Random language thread 6

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby dEhiN » 2021-03-11, 7:45

Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:I just heard the governor of São Paulo at a press conference specifically addressing the female journalists there on account of it being Women's Day referring to them carrying out their work with "hombridade", here meaning "dignity, nobility" but which has the more transparent (to anyone who knows Spanish, at least) meaning of "manliness". I found it interesting that the connection to Spanish "hombre" isn't obvious enough to a Portuguese speaker to make that choice of words obviously akward in this instance.

Perhaps the connotations that come from the connection don't exist in Brazil since they've come to view the word hombridade solely as "dignity, nobility"?
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2021-03-11, 9:43

dEhiN wrote:Perhaps the connotations that come from the connection don't exist in Brazil since they've come to view the word hombridade solely as "dignity, nobility"?


Well, the meaning of "manliness, masculinity" is one of word's meanings in Portuguese as well. I suppose that the connection to the Spanish word hombre is obscure to most Brazilians, but that's what I found strange - I think most English speakers recognise the word hombre even if they don't speak Spanish, so it's interesting that Brazilians - who speak a language much more similar to Spanish and are surrounded by countries that speak Spanish - wouldn't recognise it. I understand that the degree to which English speakers are familiar with Spanish would be greater on account of the large number of Spanish speakers in the US, but still...
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Osias » 2021-03-13, 12:58

Maybe he thinks it has to do with shoulders. But anyway, I think semantic drifts is strong here.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Rí.na.dTeangacha » 2021-03-23, 20:17

I'm reading Japanese: A Linguistic Introduction by Yoko Hasegawa. It's got some really interesting stuff in it on Japanese dialectology and historical periods of Japanese and sound changes that have happened etc, but I'm now reading through the part which describes the modern language. Most of it's not new to me, but I learned one interesting thing I hadn't noticed before in my studies: pronouns can be modified like nouns in ways that you wouldn't in English, e.g.

Gichou ga kono watashi o kounin ni shimei shita.

"The chairperson appointed (this) me as their successor."

Waratteiru anata wa totemo miryokuteki da.

"Smiling you is very charming" (i.e. "You are very charming when you smile")
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby linguoboy » 2021-03-23, 22:00

Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:I'm reading Japanese: A Linguistic Introduction by Yoko Hasegawa. It's got some really interesting stuff in it on Japanese dialectology and historical periods of Japanese and aound changes that have happened etc, but I'm now reading through the part which describes the modern language. Most of it's not new to me, but I learned one interestong thing I hadn't noticed before in my studies: pronouns can be modified like nouns in ways that you wouldn't in English[.]

I think this relates to pronouns being more of an open class in Japanese than in English. Watakushi, the ancestor of watashi, only starts being used pronominally in the 13th century CE and anata is much more recent, dating from the 18th century. (Etymologically, the latter means "that side" and was used as an indirect reference to persons for centuries before clearly adopting the meaning "you".)

It's possible to do similar things (albeit on a more limited basis) in Korean, despite he fact that pronouns form more of a closed class there (although more open than in English). For instance:

10년 전의 나에게
/sip.nyen cen uy na eykey/
ten.year front GEN me DAT
"to the me of ten years ago"

I've heard similar constructions in contemporary English, e.g. "Fat lazy future me would get axe kicked right in his handsome sexy face." But these belong to a pretty colloquial register. (In a more formal register, I'd expect "my future self".)
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Yasna » 2021-03-24, 18:13

I've been pouring most of my language learning energy into Mandarin for the past year and a half, and it's been rather tiring. I think it's mostly due to how much effort I have had to put into learning to process spoken Chinese, which is complicated by tones, an enormous amount of homophonous and nearly homophonous morphemes, the vast regional diversity of the language, and the degree to which earlier stages of Chinese are incorporated into the modern language (well educated Chinese speakers know thousands of phrases and dozens of entire quotes from medieval and ancient times, which are generally expressed using modern Mandarin phonology but otherwise retain the original grammar and vocabulary). If Mandarin didn't have such huge practical value for me I would have given up a long time ago. It's been a tremendous growing experience, but I sure am looking forward to returning to learning more "normal" languages.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Yasna » 2021-04-03, 2:55

Are there any languages outside of the Sinosphere in which it is common for morphemes to have multiple homophones?
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-04-03, 22:14

I don't understand your question. Are you just asking whether other languages have a lot of homophones? Um......y-...yes...? :?
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dEhiN wrote:
Antea wrote:Thanks for the answers. As I am have been learning Farsi from for some time now, I have noticed that in conversation groups there are a lot of people from Pakistan who also wanted to learn Farsi, and I didn't realise why there was so much interest. But yes, I now see that there a lot of cultural influences between them.

