So for what it’s worth, share my frustration.
Tuesday, 29 September 2020
More cases than Vantaa baggage reclaim.
Couldn’t resist posting this, which I received a short while ago from a fellow student of Finnish. Infamously, well infamous amongst a relatively small group of linguists and students of the language, Finnish has more cases than German and Latin combined. Something like 15. I say ‘something like’ because there is some disagreement about whether one of them is a real, and distinct case. I don’t know which one. I give up after 9 or 10.
A brave man engaging with Finnish. Years ago I met a Hungarian lady who told me of being at an airport and overhearing people speaking in Finnish. She said it was strange because she could get some of what they were saying. She said it took her sometime to work out what she was hearing.
ReplyDeleteThe things we do for love eh!
DeleteI understand that Hungarian is as equally challenging as Finnish is for us speakers of Indo-European languages. Their relationship has been described to me as being like Russian is to English. Part of the same group but distant, so the Hungarian lady did well.