Lapland?
Huh, that's a weird ass word and so specific, no wonder I didn't know it.
księżycowy wrote:You're reminding me of a Tlingit video I was watching on YouTube just this morning. I happened to turn on the English cc, thinking it would give me an English translation. Nope. It was "recognizing" the Tlingit as English and giving some sort of weird, drug-induced string of unrelated words. I think it broke the system, quite frankly.
Yeah, closed captions can be hilarious.