The phrasing, "as I am learning X for some time now", works in colloquial speech, I think. At least, I feel like I've heard native English speakers use that sort of phrasing before. But I associate that with a native speaker who maybe didn't finish high school, or something like that.

Wow, judgy! It works IMD (and, FWIW, not only did I attend college, I even gradgiated.)

Interesting, it doesn't work in mine.
Also, since you wrote, "who also wanted", you need to say, "I have noticed". If you had used the present tense instead, "who also want", then you could say, "I noticed". Both of these tense/aspect combos convey the idea that the act of noticing started prior to the specific realization that there are people who want to learn Farsi.

The use of the perfect here is only mandatory in some dialects. For many speakers of American English (and not just those "who maybe didn't finish high school"), "I noticed" would pass without notice in that sentence.

This is also true IMD, though.
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:I think most English speakers recognise the word hombre even if they don't speak Spanish

I don't think they do, but I suspect a lot of them do because of stereotypical depictions of Spanish-speakers using this word a lot (in media that's otherwise in English). Personally, my first exposure to that word was Asterix (the Spanish characters in the series say it a lot).
I understand that the degree to which English speakers are familiar with Spanish would be greater on account of the large number of Spanish speakers in the US, but still...

Is it, though? I doubt most non-Hispanic Americans are familiar with Spanish at all.

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Yasna » 2021-04-04, 0:01

vijayjohn wrote:I don't understand your question. Are you just asking whether other languages have a lot of homophones? Um......y-...yes...? :?

Homophonous morphemes, so groups of morphemes with the same sound but different meanings. Some examples from the Sinosphere would be "kan" in Japanese (感, 菅, 燗, 患, 館...), "xin1" in Mandarin (新, 芯, 心, 辛, 鑫...), or "su" in Korean (手, 水, 壽, 守, 秀...). There are dozens of these morpheme groups in each of those three languages, and I'm not aware of any languages outside of the Sinophere in which this phenomenon is present on a similar scale.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-04-04, 3:04

Doesn't English have hundreds of these?

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Yasna » 2021-04-04, 20:20

vijayjohn wrote:Doesn't English have hundreds of these?

If it does, I'm not aware of them. For reference, here's a list of homophone triplets, quadruplets, etc. in English. But ignore the words which are inflected or formed from multiple morphemes to make the list consistent with what I'm asking about.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-04-05, 21:29

Yasna wrote:For reference, here's a list of homophone triplets, quadruplets, etc. in English.

That's ignoring pairs, which, if I understand correctly what that page is saying, are a lot more common in English than triplets etc.
But ignore the words which are inflected or formed from multiple morphemes to make the list consistent with what I'm asking about.

I think these are the exception rather than the rule anyway, though. The more morphemes a word has, the longer it's likely to be, and thus the less likely it is to have homophones.

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Yasna » 2021-04-06, 3:30

vijayjohn wrote:That's ignoring pairs, which, if I understand correctly what that page is saying, are a lot more common in English than triplets etc.

Yes, I'm looking beyond simple homophone pairs, which I imagine are abundant in most languages. I'm interested in knowing whether there are any languages outside of the Sinophere which have large quantities of morpheme homophone groups with 5, 10, even 15 homophones as we see in the languages of the Sinophere.
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Vlürch » 2021-04-08, 15:30

TIL that the eventive mood in Finnish, which is literally never used in practice but appears in Kalevala, was invented by a dude who also coined Finnish neologisms, and that the reason it's not taught in school is because it was found out to have never existed before the 19th century.

