UniLang

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I want to learn Estonian too.

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Oskad näbeda sarnasused, kuid ma ei tea, kas nad oskavad üksteist.

Cesare M. wrote:...ma ei räägin ole ladus..

Sorry, but this phrase made me doubt that you are advanced. Even as a basic speaker I know it should be something more like:

ma ei oska (seda?) ladusalt rääkida or ma ei räägi (seda?) ladusalt..

hashi wrote:

Cesare M. wrote:...ma ei räägin ole ladus..

Sorry, but this phrase made me doubt that you are advanced. Even as a basic speaker I know it should be something more like:

ma ei oska (seda?) ladusalt rääkida or ma ei räägi (seda?) ladusalt..

Mis iganes. Täname parandusi.

Whatever. Thanks for your corrections.

Cesare M. wrote:

hashi wrote:

Cesare M. wrote:...ma ei räägin ole ladus..

Sorry, but this phrase made me doubt that you are advanced. Even as a basic speaker I know it should be something more like:

ma ei oska (seda?) ladusalt rääkida or ma ei räägi (seda?) ladusalt..

Well what I mean is that I am sort of low advanced. But you have your opinion. . Also thanks for your corrections.

How do you define advanced? I'm a basic speaker, but I know that you're not meant to conjugate a verb by person after ei, and I have no idea why you put ole there :/

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Cesare M. wrote:As of in this thread let's just focus on how similar Estonian and Finnish are between eachother.

Well, all the Baltic-Finnic languages have some degree of mutual intelligibility. The amount varies, but generally is stronger amongst the languages that are geographically closer together, and less so the further away they are. At the two extremes you have Finnish and Livonian, of which the mutual intelligibility of the two is possibly the lowest between any two of the Baltic-Finnic languages.

Here's some example sentences in four Baltic-Finnic languages, using four persons, so you can see for yourself some of the similarities and differences:
(N.B. Words in italics are formed based on logical deduction, due to the exact term being unknown, and words in brackets are alternate forms of pronouns. Thanks to hashi for the Estonian and Võro.)

1^st Person Singular:
[flag]et[/flag] Mina (ma) räägin soome keelt
[flag]fi[/flag] Minä (mä) puhun suomen kieltä
[flag]vro[/flag] Ma kynõlõ suumõ kiilt
[flag]liv[/flag] Ma (minā) rõkāndõb suomõ kieltõ

2^nd Person Singular:
[flag]et[/flag] Sina (sa) räägid eesti keelt
[flag]fi[/flag] Sinä (sä) puhut viron kieltä
[flag]vro[/flag] Sa kynõlõt eesti kiilt
[flag]liv[/flag] Sa (sinā) rõkāndõd ēstõ kieltõ

1^st Person Plural:
[flag]et[/flag] Meie (me) räägime võru keelt
[flag]fi[/flag] Me puhumme võron kieltä
[flag]vro[/flag] Miiq (mi) kynõlõ (kynõlõmiq) võro kiilt
[flag]liv[/flag] Mēg rõkāndõm võrõ kieltõ

3^rd Person Plural:
[flag]et[/flag] Nemad (nad) räägivad liivi keelt
[flag]fi[/flag] He puhuvat liivin kieltä
[flag]vro[/flag] Nääq (nä) kynõlõvaq liivi kiilt
[flag]liv[/flag] Ne rõkāndõbõd līvõ kieltõ

kieltä*

Of all the things for me to get wrong…

You have to learn the language if you want to understand. My Finnish friends hardly understand any Estonian. My generation (I'm 32) watched Finnish tv during Soviet times and learned it at least to understand perfectly (not everybody speaks).

Cesare M. wrote:
Läheb. Ma räägin eesti keele edasijõudnud, nii ma saan teid aidata, kuid, loomulikult ma ei räägin ole ladus. Muide, see teema on umbes eesti keele ja soome keele on vastastikku mõistetav.

Great. I can speak advanced Estonian so I can help you, but of course I'm not fluent. By the way, this thread is about the Estonian language and the Finnish language being mutually intelligible.

When you run Cesare's message written in English through Google translate here's what you get:

Great. Võin rääkida edasijõudnud eesti keele nii ma saan teid aidata, kuid loomulikult ma ei ole ladus. Muide, see teema on umbes eesti keele ja soome keele on vastastikku mõistetav.

Kinda funny that your message is almost verbatim what Google translate gives you. I think hashi's spider sense wasn't tingling for nothing, I'd be surprised if you actually spoke a word of Estonian. Sad to see the world's greatest polyglot reduced to this.

PS. Sorry for derailing this thread. There are a few well-informed posts like the one Taydr wrote.

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Cesare M. wrote:Whatever I'll send you a message about this. Meanwhile, let's get back to topic.