So, the Finnish national epic has been literally confirmed as a hoax but it's still our national epic. :lol: I mean, I guess technically the mythology isn't a hoax (or at least not all of it is), so it might not count as a hoax in its entirety, but...

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Osias » 2021-04-08, 21:33

:shock: :shock:
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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Linguaphile » 2021-04-08, 23:07

Vlürch wrote:TIL that the eventive mood in Finnish, which is literally never used in practice but appears in Kalevala, was invented by a dude who also coined Finnish neologisms

Vlürch wrote:So, the Finnish national epic has been literally confirmed as a hoax

I wouldn't call it a hoax. That's not how language planning and language reform work.
As I understand it, in the 19th century they were looking for ways to unite eastern and western dialects into a standardized form that could be used more widely, since up until then the written language was used mainly for religious texts. Lots of new words and grammar rules were proposed based both on the various dialects and on perceived needs, sometimes taking them directly from one of those sources, sometimes meshing them together and sometimes creating something entirely new.
Lönnrot was very involved in that process (his English Wikipedia page describes his role as "an arbiter in disputes about the development of standard Finnish between the proponents of western and eastern dialects") so it's only natural that he would use some of the new forms in his own writing, including the Kalevala.
Some of those proposals stuck and became part of common usage; some didn't stick. (The same sort of process happened with Estonian.)
The thing is, at the time Lönnrot wrote Kalevala, he would have had no way to know which would "stick" and which wouldn't. So he would have used things like the eventive mood expecting it to become common in standard written language and he wouldn't have known, or had any way to know, that it never would.
As for simply writing Kalevala down the way the original runesongs were told to him by their singers, he couldn't really do that, because they were in a variety of mostly eastern dialects, not in a consistent dialect from one song to another (because they were from different people in different locations) and in some cases not at all intelligible to speakers of other dialects. Some wasn't even Finnish but rather Karelian. So his best option was to write it in what he believed was becoming the standard written Finnish language at the time, or a sort of eastern-influenced version of that with poetic devices mixed in, to make it accessible to a wider audience of Finnish-speakers. As far as I know, that's exactly what he thought he was doing. The problem here is that the proposed eventive mood you are discussing just didn't stick, but Lönnrot simply wouldn't have known that at the time.
Some pretty common words that did stick include henkilö (person), kirje (letter), oppilas (student), rakenne (structure), väite (claim), and kielitiede (linguistics). These words were coined by the same person who invented the eventive mood, Wolmari Kilpinen (Wolmar Schildt). Many of his proposals stuck and are used today without seeming the slightest bit odd or contrived; the eventive mood didn't. It doesn't make them a hoax. That's just how language reform works. Some proposals (whether from an individual language reformer or from a language regulatory body) stick and some don't catch on with speakers for everyday use.

Vlürch wrote:the reason it's not taught in school is because it was found out to have never existed before the 19th century.
I sure hope that's not an actual criteria for what should be taught in schools. :silly:

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Vlürch » 2021-04-09, 7:55

Linguaphile wrote:I wouldn't call it a hoax. That's not how language planning and language reform work.

I mean, same, but my Finnish cynicism and national self-deprecationism made me call it a hoax. What it's called on the Finnish Wikipedia article is Kilpisen itse keksimä ("Kilpinen's own invention"), which at least I'd interpret as having a judgemental quality to it even without context, but in the context of that being the reason it didn't end up being considered for inclusion in the standard language, it sounds really judgemental.

Then again, most Finns don't realise that like a third of the words we use all the time were straight-up invented between the 19th and 20th centuries (or more recently) and that like half of the remaining words are loanwords, and that one of the big reasons why younger people might struggle when talking to older people or people from rural areas is that informal Finnish (at least in Helsinki) has been so heavily influenced by English in recent times... :lol:
Linguaphile wrote:The thing is, at the time Lönnrot wrote Kalevala, he would have had no way to know which would "stick" and which wouldn't. So he would have used things like the eventive mood expecting it to become common in standard written language and he wouldn't have known, or had any way to know, that it never would.

Hmm, true, I didn't even think of that. I thought it'd have been more like, he didn't know it was a recent invention and passed it off as an old thing that had been lost in most dialects, probably because that's the impression I'd gotten of it reading about it in English in the past. :oops:
Linguaphile wrote:As for simply writing Kalevala down the way the original runesongs were told to him by their singers, he couldn't really do that, because they were in a variety of mostly eastern dialects, not in a consistent dialect from one song to another (because they were from different people in different locations) and in some cases not at all intelligible to speakers of other dialects. Some wasn't even Finnish but rather Karelian.

That's a really good point, I'm an idiot sometimes (or always).
Linguaphile wrote:I sure hope that's not an actual criteria for what should be taught in schools. :silly:

Dunno, the Finnish education system is pretty much a joke in many ways and we just like to larp as having the best education in the world. Well, it is better than in a lot of countries in some ways, but you know, the idea that it's perfect and that the kids here are geniuses is obviously not true. Literally illiteracy is rising every year, and politicians don't give a single fuck beyond saying "oh no, how could this happen?" even though they caused it themselves by cutting from education all the time...

...but I'm not 100% sure if that's the reason, it was possibly a bit of a leap considering that's just the reason it wasn't recommended for inclusion in the standard language. So it could still have ended up being taught for some other reason (like nationalistic reasons related to the Kalevala or "FINNISH IS HARD TRUST ME BRO") but just didn't, or there could be other reasons why it isn't taught (like it being totally useless).

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Naava » 2021-04-10, 8:42

Linguaphile wrote:
Vlürch wrote:TIL that the eventive mood in Finnish, which is literally never used in practice but appears in Kalevala, was invented by a dude who also coined Finnish neologisms

Vlürch wrote:So, the Finnish national epic has been literally confirmed as a hoax

I wouldn't call it a hoax.

Yeah I don't think the entire book is a hoax just because there's one made-up case. However, the language planners would've probably been ready to call the eventive a hoax, as far as we can trust Wikipedia here! It says they considered taking it as part of the standard language, but when they found out it didn't exist in any of the dialects but had been invented by Kilpinen, they decided against it. In other words, it was not simply something that "didn't stick" in the end, it was a conscious decision to leave it out.

It's true people invented lots of new words in the 1800s-1900s, and they also agreed on some arbitrary rules (e.g. when to have -oittaa and when -ottaa in verbs*), but I guess making up new cases was where they drew the line. I don't believe cases like eventive would've lasted long anyway, because there's always been a tendency to change the rules of standard language to match how people speak and write**.

* Some of these discussions were hilarious. For example, Kilpinen wished we'd only have -ottaa in verbs and never -oittaa because he believed the one without the <i> was "manlier than the one with <i>", which he thought was "a ponderous, drawn out, and bawling word form".
** For example, there used to be a rule that said you must always use the A infinitive with the verb "alkaa" (to begin, to start). People kept breaking the rule by using MA infinitive instead, which is why they changed it in 2014: you can now use either A or MA infinitive.


Linguaphile wrote:So he would have used things like the eventive mood expecting it to become common in standard written language and he wouldn't have known

Tbh the trend back then was to write the way you wished was standard and hope others would agree with you. :ohwell: (Lönnrot was quite succesful in this, but I doubt he was surprised to hear some of his ideas were disregarded.)

Linguaphile wrote:Some wasn't even Finnish but rather Karelian

"Almost half of the runes" were recorded in White Sea Karelia, so maybe it's safe to say almost half of it was in Karelian. (Although, there could've been runes that were sung in a language that wasn't clearly Savonian or Karelian but somewhere in between because there might've been a continuum between Savonian, Southwestern dialects, and Karelian *. If that was the case, it'd be difficult to say whether those runes should be counted as Finnish or Karelian.)

* And who knows, maybe there still is - I don't know enough to say for sure, but I know there are shared features that don't exist in other Finnish dialects because Savonian, Southeastern and Karelian are all descendants of the same proto-language.

Vlürch wrote:one of the big reasons why younger people might struggle when talking to older people or people from rural areas is that informal Finnish (at least in Helsinki) has been so heavily influenced by English in recent times...

I haven't noticed this, but I don't live in Helsinki. There are some new loan words, but not that much that different generations would struggle to understand each other. :hmm:

Vlürch wrote:Dunno, the Finnish education system is pretty much a joke in many ways

What do you mean? I know there are things we could change, but I wouldn't call it a joke yet.