Then maybe you should actually reply to the post Taydr took the time to write you and stop trying to impress people with your Estonian when the discussion is clearly heading to be in English. Save yourself the trouble.

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Cesare M. wrote:Wow, the similarities you posted are very interesting. So I guess that Finnish and Estonian may not be mutually intelligible, but they do look similar in an interesting way. It was also interesting when you added two other similar languages. Thanks for the info, and sorry I didn't reply right away.

Well they do have some mutual intelligibility, due to their common ancestry. What I find most interesting is how much similarity there is between all the languages in the Baltic-Finnic family. It's even more interesting considering the time that has passed since the languages started diverging, which is probably about 1500–2000 years. As a comparison, the Scandinavian and Goidelic languages only began diverging around 800 years ago, and yet the similarities of the Baltic–Finnics are almost comparable to those of the Scandinavians and Goidelics.

Another thing of interest is the origins of loan words into the Baltic-Finnics. From my observations, it appears that the primary source of loans is the Germanic family, primarily from Swedish for the northern languages, and German for the southern. Outside of that I think the single biggest influence on any of the Baltic-Finnics is Latvian, which contributed orthographical and phonological influences to Livonian.

Taydr, you can't always say that a loanword is from Swedish or Latvian (speaking about older layers). It's Baltic and Scandinavian rather. Take for instance the Finnic word raud (Estonian), rauta (Finnish). It comes from rauði 'red' in English, röd in Swedish and means 'iron' in Finnics. And there were several Baltic tribes neighboring the Finnics before any Latvian single language appeared. Usually we search the loanwords from Lithuanian, which is more archaic. Btw, Latvian is too much influenced by Finnics .

Taydr wrote:Another thing of interest is the origins of loan words into the Baltic-Finnics. From my observations, it appears that the primary source of loans is the Germanic family, primarily from Swedish for the northern languages, and German for the southern. Outside of that I think the single biggest influence on any of the Baltic-Finnics is Latvian, which contributed orthographical and phonological influences to Livonian.

You might be right with Livonian. Although I think historically the Germanic languages (of different ages) have had the most profound effect on the Finnic languages as a whole, influencing everything from lexicon to syntax.

Russian has nowadays a major influence on Karelian, Veps etc. Sami languages are a significant lexifier in northern Finnish dialects, this just to point out that there are and have been several smaller areal contacts with other languages, which are in part responsible for the fact that Finnic languages aren't more mutually intelligible. I think neighbouring Finnic languages are usually pretty much mutually intelligible. I think from a syntactical point of view the Finnic languages are pretty similar, it's the fact that if one of the languages has a major lexical layer that the others lack the mutual intelligibility rate drops dramatically no matter how well the grammar is understood.

Loiks wrote:Taydr, you can't always say that a loanword is from Swedish or Latvian (speaking about older layers). It's Baltic and Scandinavian rather. Take for instance the Finnic word raud (Estonian), rauta (Finnish). It comes from rauði 'red' in English, röd in Swedish and means 'iron' in Finnics. And there were several Baltic tribes neighboring the Finnics before any Latvian single language appeared. Usually we search the loanwords from Lithuanian, which is more archaic. Btw, Latvian is too much influenced by Finnics .

I actually don't think that rauta is a Scandinavian loan from *rauði, but an older loan from Proto-Germanic *raudan, it just seems more convinient considering the fact that the word rauta is an a-stem and also because the word's also present in Sami languages, North Sami ruovdi (Proto-Sami *ravta, which pretty nicely conforms to the Finnic word, although it can of course be a separate loan from the same Germanic source). I think there are statistically more older Germanic loan words in the northern group of Finnic languages.

Swedish was the prestige language in Finland for centuries and at the time Finnish had a huge influx of Swedish loans, also most of the words that I would label as "common European" (often ultimately of Latin or Greek origin) entered Finnish via Swedish. In Estonia the prestige language on the other hand was (Low) German and often words from the medieval period onwards that were of Swedish origin in Finnish are of German origin in Estonian (like 'doctor' which is lääkäri in Finnish from Swedish läkare is arst in Estonian from w/e the corresponding German word is).

Loiks wrote:Taydr, you can't always say that a loanword is from Swedish or Latvian (speaking about older layers). It's Baltic and Scandinavian rather. Take for instance the Finnic word raud (Estonian), rauta (Finnish). It comes from rauði 'red' in English, röd in Swedish and means 'iron' in Finnics. And there were several Baltic tribes neighboring the Finnics before any Latvian single language appeared. Usually we search the loanwords from Lithuanian, which is more archaic. Btw, Latvian is too much influenced by Finnics .

I should have been clearer there, I really meant in the last few centuries, to account for some of the bigger differences between the languages.