Vlürch wrote: the idea that it's perfect and that the kids here are geniuses is obviously not true

I hope no one believes so. No matter what we're speaking of, thinking that something is perfect as it is is very dangerous.

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Linguaphile » 2021-04-10, 14:52

Naava wrote:
Linguaphile wrote:
Vlürch wrote:TIL that the eventive mood in Finnish, which is literally never used in practice but appears in Kalevala, was invented by a dude who also coined Finnish neologisms

Vlürch wrote:So, the Finnish national epic has been literally confirmed as a hoax

I wouldn't call it a hoax.

Yeah I don't think the entire book is a hoax just because there's one made-up case. However, the language planners would've probably been ready to call the eventive a hoax, as far as we can trust Wikipedia here! It says they considered taking it as part of the standard language, but when they found out it didn't exist in any of the dialects but had been invented by Kilpinen, they decided against it. In other words, it was not simply something that "didn't stick" in the end, it was a conscious decision to leave it out.

That makes sense! I thought that Kotikielen Seura had made that decision somewhat later, after seeing that no one else was using it, for example. (My search had found something about 1949.) But then I found this (quoted below) about it. Still, I do think Lönnrot must have expected it to become a commonly-used form or hoped it would. It wasn't rejected until the 1890's, after Lönnrot's death.

"Keväällä 1890 Kotikielen Seuralta pyydettiin kannanottoa kysymykseen, joka koski uuden moduksen omaksumista kirjakieleen. F. Ahlman lähetti nimittäin seuralle kirjeen, joka käsitteli ns. modus eventivusta (esim. Kaleva-lassa suuttuneisi, kamaltuneisi); toivoi, että Kotikielen Seura suositte-lisi tämän tapaluokan omaksumista kirjakieleen. Kirje, joka valitettavasti on seuran arkistosta kadonnut, herätti pöytäkirjan mukaan vilkkaan keskustelun. Erityisesti Kaarle Krohn asettui vastustamaan Ahlmanin ehdotusta; peruste-luksi hän esitti mm. sen, ettei tällaisia muotoja esiinny muualla kuin parissa kohdassa Kalevalassa. Kun puoltaviakin kannanottoja ilmaantui, seura päätti lykätä asian käsittelyn toistaiseksi. Kysymys tuli seuraavana syksynä uudes-taan esiin, ja tällä kertaa oli virikkeenä Volmari Kilpisen lähettämä kirje, josta pöytäkirjaan on otettu katkelma:
Viime kevättalvella oli Kotik. Seurassa keskusteltu toimileen: otta-neisin, antaneisin y.m. muodosta ja sen synnystä. Siihen minä saatan antaa selvikettä. — Jo alkuaikoina El. Lönnrothin asuessa Kajaanin kaupungissa eli kyliössä kirjoitin Hänelle kirjeen, jossa tuota muotoa käytin. Se minusta soveltui yhdistämään muodot ottanen ja ottaisin. Heti hän minulta kysymään, oliko se muoto käytössä Keskisuomen rahvaassa? Minä eitin niin olevan, ja olevan omaa kotitekoani vaan. Sittemmin olen sitä usein viljellyt, ja näkyipä E. L:kin sen ottaneen varteensa joskus. Ja siten on eittämättä joka muoto ja sana kielessä alkunsa saanut, että joku henkilö sen on sepustanut. Jos keksimä on ajatusta, ymmärrettä ominut, niin se on laajemmalle, vihdoin ylei-seksi levinnyt.
Seuranneessa keskustelussa Krohn tarkasteli lähemmin Kalevalassa esiin-tyvien suuttuneisi, nuristuneisi -tyyppisten muotojen syntyhistoriaa. Muodot olivat Krohnin mukaan olleet vielä Lönnrotin välilehtisessä Vanhan Kaleva-lan kappaleessa suuttunevi, vihastunevi -asussa. Uuden moduksen omaksumista kirjakieleen ei kannatettu: »Hra F. Ahlmanein viime lukukaudella tekemän ehdotuksen, että nämät konsessiivi & konditionaalin sekamuodot otettaisiin käytäntöön, seura vaitiololla tappoi.» "

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Re: Random language thread 6

Postby Vlürch » 2021-04-10, 15:30

Naava wrote:I haven't noticed this, but I don't live in Helsinki. There are some new loan words, but not that much that different generations would struggle to understand each other. :hmm:

I mean, the generational thing is mostly just old people being bitter about young people using words that they don't use (or not using words that they do use), like how my mum for example uses old Helsinki slang words borrowed from Swedish or Russian where I'd use English loanwords... she's not bitter about it, though, and I've noticed my dad has been "updating" in this regard so he's not bitter about it either AFAIK, but some old people are. Older people also use idioms or whatever that are presumably calqued from Swedish or Russian (or actually originally Finnish), while younger people use ones calqued from English.

As far as dialectal differences go, well, sure 99.9% of what someone younger than 50 or whatever from pretty much anywhere says is understandable, but there's different slang and also older people might sometimes use cases or syntax that aren't used in Helsinki (anymore).

I can't think of any examples of anything right now, though, except for a general thing my parents keep telling me about: when my mum first went with my dad to Savonranta (where my grandpa on my dad's side was from and where we had a summer cottage until a couple of years ago), she couldn't understand anything anyone was saying, like the dialect there was so different and the accents were so thick that it might as well have been a completely different language. Even my dad, who IIRC was born there (or maybe he was born in Helsinki, I'm actually not sure if they moved here before or shortly after he was born), keeps telling me about how he always struggled with understanding the locals. What's weird is that I don't remember any difficulty with it, but then I was like 10-12 the last time I spoke to anyone there (after that it basically became a ghost town and we barely ever saw other people when we went there in the summer) and it's not like I was having deep conversations with anyone, so eh.
Naava wrote:What do you mean? I know there are things we could change, but I wouldn't call it a joke yet.

At least the way WW2 was taught when I was in school was, well, not accurate... it was like "we were neutral and totally the good guys! what do you mean we were an Axis country? the Nazis occupied us and we fought against them just as much if not more as we fought alongside them, and when we fought alongside them it was TOTALLY separate! we had NOTHING in common with them ideologically! also Mannerheim did nothing wrong" but I guess every country has nationalism problems in history education.

PE was kind of a joke at least in middle school, too, since me and my best friend got permission from the teacher to just go on walks practically every time, so obviously in practice we just walked really slowly and sat around or whatever. I mean, I still think that's a good thing because the alternative is forcing kids to work out and beat them if they refuse or whatever, but you know.

We also had a literal Nazi (as in an actual Nazi from WW2) as a math teacher for some time in eighth grade, he was absolutely ancient (to the degree that other teachers joked about it to us) and came back from retirement because there weren't any other math teachers left who were qualified enough. Once, he marked an answer I had in a test as wrong even though my best friend had put the same answer and he got it right, and when we asked him about it, he was like "well I guess it might be possible that I made a mistake" and fixed my rating on the test. He told us several times that he missed the times when he could legally beat students, and as you'd expect, he ended up getting fired for beating students.

Back when I was in middle school, some elementary schoolers had to move their classes to barracks outside the school because of mould or whatever, and those barracks are still there.

I could think of more problems, but the exact problems of course vary from one school to another, probably more from one part of a city to another and even more from one city to another, etc. Still, I've heard things have only gotten worse since then in every way, evident from the reports that illiteracy is on the rise, and although I don't know anyone who has kids so I don't have any actual knowledge about how things have changed, it's pretty clear from how teens practically seem to think they're American in every way and make tons of mistakes in both spelling and grammar and throw in tons of (misspelled) English words everywhere... I mean, I can't 100% confidently write in formal literary Finnish either, but at least I can mostly do it. Teens nowadays can't even write informal spoken Finnish in any consistent way.

...which wouldn't be a big deal since languages change over time if it wasn't for the fact that it's happening as part of a general decline in pretty much every kind of knowledge/ability. I've heard teens are now just as stupid with technology as old people, and it seems to be true based on some of the examples I've heard like them falling for obvious scams.

That rambling was kinda off-topic, but...


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